I am now a Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sheffield, UK. I co-wrote Mind Hacks with technologist Matt Webb; we had great fun doing it. My research has always been in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, using experiments to understand the mind and brain and how they fit together.
This book captures what is so exciting about psychology - that our own minds are at once so familiar yet so deeply weird. There’s so much to be explored!
Warren is a perfect guide, sharing his learning but not getting bogged down with it, as he visits different states of consciousness, some of which we visit every day, like the daydream or the feeling of falling asleep, others, like the lucid dream, might be less familiar.
This book will change the way you think, sleep, and dream for good. It is a book of psychology and neuroscience, and also of adventure wherein the author explores the extremes to which consciousness can be stretched, from the lucid dream to the quasi-mystical substratum of awareness known as the Pure Conscious Event. Replete with stylish graphics and brightened by comic panels conceived and drawn by the author, The Head Trip is an instant classic, a brilliant and original description of the shifting experience of consciousness that's also a practical guide to enhancing creativity and mental health. This book does…
Broks draws upon his experience as a neuropsychologist to tell illuminating case studies of those with brain injury and other anomalies of experience. Woven through are reflections on the philosophy of what it means to have a mind which is based on the meat of the brain and what it means for our sense of selves to have damage to that brain.
Humane and moving, with flashes of dark humour, Broks brings back from the outlying lands of human experiences lessons that are relevant for all of us.
Many people from all walks of life, even after many accomplishments and experiences, are often plagued by dissatisfaction, pervasive longing, and deep questioning. These feelings may make them wonder if they are living the life they were meant to lead.
Living on Purpose is the guidebook these people have been…
A brilliant and accessible explanation for one of the central mysteries: how and why do we feel like we decide to act? Sometimes, we think we cause events when we don’t; other times, we act without knowing it. What gives?!
Through the story of his research programme, Wegner shows how each experiment fits together to build a satisfying explanation for how the mind fabricates for us a feeling of agency. As well as experiments, the book covers a set of fascinating phenomena, Ouija boards, hypnosis, and possession, and tries to show how they can be made sense of.
The whole thing is a window into how experimental psychologists do their work, as well as a compelling account of the nature of conscious will.
A novel contribution to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism.
Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our…
Ong was a Jesuit priest and a professor of English literature with a profound knowledge of ancient cultures. He also had a bold thesis: the invention of written language performs a kind of “software rewrite” (NOT his phrase!) on human experience.
This book is his explanation of the differences between cultures dominated by the oral tradition and modern cultures dominated by the written word. Writing makes a whole set of things possible, like lists of arbitrary items, communication without seeing your audience, freeing ideas from reliance on fallible memory, and so serving abstract, analytic thought.
As well as making us appreciate that our thinking style has been profoundly influenced by the technology of writing, Ong’s book also helps us respect the thinking style of oral cultures. The view from across 10,000 years of human history is dizzying and like the best science fiction, enhances your appreciation of what is possible for the human experience.
Walter J. Ong's classic work provides a fascinating insight into the social effects of oral, written, printed and electronic technologies, and their impact on philosophical, theological, scientific and literary thought.
This thirtieth anniversary edition - coinciding with Ong's centenary year - reproduces his best-known and most influential book in full and brings it up to date with two new exploratory essays by cultural writer and critic John Hartley.
Hartley provides:
A scene-setting chapter that situates Ong's work within the historical and disciplinary context of post-war Americanism and the rise of communication and media studies;
Gifts from a Challenging Childhood
by
Jan Bergstrom,
Learn to understand and work with your childhood wounds. Do you feel like old wounds or trauma from your childhood keep showing up today? Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed with what to do about it and where to start? If so, this book will help you travel down a path…
Clark is a philosopher and shows with wit and many great examples how our minds evolved to be a tight meshing between our brains, bodies, and the environment. In this account, our human endowment is to naturally absorb technologies, whether as simple as a stick or as complex as the internet, into our thinking and so warp and expand our consciousness and our capacity for thought.
So much discussion of artificial intelligence is about what computers will do better than humans or instead of humans. This book explodes the whole notion: intelligence has always been artificial, and the most interesting questions are about how we’re going to use technology to think. Onwards!
From Robocop to the Terminator to Eve 8, no image better captures our deepest fears about technology than the cyborg, the person who is both flesh and metal, brain and electronics. But philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark sees it differently. Cyborgs, he writes, are not something to be feared-we already are cyborgs. In Natural-Born Cyborgs, Clark argues that what makes humans so different from other species is our capacity to fully incorporate tools and supporting cultural practices into our existence. Technology as simple as writing on a sketchpad, as familiar as Google or a cellular phone, and as potentially…
Mind Hacks is 100 do-it-at-home experiments in cognitive neuroscience, a collection of probes into the moment-by-moment workings of our brain. They are a chance to get under the surface of our daily experience, understand how the mind works, and maybe even learn to use and enjoy the marvelous machine of our brain a little better.
