my mind on books

I’ll be traveling to the Washington DC-Silver Spring MD area this coming week for some meetings related to my day job, so posting here will be even more intermittent than usual.

I’m taking Proust Was a Neuroscientist along for some travel reading.

I’ve been enjoying playing the vocabulary game at FreeRice . It’s challenging and addictive, good exercise for the brain, plus, for every correct answer, ten grains of rice are donated to the United Nations World Food Program!

Thanks to LanguageHat and Metafilter.

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Does anybody miss the link previews? I recently turned off “Snap Shots” because they started having ads, but I liked the way the previews worked with Amazon to show a little summary & price information for books. I’m looking around for a way to get that functionality back….

Continuing an occasional ‘mind alphabet’ series….

For a conceptual overview: Free will on WikiMindMap

Selected books on free will:

A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will by Robert Kane (Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2005).
An Essay on Free Will by Peter Van Inwagen (Oxford [Oxfordshire] : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1983).
De La Mettrie’s Ghost: The Story of Decisions by Chris Nunn (New York : Macmillan, 2005).
Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting by Daniel Clement Dennett (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1984).
Four Views on Free Will (Great Debates in Philosophy)by John Martin Fischer (Malden, MA ; Oxford : Blackwell Pub., 2007).
Free Will (Blackwell Readings in Philosophy) by Robert Kane (Wiley, 2001). [readings]
Free Will: A Very Short Introduction by Thomas Pink (Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2004).
Free Will and Luck by Alfred R Mele (Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2006). More on F is for Free will

Describing Inner Experience?: Proponent Meets Skeptic (Bradford Books) is a new book from MIT Press by Russell T. Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel, who announces the book’s appearance on his blog, the Splintered Mind.
This sounds really interesting both in the subject matter of introspection and the way the book is put together as a collaboration between opposing viewpoints (with a third collaborator, “Melanie,” as test subject). From the book description:

Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel recruited a subject, “Melanie,” to report on her conscious experience using Hurlburt’s Descriptive Experience Sampling method (in which the subject is cued by random beeps to describe her conscious experience). The heart of the book contains Melanie’s accounts, Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel’s interviews with her, and their subsequent discussions while studying the transcripts of the interviews. In this way the authors dispute about the general reliability of introspective reporting is steadily tempered by specific debates about the extent to which Melanie’s particular reports are believable.

The publisher’s website for the book includes the transcripts and audio files of the interviews, plus the first chapter of the book.

I like to browse…

Music, Language, and the Brain is due to be released tomorrow (Nov. 7) from Oxford University Press.
“In the first comprehensive study of the relationship between music and language from the standpoint of cognitive neuroscience, Aniruddh D. Patel (Senior Fellow, The Neurosciences Institute, San Diego) challenges the widespread belief that music and language are processed independently.”

The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science (Leonardo Books), is new from MIT Press: “In The Hidden Sense, Cretien van Campen explores synesthesia from both artistic and scientific perspectives, looking at accounts of individual experiences, examples of synesthesia in visual art, music, and literature, and recent neurological research.”

Consciousness and Mental Life by Daniel N. Robinson is due out on Nov. 16.