my mind on books

The Book A Month Challenge theme for January is time, an excellent choice that should be easy to connect with “books on the mind.” I think the hard part will be picking out one book to read! I’d especially like to find a good book on subjective time experience, or maybe something in the anthropology of time, comparing time experiences across cultures. Here are some possibilities:

• An Experiment With Time (Studies in Consciousness) by J.W. Dunne – a classic
• Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness (Perspectives in Cognitive Neuroscience) by Benjamin Libet
• The Images of Time: An Essay on Temporal Representation by Robin Le Poidevin

Or, already in my library waiting to be read (sometime!):

• Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past by Eviatar Zerubavel
• The Story of Time (an exhibition catalog with essays by Umberto Eco and others)

Here’s a “LibraryThing tagmash” on time, mind

and one on time, anthropology

Spotted at the bookstore: Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation by Dave Edwards. “David Edwards describes how contemporary creators achieve breakthroughs in the arts and sciences by developing their ideas in an intermediate zone of human creativity where neither art nor science is easily defined.”

The beginning of the book has a nice list of related works…..

• The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat by Martin Kemp
• Science and Art: The Red Book of `Einstein Meets Magritte’
• From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature (Writing Science)
• Art and Science (Art and… Series) by Sian Ede
• Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought by Keith J. Holyoak and Paul Thagard
• Metaphor and Analogy in the Sciences (Origins: Studies in the Sources of Scientific Creativity) ed. by Fernand Hallyn
• Metaphor in Languages for Special Purposes: The Function of Conceptual Metaphor in Written Expert Language and Expert-Lay Communication in the Domains of Economics, Medicine, and Computing by Susanne Richardt
• Diffusion of Innovations, 5th Edition by Everett Rogers
• Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration by Warren G. Bennis
• The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life by Richard Florida

David Edwards and Jay Cantor also have a forthcoming novel, Niche (Idea Translation Lab Series)

Thanks to LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers Program, I received an advance copy of The Age of Shiva: A Novel by Manil Suri, which is due to be published in Feb 2008, according to Amazon. Since it is the second volume of a trilogy, I re-read the first book, The Death of Vishnu, while waiting for ‘The Age of Shiva’ to arrive.

Now I’ve read both novels, and find that I much preferred ‘Vishnu’ to ‘Shiva.’

‘The Age of Shiva’ is told from the first-person perspective of one character, Meera, addressed to her son, Ashvin. Set against a background of Indian politics and history during the early years of independence, much of the story concerns the intense relationship between Meera and her child. Meera’s father is a progressive who urges his daughters to become educated and have careers. Paradoxically, Meera experiences this as paternal interference; an early marriage seems to be her way of rebelling against her father’s wishes. Jealousy of her older sister also plays a role, so that much of Meera’s life seems to be based on reactions to her relatives and other people around her. Echoes of the mythological figures of Shiva, Parvati, and their son Ganesha are also woven in.

In ‘Death of Vishnu,’ among many stories involving the residents of one apartment house, there is a compelling treatment of three characters who exemplify differing concepts of transcendence. The title character, Vishnu, at the lowest level, undergoes death and rebirth, while an upstairs neighbor, Mr. Jalal, takes a more intellectual approach. On the top level, Mr. Taneja experiences a gradual withdrawal from the world after his wife’s early death. His story seemed to me to be a beautiful depiction of a very natural kind of spiritual development, in contrast to Mr. Jalal’s deliberate efforts.

Author’s website

San Francisco Chronicle article on “Cultivating happiness” (12/28/07) discusses this new book: The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want by Sonja Lyubomirsky.

The article also mentions the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley and the “Half Full” project on “The Science of Raising Happy Kids,” as well as the work of Carol Dweck, which was discussed here in an earlier blog post.

The Neuroscience of Fair Play: Why We (Usually) Follow the Golden Rule by Donald W. Pfaff

“Renowned neuroscientist Donald Pfaff upends our entire understanding of ethics and social contracts with an intriguing proposition: the Golden Rule is hardwired into the human brain.”

Dana Foundation book information, including Table of Contents and excerpts