my mind on books

Consciousness researcher Christof Koch is interviewed on Brain Science Podcast #22.

Koch is the author of The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach

I saw him speak at Berkeley when he gave the Foerster Lecture in 2006, which can be viewed through Google video.

Brain Science Podcast has many more interesting episodes, plus a list of “Best Books on the Brain.”

Tell Me a Story: A New Look at Real and Artificial Memory by Roger C. Schank

Most of the public writing I’ve done up to now has been fairly academic – from college papers to abstracts of journal articles. This book by Roger Schank (who is forever associated in my mind with the “restaurant script”) has started to change the way I think about writing. Instead of thinking of the information I want to impart and how to organize it, Schank prompts me to think more in terms of “what story can I tell about this?”

Schank discusses the relationship between storytelling and intelligence, conversation as a process of responsive storytelling, and how stories are stored in memory:

Stories are a way of preserving the connectivity of events that would otherwise be disassociated over time. (p.124)

Near the end of the book (p. 221-237) Schank suggests that greater intelligence involves extending normal human abilities along seven dimensions. The dimensions are

• data finding (“the more that interests you the better memory you are likely to have,” p. 224)
• data manipulation (“the more successfully you adapt old stories, the more creative you are,” p. 226)
• comprehension (“intelligence means being interested in explaining as much as possible rather than explaining away as much as possible,” p. 229)
• explanation (“Failure is valuable because it encourages explanation,” p. 231)
• planning (“the more intelligent you are, the more you can create new plans,” p. 233)
• communication (“the more ideas are discussed, the more insights one will come to,” p. 235)
• integration (“the smartest of us becomes curious about certain aspects of what we encounter, and it is precisely those aspects that are worth focusing on,” p. 241)

Schank is also the author of The Connoisseur’s Guide to the Mind: How We Think, How We Learn, and What It Means to Be Intelligent and The Creative Attitude: Learning to Ask and Answer the Right Questions (among others).

The above image from Wikipedia is so perfect for “My Mind on Books” – the man has a stack of books next to him, easier to see if you click on the picture to follow the link back to the higher resolution image. This has inspired me to post some other mind-related Wikipedia entries, focusing on aspects that go beyond the traditional encyclopedia articles:

• Consciousness studies at Wikibooks, including this “Table of Theories.” (Wikibooks is a “sister project” of Wikipedia.)
• There are lots of lists at Wikipedia, such as the list of “unsolved problems in neuroscience” (which seems too short) or the list of “lists of psychology topics”
• There are also portals for broad topics, such as the Mind and Brain portal.

[For this reading challenge I picked non-fiction titles that are outside the usual scope of my reading and of this website.]

A Year in Japan by Kate Williamson is the last book for the “Non-Fiction Five Challenge.” This is a beautifully drawn travel journal by an artist who spent a year living in Kyoto. I did not feel like I got much of a deeper acquaintance with Japanese culture, but the book was filled with the kind of observations that strike a foreigner traveling in a new land. The reader who has never traveled to Japan can get a sense of experiencing an unfamiliar culture through the author’s drawings and brief written descriptions. Not much about Japanese popular culture here, but there are notes about the food, festivals, street scenes and sights of Kyoto.

Amazon has “Search Inside the Book” for this title, and the Google Book page also has some preview pages, plus reviews and web page references.

Thanks again to Mind Hacks, this time for pointing to “A Short Course in Thinking About Thinking” by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman at Edge.org.

Last February I attended two lectures by Kahneman at UC Berkeley, on intuition and happiness, which are archived here (near the top, under Hitchcock lectures). There’s some other good stuff on that page as well, including lectures on consciousness by Christof Koch and Thomas Metzinger.

For a “book tie-in” – the classic work by Kahneman, with Amos Tversky, is Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases

search results for books by Daniel Kahneman at Amazon