my mind on books

In honor of Priscilla Palmer’s list of personal development bloggers, which continues to grow, here is a link to Amazon’s most popular books on personal transformation. If this works like I think it will, it should change to show the top books at the time the link is clicked. Right now the most popular book is Choices and Illusions: How Did I Get Where I Am, and How Do I Get Where I Want to Be? by Eldon Taylor.

Following is the full list of personal development bloggers as of now:

More on Personal development books and bloggers

Important Books on the Brain: An Annotated Bibliography of Fiction and Non-Fiction

“The following descriptions focus on widely praised books about the brain, both scientific and literary. The selections are excerpted from articles in Cerebrum: The Dana Forum on Brain Science.”

“There are two kinds of people…..” (and many ways to divide people into two kinds!)

“Categorization is the process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated and understood. Categorization implies that objects are grouped into categories, usually for some specific purpose.” (from Wikipedia)

A good introduction to the topic for the general reader can be found in The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution by Howard Gardner (New York: Basic Books, 1985, 1987) – Ch. 12 “A World Categorized.”

The work of Eleanor Rosch was instrumental in overturning the classical view of categories based on “necessary and sufficient conditions” in favor of a psychological approach to the structure of categories based on prototypes.

Rosch discusses her work on categorization in this transcribed interview: “Categories have what I called a graded structure of better and worse examples, and many categories have unclear boundaries”

Books on categorization:

• Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind by George Lakoff (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1987). [listed first at both WorldCat and LibraryThing, the most popular book on the topic at both institutional and personal libraries]
• Beyond Labeling: The Role of Maternal Input in the Acquisition of Richly-Structured Categories (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development) by Susan A Gelman et al; Society for Research in Child Development. (Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 1998). (JSTOR) More on C is for Categorization

(found via Mind Hacks) PsychAntenna: “an ever-growing showcase of psychology-related websites, blogs, podcasts and journals that utilize RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to broadcast their content.”

My Mind on Books is honored to be included in PsychAntenna’s database. You can submit your favorite psychology-related sites for inclusion.

Steven Pinker‘s new book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature is now available.

Also recently out: Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf.