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new book – ‘The Origin of Ideas: Blending, Creativity, and the Human Spark’ by Mark Turner

January 13, 2014

The Origin of Ideas

The Origin of Ideas: Blending, Creativity, and the Human Spark by Mark Turner (Oxford University Press, 2014)

(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk), (UK kindle ed.)

Book description from the publisher:

What makes human beings so innovative, so adept at rapid, creative thinking? Where do new ideas come from, and once we have them, how can we carry them mentally into new situations? What allows our thinking to range easily over time, space, causation, and agency-so easily that we take this truly remarkable ability for granted?
In The Origin of Ideas, Mark Turner offers a provocative new theory to answer these and many other questions. While other species do what we cannot-fly, run amazingly fast, see in the dark-only human beings can innovate so rapidly and widely. Turner argues that this distinctively human spark was an evolutionary advance that developed from a particular kind of mental operation, which he calls “blending”: our ability to take two or more ideas and create a new idea in the “blend.” Turner begins by looking at the “lionman,” a 32,000-year-old ivory figurine, one of the earliest examples of blending. Here, the concepts “lion” and “man” are merged into a new figure, the “lionman.” Turner argues that at some stage during the Paleolithic Age, humans reached a tipping point. Before that, we were a bunch of large, unimaginative mammals. After that, we were poised to take over the world. Once biological evolution hit upon making brains that could do advanced blending, we possessed the capacity to invent and maintain culture. Cultural innovation could then progress by leaps and bounds over biological evolution itself, leading to the highest forms of human cognition and creativity.
For anyone interested in how and why our minds work the way they do, The Origin of Ideas offers a wealth of original insights-and is itself a brilliant example of the innovative thinking it describes.

Google Books preview:

See also: Author’s website

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new book – ‘My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind’ by Scott Stossel

January 12, 2014

My Age of Anxiety

My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind by Scott Stossel (Knopf, 2014)

(kindle ed.),(amazon.co.uk), (UK kindle ed.)

My Age of Anxiety - UK ed

Book description from the publisher:

A riveting, revelatory, and moving account of the author’s struggles with anxiety, and of the history of efforts by scientists, philosophers, and writers to understand the condition

As recently as thirty-five years ago, anxiety did not exist as a diagnostic category. Today, it is the most common form of officially classified mental illness. Scott Stossel gracefully guides us across the terrain of an affliction that is pervasive yet too often misunderstood.

Drawing on his own long-standing battle with anxiety, Stossel presents an astonishing history, at once intimate and authoritative, of the efforts to understand the condition from medical, cultural, philosophical, and experiential perspectives. He ranges from the earliest medical reports of Galen and Hippocrates, through later observations by Robert Burton and Søren Kierkegaard, to the investigations by great nineteenth-century scientists, such as Charles Darwin, William James, and Sigmund Freud, as they began to explore its sources and causes, to the latest research by neuroscientists and geneticists. Stossel reports on famous individuals who struggled with anxiety, as well as on the afflicted generations of his own family. His portrait of anxiety reveals not only the emotion’s myriad manifestations and the anguish anxiety produces but also the countless psychotherapies, medications, and other (often outlandish) treatments that have been developed to counteract it. Stossel vividly depicts anxiety’s human toll—its crippling impact, its devastating power to paralyze—while at the same time exploring how those who suffer from it find ways to manage and control it.
My Age of Anxiety is learned and empathetic, humorous and inspirational, offering the reader great insight into the biological, cultural, and environmental factors that contribute to the affliction.

Google Books preview:

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new book – ‘The Birth of Intersubjectivity: Psychodynamics, Neurobiology, and the Self’ by Massimo Ammaniti and Vittorio Gallese

January 10, 2014

Birth of Intersubjectivity

The Birth of Intersubjectivity: Psychodynamics, Neurobiology, and the Self by Massimo Ammaniti and Vittorio Gallese (W.W. Norton & Co., 2014)

(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk), (UK kindle ed.)

Book description from the publisher:

Neurobiological research helps explain the experience of motherhood.

This book, the exciting collaboration of a developmental psychoanalyst at the forefront of functional magnetic resonance attachment research and a leading neurobiological researcher on mirror neurons, presents a fresh and innovative look at intersubjectivity from a neurobiological and developmental perspective. Grounding their analysis of intersubjectivity in the newest advances from developmental neuroscience, modern attachment theory, and relational psychoanalysis, Massimo Ammaniti and Vittorio Gallese illustrate how brain development changes simultaneously with relationally induced alterations in the subjectivities of both mother and infant.

Ammaniti and Gallese combine extensive current interdisciplinary research with in-depth clinical interviews that highlight the expectant mother’s changing subjective states and the various typologies of maternal representations. Building on Gallese’s seminal work with mirror neurons and embodied simulation theory, the authors construct a model of intersubjectivity that stresses not symbolic representations but intercorporeality from a second-person perspective. Charting the prenatal and perinatal events that serve as the neurobiological foundation for postnatal reciprocal affective communications, they conclude with direct clinical applications of early assessments and interventions, including interventions with pregnant mothers.

This volume is essential for clinicians specializing in attachment disorders and relational trauma, child psychotherapists, infant mental health workers, pediatricians, psychoanalysts, and developmental researchers. It combines fascinating new information and illustrative clinical experience to illustrate the early intersubjective origins of our own and our patients’ internal worlds.

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Kindle Daily Deal highlights for Jan 10 – cinema, sentences, data science, art journaling, happiness & more!

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Kindle Daily Deal for 1/10 – over 500 educational Kindle books up to 80% off

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