my mind on books

An extensive annotated bibliography on consciousness and the brain is available here: www.consciousness-brain.org.

Arranged by author, the bibliography covers articles and books. Most of the entries have annotations, sometimes quite detailed summaries of the content. A few have links. The latest date I saw was 1996.

A recent book by neurophysiologist R. Grant Steen on brain science: The Evolving Brain: The Known and the Unknown

Chapter 9 deals with consciousness; a few excerpts follow….

“We propose that consciousness arises only when a subject shows a combination of attention, perception, memory, and awareness.” p. 187

“Consciousness may be equivalent to neuronal synchronization. If so, does anything that increases neural synchronization also increase consciousness? Recent evidence shows that Buddhist monks are able to synchronize large brain areas as they meditate. This is consistent with the focused attention and increased consciousness that practitioners claim as a benefit of meditation. Equating synchronization to consciousness makes a fairly simple hypothesis, with the obvious appeal that it would be easy to test and easy to prove false.” p. 202

“It seems likely that consciousness is a correlate of complexity, an emergent property of the brain.” p. 208

“Darwin’s God” – excerpt:

Lost in the hullabaloo over the neo-atheists is a quieter and potentially more illuminating debate. It is taking place not between science and religion but within science itself, specifically among the scientists studying the evolution of religion. These scholars tend to agree on one point: that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. What they disagree about is why a tendency to believe evolved, whether it was because belief itself was adaptive or because it was just an evolutionary byproduct, a mere consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the human brain.

go to the full article at NYT Magazine

Authors discussed in the article:

• Scott Atran – In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Evolution and Cognition Series)
• Justin Barrett – Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (Cognitive Science of Religion Series)
• Paul Bloom – Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human
• Pascal Boyer – Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought; The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion; Cognitive Aspects of Religious Symbolism
• Jesse Bering and David Bjorklund – Jesse Bering’s homepage, links to publications and interviews
• David Sloan Wilson – Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society
• Richard Sosis – abstract of American Scientist article “The Adaptive Value of Religious Ritual”

According to the byproduct theorists, religion arose as a kind of “spandrel” from other adaptive mental characteristics such as agent detection, causal reasoning, and theory of mind or folk psychology, leading to concepts such as “minimally counterintuitive agents.” Adaptationists look for reasons why belief in religion is itself adaptive.

Steven Winn discusses some recent books on happiness in today’s SF Chronicle:
link to article

Books featured in the article include: Happiness: A History by Darrin McMahon and Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert.

A new book on consciousness by Douglas Hofstadter is scheduled to be released tomorrow (March 5, 2007):

I Am a Strange Loop

Hofstadter’s home page is here: link