RoR: Forum

Attention moderator, many of my polls on these books/authors are close duplicates. I assumed that unpublished polls did not stay in the queue, so I resubmitted them out of impatience. I suggest all except my last submission on New Zealand be removed from consideration.

Post 1

Wednesday, July 18, 2007 - 10:47pm

The poll is dead. Long live the new poll.

Post 2

Thursday, July 19, 2007 - 12:31pm

I marked Damasio. He along with Jeff Hawkins and Eric Kandel are making huge leaps in cognitive science. Both Jeff Hawkins' book On Intelligence and Eric Kandel's book In Search of Memory are worth a mention.

Jim

Post 3

Thursday, July 19, 2007 - 1:08pm

Jim,

Walter Donway gave an interesting talk at the Summer Seminar entitled �Brain Science Discovers the Self�. It relied heavily on the work of Damasio as presented in The Feeling of What Happens.

Sorry you weren't there; maybe next year.
Thanks,
Glenn

Post 4

Thursday, July 19, 2007 - 6:14pm

Hawkins' book should have been in this poll, I'll have to look up Kandel. Luke Setzer recommended and I endorse Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open which is a readable introductory survey of the current state of research.

Post 5

Saturday, July 21, 2007 - 8:09am

Glenn,

Thanks for your comment. I plan to listen to Walter's talk on CD sometime in the near future. Right now I'm about 2/3 of the way through Descartes' Error and plan to read The Feeling of What Happens and Looking for Spinoza sometime soon.

The explosion of promising work in cognitive science is tremendously exciting because it is tackling problems on multiple causal levels. Eric Kandel's work at the synaptic level is yielding new insights into long-term memory. Damasio's work on reason/emotion synergy and decision-making in the prefrontal cortex is and his general approach of gathering and synthesizing brain lesion data into a coherent picture is tremendously promising. Jeff Hawkins' memory-prediction model for the human neocortex is earth-shattering. Also amazing is that each of these men has written books for the layman that are very readable and can be bought at Barnes and Noble.

Daniel Amen has also written some terrific self-help type books (one of which is How to Make a Good Brain Great) on the latest clinical brain research. He has a cutting edge clinic that specializes in SPECT imaging of blood flow in the brain and correlating neurological deficits with head trauma, stress and other issues.

Jim

(Edited by James Heaps-Nelson on 7/21, 8:28am)

Post 6

Saturday, July 21, 2007 - 8:15am

Ted,

Thanks for your comment as well. I own Mind Wide Open and it is on my growing reading list ;-). I also recommend Stephen Johnson's book Emergence about complex systems and how seemingly simple rule system changes effect huge changes and behavior. Since that book came out in 2001, some of its discussion as it relates to the internet is somewhat dated, but it's a terrific read nonetheless.

Jim

Post 7

Saturday, July 21, 2007 - 8:26am

As an aside, Ken Livingston has given some terrific talks over the years at IOS/TOC about brain function and rationality. His lecture on different EEG patterns and how they affect brain function and rationality was especially interesting.

Jay Friedenberg who gave also has a good introductory Cognitive Science textbook for people who are interested.He gave a really good set of cognitive science survey lectures at last year's Summer Seminar.

Jim

(Edited by James Heaps-Nelson on 7/21, 8:30am)

Post 8

Saturday, July 21, 2007 - 9:39am