my mind on books

Garcia’s Heart, a first novel by neurologist Liam Durcan, deals with issues of medical ethics, memory, and the difficulty of knowing another person’s mind and heart. The narrator is a neurologist attending the war crimes trial of his former mentor, Hernan García. The accused refuses to speak, thus leaving it up to the narrator to sift through his own memories, trying to reconcile his image of the man who had inspired him to study medicine with the actions attributed to him. In the process, the narrator also examines his own life and the choices that led him to apply neuroscience to market research on behalf of a large corporation.

García is a cardiologist and the narrator is a neurologist, so there is some heart vs brain contrast between the two characters; plus the physical heart plays a pivotal role in the plot, making this an appropriate selection for the
“Book A Month Challenge” theme “the heart.”

Artificial Psychology: The Quest for What It Means to Be Human by Jay Friedenberg

Is it possible to construct an artificial person? Researchers in the field of artificial intelligence have for decades been developing computer programs that emulate human intelligence. This book goes beyond intelligence and describes how close we are to recreating many of the other capacities that make us human. These abilities include learning, creativity, consciousness, and emotion.

The attempt to understand and engineer these abilities constitutes the new interdisciplinary field of artificial psychology, which is characterized by contributions from philosophy, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, computer science, and robotics.

The National Book Critics Circle recently published a list of recommended books, the “Good Reads – Winter List,” based on recommendations from book critics and award-winning authors. The nonfiction short list includes Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks.

There is also a long list of titles that received multiple votes. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain is one of the books on the nonfiction long list, along with How Fiction Works by James Wood, even though it’s not due out until July.

Steven Pinker recommends What is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect by James Flynn.

Times Online has a review by A.S. Byatt of Sleeping and Dreaming, “a scholarly and complex set of essays to accompany the Wellcome Collection’s exhibition” by the same name. (Amazon.co.uk link)
At the Wellcome Collection website there’s an “online taster” for those of us too far away to visit in person.

The title caught my mind, sounds interesting as a cultural analysis: American Angels: Useful Spirits in the Material World by Peter Gardella (University Press of Kansas, 2007)

Gardella’s engaging study is the first to look objectively at the place of angels in American culture. He explores in particular the emergence of a domestic religion of “useful angels”–especially outside mainstream churches–that has created a uniquely American faith, one that addresses everything from the sexuality of angels to how angels and demons literally figure in the War on Terror….
Beautifully and sympathetically written, but with a scholar’s eye for pattern and detail, American Angels mixes theology, psychology, sociology of religion, gender theory, and even film criticism to create an unusually well-rounded survey of a uniquely American phenomenon. It shows us how the utility of angels speaks to the very core of religion and will enlighten skeptics and believers alike.

In a similar vein there is American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon by Stephen Prothero (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004)