This is Your Brain on Music (Daniel Levitin)

I already know a fair amount about music and about the brain, so some of this book was old hat, but I still learned a lot about the intersection between the two. For instance, I never appreciated the importance of the cerebellum in timing and rhythm. I also never realized that even non-musicians can generally sing a very familiar song from memory and get the key, the tempo, and even the singer's vocal mannerisms right. Music is a very complex and meaningful set of promises, and I enjoyed learning more about it.

Blindspot (Mahzarin Banaji & Anthony Greenwald)

An excellent review of all the research indicating that we humans are just a mass of prejudices, biases, assumptions, and limitations when it comes to evaluating situations, others, and even ourselves. All true! I wasn't surprised by any of the research results here, since I've followed this research for a while, but this is a good resource for pulling it all together. (With just one mistake I noticed: the misinformation effect described by Loftus is not the same thing as retroactive interference - a minor issue that doesn't detract from the work overall.) I highly recommend this for anyone interested in the science behind prejudice and discrimination.

Living With a Wild God (Barbara Ehrenreich)

The author as a mature woman, veteran of marriages and illnesses and careers, looks back at a quest she began at age 14 to understand the real nature of the universe. Raised as a staunch atheist, she wondered what the purpose of life and the universe could have beyond reproduction and death. Was there some ineffable, inexpressible Other that gave the world its real nature? For most of her life, Ehrenreich has been subject to what can only be called mystical experiences, in which language and human labels are leached away, leaving only pure sensations and a strong sense of Presence. This book is her attempt to describe her experiences as accurately as she can and to determine what they might mean. My professional background and my scientific inclinations lead me to something like this: brain circuitry developed for the purpose of recognizing and predicting the behavior of the intelligent social creatures we lived with (other people) sometimes overshoots, leading to pariedolia and, in the case of temporal-lobe epilepsy, a strong sense of oneness with the divine. Ehrenreich dismisses these explanations too glibly, I believe, lumping them in the category of "mental illness." I will grant her that no evidence disproves the existence of Others that are invisible to any rational scientific investigation and can't even be approached in a rational linguistic frame, but I don't accept that she has provided any actual evidence in favor of its existence either. No matter--the book is a fascinating look at the really big questions, and will provoke anyone to think deeply about them.

Echopraxia (Peter Watts)

I admired Watts's earlier Blindsight for its intelligence, its mind-blowing ideas, and its frequent reference to ideas that are square in the center of my own professional areas of interest. Echopraxia is more of the same, and even more so. It takes place in the same universe as the earlier book, focusing on what's going on back home while Humanity's heroes are engaging in a deeply mysterious first Contact. The main character, a biologist of the old school who eschews most forms of direct brain augmentation, gets caught up in an increasingly challenging set of circumstances as he fights to save himself and humanity from vampires, scientific mystics, military zombies, and alien slime mold. It's not clear whether or not he is successful. I admire the brilliance of his thinking and world-building. I love that I know about little bits of psychological research he tosses out. I was impressed with how he gave one character a unique voice, a sense of rapid delivery and impatience, simply by leaving out commas. Still, I can't say that I loved either book, and I'm afraid that it's because I'm not smart enough to read Peter Watts. I had the constant feeling that I didn't quite know what's actually happening, and kept going in the belief that it would become clear eventually, but it never did. If you loved Blindsight and you're smart enough to follow down the rabbit hole, you will probably love this one as well.

Blindsight (Peter Watts)

This is a deeply complex, challenging book that touches on topics that are important to me professionally: the blindsight of the title, for one thing, and also saccadic blindness, Cotard syndrome, and the nature and value of consciousness itself. It wraps this up in a first-contact novel like none other. The story starts when millions of tiny sensors drop into our atmosphere all over the world and immediately burn up, presumably after sending information to some alien ship. Humanity throws together several waves of manned and unmanned probes to try to reach the aliens and learn about them, hoping to open a dialogue at best, to defend ourselves at words. The story follows a ship containing a linguist with four different identities, a marine with neural connections to armies of mechanized grunts, a biologist whose normal senses have been replaced with a whole array of sensors, and a synthesist whose job is to translate what experts learn into terms ordinary folks can understand, under the command of a vampire. Seriously. It all makes sense. The aliens are more completely alien than anything I've ever seen before, and they apparently think of us the same way. The story doesn't have a happy ending, not only because of what aliens may do to us, but because of what we are doing to ourselves. I read this long ago and remember thinking that I need to read it again so I can get more out of it the second time, because it is so dense. Now seemed like the right time, as I want to read his next book, set in the same universe: Echopraxia.

How We Remember: Brain Mechanisms of Episodic Memory (Michael Hasselmo)

I love to study memory; it's my area of primary interest within cognitive psychology. For that reason, I expected to love this book, a close examination of how episodic memory works. Episodic memory is the memories of my actual life experiences, where I remember being there. For example, knowing what a toothbrush is for is a semantic memory, knowing how to brush my teeth is a procedural memory, but remembering brushing my teeth this morning, while looking out the window and observing that the sky is clear after days of rain--that is an episodic memory. I'm sad to say, however, that this book didn't work for me. Partly because this book goes deeper than my interest goes into those brain mechanisms mentioned in the title. I like to learn about different brain structures and how they work together, but kept skipping over the analyses of neural firing patterns in individual brain cells. Another problem I had is that the author explicitly defined episodic memory as the recovery of a spatiotemporal trajectory: first I went there and did that, next I went here and did this, and so on. I kept waiting for them to address the fact that some episodic memories don't have specific places and times linked to them, at least in my experience. Last week I was driving around town looking for a specific tree I had seen that I wanted to photograph. I had the location and time only very generally (somewhere within a half-hour or so of my house; somewhere in the winter, last year or perhaps the year before). I couldn't link it to anything that came before or after. But I had a clear memory of looking out the right side of the car as I rode in the passenger seat and thinking, "That's a really cool tree. I need to come back sometime and photograph it when the leaves are out." There is no trajectory in this memory, but it seems to me clearly to be an episodic memory, and this book can't account for it. While I admire and respect the work this author has done in uncovering some of the most basic aspects of episodic memory, all told it didn't click for me.

Human Memory: A Constructivist View (Mary Howes & Geoffrey O'Shea)

The authors present a thorough, tightly-argued case for the idea that memories are constructed, not simply stored. That is, each time we remember something, we use the bits and pieces of information available in the hugely complex network we've built, incorporating traces of all our experiences and knowledge, to build that memory. We don't just go on a shelf and find it there; it's new each time, and is changed every time we remember it. This is a very strong idea and has a huge amount of empirical support. For me, this was the weakness of this book; it argued against the idea that memories are exact replicas of our experiences, perhaps stronger or weaker, faded or intact, but otherwise unchanged. I don't know of anyone in the field who seriously takes that position any more. This made me lose patience with the book, because it seemed they were devoting their energies toward knocking down a straw man rather than actually examining the implications of the constructivist nature of memory. I also had another issue, which is much more mine than theirs; the book leaned heavily toward a philosophical approach, focusing on logic and introspection, but not so much empirical research. It's a matter of taste, I suppose, but that's not to my taste. I can't fault their conclusions, but don't feel that reading it really changed or enlarged my understanding of memory.

The Science of Fear (Daniel Gardner)

Gardner sounds a clarion call for making decisions based on rationality and reason, rather than the emotionality encouraged by our primitive brains and the media that surrounds us. Why do we spend such a huge amount of energy and money on fighting terrorism, which objectively offers virtually no risk, when automobile accidents and heart disease are much more dangerous? Why is everyone convinced that crime is going up, that our children are at great risk for being stolen by strangers, that chemicals are giving us all cancer,when none of this is actually true? Gardner explains this irrationality by describing the many cognitive biases and shortcuts we use when making sense of the world, and how they can lead us astray. I found it compelling and very readable. Highly recommended.

Our Own Minds (Radu Bogdan)

I'm reminded once again that I'm a psychologist, not a philosopher. I'm fascinated by the workings of the mind. but I want to approach them empirically and don't have the patience for the fine-grained logical analysis philosophers do. So while I enjoyed the basic ideas put forward in Bogdan's work on the development of consciousness, I found myself skipping over some of the painstaking argument and semantic distinctions here. Here's that basic idea. Children are born with an external orientation (to the environment and especially other people). Their minds work furiously to figure out how what others are doing and why, and what this has to do with the events and objects in the world. They very quickly start internalizing some of this, in the sense of developing their own relationships with the world, including the world of other people, but they're still looking at their own minds and relationships more or less from the outside, and don't start to develop a truly internal view of themselves until after around age four. That's when they start to be able to perceive their own internal thoughts and motivations directly. This fits with what I've always thought of as the nature of our self-awareness. As social creatures, we have to try to understand and predict what others will do. Because humans are flexible in our responses to the environment, with very few specific behaviors controlled directly by biology, we needed to develop internal models of other people, figuring out their motivations and goals and preferences. This mental machinery, created to help us think of others, is then available for us to use to understand ourselves, and that's where we get our ability to think of our own motivations and goals and preferences. Makes sense to me.

Time Warped (Claudia Hammond)

An interesting discussion of the many ways in which our perception of time can warp. The author comes back again and again to the Holiday Paradox - the fact that while on a vacation trip, seeing new things and having new experiences every day, the time seems to fly by, but after returning home and looking back on it the trip seems to have lasted a very long time. How is this possible? There are many theories, and she discusses them all, but the most likely has to do with attention and memory. When we are focused on things because they are new an unexpected, we lose track of the passage of time and are surprised when suddenly it is dinner time, so the day seems to have gone quickly. Looking back, however, we have so many separate memories it seems impossible that they all fit into that one small time frame. There is a lot more here, including why time seems to speed up as we get older and how to make better predictions about our own future. At times the material seemed scattered, with less organization than I would have liked, but overall it was interesting and informative.

Mnemonology (James Worthen & R. Reed Hunt)

This small but dense scholarly text is not for the lay public. However, for a student of memory, it is an interesting examination of mnemonics; their history, their classifications, their effectiveness, and their use in everyday life, in education, and in rehabilitation. The authors argue strongly that the formal study of mnemonics is important to a complete understanding of memory, and that formal training in the selection and use of mnemonics would be a valuable addition to standard curricula at all levels.

How We Decide (Jonah Lehrer)

The author gives us a suitably complex and nuanced description of the mental processes involved in making decisions about everything from what to eat for breakfast to whether to shoot down an incoming object that might be a friendly pilot or an enemy missile. The basic message is that our brains have two separate but interconnected decision-making systems. The rational system, housed primarily in our oversized, relatively modern frontal lobes, is great at weighing the odds and calculating probabilities. The emotional system, mostly in the lower levels of the brain and honed by millions of years of evolution, is great at making snap decisions about a wealth of fuzzy information. To make the best decisions, we need to know how these two systems operate, how to help them operate most effectively, and  when to turn over control to which system. The examples are numerous and fascinating, and the writing is clear and accessible. Highly recommended for anyone who makes decisions and would like to make them better.

Wired for Story (Lisa Cron)

How cognitive psychology applies to the process of reading fiction, and by extension how writers can use this information to write better, more engaging, more successful stories. I didn't learn any new cognitive psychology from this book, but can endorse the accuracy of the science she presents, and I was very interested in what it has to say about writing. I recommend this for anyone who is trying to get a story written and then get it read by others.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (Karen Joy Fowler)

This is the story of a very unusual family, told from the point of view of the daughter of a research psychologist. The father works in the field of comparative cognition, looking at how the cognitive processes of humans differ from those of rats and other primates - right up my alley! He winds up involving his family directly in his research, though, with dire consequences for everyone concerned. The narrator moves into adulthood dealing with issues of guilt, anger, and fear as a result of the events of her early childhood. I'm dancing around the central events here, because they're not revealed until several chapters in and I don't want to spoil anything from the few folks who don't go in knowing what was happening. The story is gripping, heartbreaking and heartwarming, and manages to claw its way to as happy an ending as the various characters could have. I enjoyed it a lot.

Quiet (Susan Cain)

As an introvert myself, I really appreciated this powerful, evocative, and well-researched treatise on the value of introverts. Cain does not try to make a case that introverts are better than extraverts, but that their way of interacting with the world is just as valuable overall and may be more effective in some situations (and less effective in others). Irony of the day: as my more extraverted husband was outside chatting with some of his friends, I was inside reading the last few chapters of this book, happy to be on my own and interacting with the world of ideas and grateful for an author explaining why this was OK.

Teaching for Critical Thinking (Stephen Brookfield)

Parts of this book were very helpful and insightful. I will get a lot of use out of his analysis of the different disciplines of critical thinking (it is no surprise to me that I find the scientific, hypothesis-testing view most congenial). I also found some of his suggested exercises for critical thinking very interesting, and may adopt some of them in my future courses.

Apprentices of Wonder (William Allman)

I really enjoyed this exploration of the connectionist/neural network approach to cognitive psychology, showing how the field was getting started. It does a great job of explaining how the connectionist view differs from the traditional computer analogy for mental processing, and describes the excitement and the wariness practitioners felt. The only problem is that the book is more than 20 years old (published in 1990), so it can't describe how the promises and perils have played out as the viewpoint matured. Otherwise, it's a good way for someone just exploring the field to get a picture of what these ideas are all about.

Brain Bugs (Dean Buonomano)

An interesting look at some of the consistent biases and mistakes we make because of how our brains work. The author looks at familiar things like change blindness, framing, and the influence of advertising, as well as some not pointed out as often, such s religion. I study this area, so I can't say I learned anything new. I also had problems with a few of the author's beliefs. For example, his theory as to why humans evolved religion is interesting, but flawed. He claims that one factor distinguishing humans from other animals is our tendency to ask questions, so we can try to make things better. True enough. But, he says, for early humans there was a need to distinguish things we could actually influence (such as how to hunt more effectively) from those we couldn't (such as the weather). Religion evolved, he says, to keep us from wasting too much time and energy on things out of our control. They became the purview of the gods. I disagree with this analysis. It seems that religion exists because we wanted to understand and explain everything. The gods are the explanation we came up with for the things we couldn't otherwise explain. So the book was all right, but didn't increase my understanding or change my thinking.

Inside Jokes (Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, Reginald Adams)

The authors describe a very interesting theory as to the function and importance of humor, and why only humans seem to display it. What the human mind is best at is the very rapid and risky development of predictions and expectations, based on heuristics and unconscious ideas about the world. If there were no mechanism for checking those expectations to remove the ones that proved to be incorrect, we would become less and less effective as incorrect assumptions built up. Therefore we need to spend time looking for inconsistencies and discrepancies. What will motivate us to devote precious time and mental effort to doing this? There has to be some internal reward - and mirth is that reward. Evolution has set up this reward system to get us to do what we need to do. I find the theory interesting and think it has a lot of merit. I have to say, though, that what I enjoyed most about the book was the jokes!

Consciousness (Susan Blakmore)

This textbook goes into all the theories and controversies relating to the questions of consciousness. When I look at a sunset, what creates the experience of the colors? Who is the one doing the experiencing? What does it mean to experience these colors, as opposed to just registering and labeling them?  There are way more questions than answers on this amazingly complex issue. It's fun to think about, but it kind of makes my head hurt. And what does that mean, exactly? I certainly think about these questions differently than I did before!