A tale of two minds as one
341262
Anyone who has seen the original Star Trek Series, let alone the unaired pilots, specifically The Cage, would gradually begin to understand this man called Christopher Pike. He haunts down through the ages and through those eyes of this. As does the woman who loves him, a woman called Vina. It is difficult to explain but if you really enjoy books like this one you know why you can never put it down for long because it must be read through.
1630928
Dr. Sowell does a remarkable job of explaining the Universal Political Spectrum without using words like Liberal, Conservative, Radical, Reactionary, Left, or Right.
Sowell explains the underlying motivations of the two dominant worldviews, and does so in an evenhanded manner.  He makes his case by painting two disparate pictures of human nature, the Constrained and the Unconstrained.  He presents these two competing worldviews with the aid of readily understandable examples draw from history, such as Adam Smith and J. J. Rousseau.  He then goes on to explain the effect these two competing visions of reality have on the individual's conceptions of such topics as Justice, Power, Knowledge, Law, Honesty, and Equality.
Although this argument, like any other product of man, is far from perfect, it offers a fascinating structure within which to consider ideological issues.  Although it is not a panacea that will explain away all confusion, it does offer intriguing explanations for the often polar differences between liberals and conservatives, and why they so often seem to be `talking past each other'.
I highly recommend this book to the beginner and the expert alike.  The beginner is likely to find himself stunned, while the expert will be familiar enough with Dr. Sowell to recognize his expertise and admire his skillful writing.
1395039
Mantel's unusual tale is intriguing, a contrast between the seemingly normal lives of neighbors on a quiet street, most unaware that an odd mother and daughter exist in quite another world, one where spirits inhabit the rooms as well as the residents. In 1970ss England, Evelyn Axon and her mentally-challenged daughter, Muriel, are an unusual pair. A medium, the widowed Evelyn is haunted by the spirits she calls upon for clients, her rambling, decaying house filled with the uninvited. The sly, observant Muriel, no longer a child, takes great pains to outwit Evelyn, who berates her daughter cruelly and often. Not surprising that the ungainly, uncommunicative Muriel is the predictable product of her bizarre environment. The hammering of various social welfare workers is met with silence from within, the Axon's recoiling from unwanted intrusion.

Isabel Field, the current social worker assigned the Axon's, is troubled by her inability to help this pair, judging her own efforts inadequate. But Isabel gets distracted by a short affair with married schoolteacher Colin Sidney, whose unhappy wife, Sylvia, can barely control the three children who fill her days with chaos, let alone track the movements of a boring husband. In a vague connection, Colin's unmarried sister, Florence, lives next door to Evelyn and Muriel, her tentative overtures of friendship quickly rebuffed. Coping with the disappointments of an unhappy marriage and the scant rewards of an illicit relationship, Isabel and the Sidney provide the face of everyday life as most of us experience it, Muriel and Evelyn the unpredictable, both victims and conspirators in a bureaucratic social network meant to help those in need.

Mantel explores both the light and the dark side of human existence, the mental aberration bred of dysfunction, the accidental exposure of a nightmare in the midst of a quiet neighborhood, where incipient tragedy festers in dark corners and the scent of decay is pervasive. The blundering Colin Sidney, the well-meaning Isabel and the helpful neighbor, Florence, are caught up in a contretemps with unforeseeable consequences as the tortured daughter of an unstable woman finds herself at the mercy of an unfamiliar world, institutionalized by a system that swallows the needy whole. Out of sight, out of mind, or is she? Luan Gaines/2010.
4957744
It's a good read.  The book tells of man having only one mind and 2 differe t phases.  Each phase is characterized by its own phenomena and how to the mind works.
2535382
The human brain has been the subject of study for both scientists and philosophers for hundreds of years. We have spent countless hours examining and dissecting this small object. Many of us feel our personality, or even our soul dwells within that small, gray matter between our ears. Yet it is the heart that we celebrate, often apologetically in poetry, prose and emotional discourses. It seems for many of us, the head and the heart are at war with one another. Indeed most of us face the dilemma of choosing between the head and the heart many times in our lives, and it is always challenging and nerve-wracking.
Author Joseph Chilton Pearce, in his new book, The Heart-Mind Matrix, addresses this whole issue and offers some fascinating and thought-provoking insights. He observes that in the early half of the twentieth century, scientist Arthur Eddington pondered on how this small lump of jelly in our skulls could have come to understand and control so many secrets of the universe in such a short time. He concluded that the mind must be a mirror of the universe. This theme was embraced by the author in his previous book, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg and then expanded upon in this latest book. The key, it seems is to examine and understand the mystery of the heart.

The heart, it appears is the key to our happiness and fulfilment. Yet we have embraced only the wisdom of the head. The heart, he writes, is an innate system of emotional-mental coherence that has been lost generations ago through a breakdown of the natural nurturing culture of our ancestors. By severing ourselves from our heart intelligence, he argues, we are left with our selfish, survival-oriented reptilian brains, which create and reinforce strange loops between potential and actual reality, leading to our modern worlds endless cycle of self-inflicted disasters and society crises.
1623345
This is a thought-provoking short sci-fi story copyrighted in 1956 which contains an original rather clever idea about the human mind and about enjoying life on earth. A being from another planet, named Kcid, came to earth to help his fellow beings decide whether to settle earth, inhabit the bodies of earthlings, and live here. He is the second such being to come. The first seemed to enjoy life on earth so much he did not communicate his findings to his planet.

 Kcid finds that the earthlings are very backward and their science insufficiently developed. Some of their behaviors strike him as strange, especially their sexual desires. He also finds that they are different from beings in any planet; they have two minds, a conscious and a subconscious. The latter causes humans to do things that they would not want to do if they only used their conscious mind. Kcid finds that the subconscious leads to bizarre acts and what humans call insanity. He reports back that he wants to spend a vacation on earth.
4955287
Ramachandran is a good readable writer, and his book a Brief Tour of Human Consciousness proves it.  Like Oliver Sacks (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) his style of presentation is by means of patient history, much like a "grand rounds" presentation of interesting and unusually instructive cases in university hospitals.  This is a particularly engaging process, since it provides a more intimate and personal acquaintance with brain studies and mind research.  People are interested in people more than in a construct of cells.

The book makes note of what has been learned from damage sustained by individuals to specific, narrow areas of the brain.  Physical disabilities and mental anomalies are more clearly defined by these occurrences, and the introduction of PET scans and functional MRI's has allowed researchers to take a closer look at specific sites and their anatomy and physiology.  In the past, such information was gleaned from what could be deduced from autopsy results after such an individual died.

Some of the material is old.  Certainly the oddities produced by corpus collisotomy have been discussed in depth, as has the unusual abilities of the autistic savant (individuals like the Rainman).  The author's experiments with retraining paralytic limbs and with reducing the phantom pain phenomenon with mirrors will probably be new to anyone who has not read his other book.

A fun book and an interesting introduction to the functioning of the brain.
410727
Imagine writing a book with two characters that must inevitably share every experience, and yet giving each character a unique and vivid perspective.  That is what Lansens has done with her novel of conjoined twins Ruby and Rose, the oldest surviving (they are approaching their 30th birthday) craniopagus (joined at the head) twins.

Lansens demonstrates that her twins have different perspectives on life by having them by joined such that they face at angles to each other (as Rose says, "I have never looked into my sister's eyes."), a neat literary trick.  And of course they sometimes remember the same events differently as any two people, real or imagined, will.  In some ways, Lansens ability to create two such different characters is not very remarkable, since most authors do it in every book.  But we must return to the fact that Lansens' characters are not the same as any other two characters in a different book.  And yet, they are.  And it is Lansens ability to make them so normal, and so real, to her readers that is just a part of what makes this book so good.
696972
A fascinating look at the life of a woman with multiple personalities and her eventual integration into one personality.
534883
This was a fun book to read. It introduces how different parts of the brain work and fit together by looking at how people with damage to parts of their brain behave and experience the world. For example, if several people with temporal lobe epilepsy have feelings of religious enlightenment or feel that they understand the cosmos, this suggests that the temporal lobe plays a role in these feelings. What I want most to understand about the brain is the relation of the rational justification of a thought and belief in this thought. Thus I'm interested to know what systems in the brain are responsible for the feeling that you know something, independent of whether that thought is true.

In the last chapter Ramachandran argues that since an objective description of what it means for me to see red and my subjective experience of seeing red are in different languages (one the language of nerve impulses and the second spoken language), there will always be something lost in translation. Since the problem of describing qualia (the raw feel of sensations) is just an instance of the problem of translating between any languages, this makes the problem of experiences vs. scientific description seem less mystical.

There are some nifty tests Ramachandran presents for seeing how your mind fills in the gap of your blindspot. There are also some very cool tests he describes for experiencing a phantom nose (messing with your "proprioception"). In the notes he describes another illusion reported by Lackner, in which a subject feels that their nose has lengthened.
2579648
This is a delightful, yet introspective and unsettling tale that provides insight into the lives of two ends of the human spectrum. The author learns first hand about people with whom he had nothing in common as those people learned about the author who was raised and educated in an environment that they could have only read about.
3397725
Cheers to Daniel Tammet for sharing his intriguing life with his fellow humans.  An autistic savant with mind-boggling mathematical capabilities, Mr. Tammet presents the reader with an autobiography that does a very credible job in balancing a description of his intriguing and amazing talents with an important portrait of the interior life of a high functioning autistic.

Autistic spectrum disorders are usually accompanied by behavior patterns that the average person thinks of as freakish.  Mr. Tammet's descriptions of the differences in the way autistic spectrum brains work go a long way towards demystifying behavior that can seem painfully odd to the general population. Born on a Blue Day's portrait of an unusual mind offers the reader the opportunity to respond differently to people with autistic disorders than he or she has in the past, this aspect of the book alone makes it a worthwhile read, though it offers much more.

Indirectly, Born on a Blue Day, which Tammet uses as an opportunity to link the neuroanatomy of the brain to his specific gifts as well as his disabilities, takes a few more steps down the road towards the premise that anatomy and consciousness are synonymous.  Though Tammet does not state this as a premise, his description of the known differences between savant brains and that of the more average human brain highlights how dramatically the architecture of the brain affects how we perceive and respond to the world around us.

Thought-provoking but not overwhelmingly technical, Born on a Blue Day is an easy read, and one that will permanently alter the reader's perspective on differently abled minds.
3605807
The unique feature of this book is that the author combines a personal lost-love story with masterly accounts of quantum physics and neuroscience.  The author has real literary talent and manages to weave together the different storylines into a coherent whole. His treatment of the history to quantum physics has a poetic feel to it, as he leads the reader through the theories and experiments in the early 1900's where science moved from a billiard-ball conception of the atom to the mysterious wave function.  Walker then gives fresh accounts of the leading interpretations of quantum physics from the Copenhagen interpretation (don't worry about reality, just read your instruments) to the bizarre many-worlds interpretation (each of the uncountable wave states represents a different world.) He then takes on the difficult question of how is it that under quantum theory, the observing consciousness collapses the wave function? He devotes many pages to Bell's theorem and the finding that the world indeed is not made of independent objects but is in some sense entangled. He then makes a detour to Zen Buddhism and notes Zen's insights into the nature of consciousness.  (Along the way, we see that Walker's memory of his teenage romance has caused him to reject extreme materialism and to search for something more; hard to take issue with that.)  Using quantum physics and Bell's theorem, Walker then proposes that the source of consciousness is the "collection of potentialities" that develop as electrons and the brain's structure interact. He then plows new ground by proposing a way to measure the "consciousness stream" of the brain, along with the "will stream," based upon the firing speed of brain synapses. Here he finds the "quantum mind," the one consciousness that we all share, emerging from the brain. "Reality is the observer observing," he writes, and "our observation -- our coming together -- created matter." Although this book is worth reading because it explores new ground and stretches the intellect, in the end the theory may appear self-contradictory. If there is no independent world outside of consciousness and if the mind is primary, then would not that also hold true for the human body and the brain?  He frames the question, "where is in Mind in the Brain?" but maybe the radical question really is, "where is the brain in the Mind?"  And, although it must be considered quite an achievement to actually measure the force of consciousness and the will through brain activity, it may turn out that Ultimate Reality is immeasurable.

The reviewer is the author of "The Heaven at the End of Science: An Argument for a New Worldview of Hope."
4456053
Wonderful book! This book reminds me of Julian Jaynes' origins of
consciousness theory as voices in our head between our two brain
hemispheres. Basically, it hypothesizes that we are two intellectual
persons, which he calls System 1 and System 2. System 2, the deductive
system, is prisoner of System 1, the sense-making system. System 2 can
only act on what System 1 presents. What's wonderful about this book
is that it is a philosophical theory of a life-long research on
decision-making that the author conducted with Amos Tversky. The two
systems explain why we are not completely rational in our judgment and
how our biases lead us astray. Moreover, System 1 looks for patterns
where there might be none and System 2 has no choice but to follow. I
also liked the distinction between the experiencing self and the
remembering self. We do (or don't do) things taking into account the
remembering self. The remembering self is our own police.

I actually bought the book from Amazon after reading it from my library.
It's that good!
3411248
There is much learning in Rabbi Jonathan Sacks's insights into history, science, politics, religion, and humankind. I see problems with two terms: universalism and particularity.
The story started on the grounds of the seventeenth century when the United States appeared. Years of religious wars, economic changes, and political realignments. In a comparison with the seventeenth century, of course, the twenty-first seems to focus more on religious wars than nation-states.
A mediation can occur through the term tzedakah: social justice wherein everyone has sustenance for survival as those who must provide for those that have little. Some express this notion as the upper 1% having 99% of the resources while the 99% have 1%.
A startling idea appears in an early chapter, "The Dignity of Difference: Exorcizing Plato's Ghost." The author sees Plato as a perfectionist whose concern is more in universal forms (archetypal idea) than bread-and-butter issues (typal manifestation). He labels our insider (us) v outsider (them) as tribalism as "perhaps, the central question of the global age (61)."
However, there can be no particular without the universal: the whole exists for parts and they for it. The systematic structure of one and many differs from an aggregate or pluralistic. The many are not separate, detached from the whole. They combine in a total relationship with God.
1059476
Dr. Giovanni Raccuglia's novel The Soul Box entertainingly broaches the possibility that all too soon humans may be dealing with futuristic inventions indeed -- enhanced human minds enclosed in strongboxes equipped with prosthetics enabling them to fend for themselves against the resentful onslaughts of mere humans like ourselves.  Along the way Dr. Raccuglia skims over the efforts of religions and philosophers to understand why and how humans have minds which feel like souls and have mastered so much, what death means and what it is, and why evil beyond chance exists in humans' minds, or instincts? or ... souls?

His plot itself describes an expertly managed hospital and principled doctors, sometimes verging  toward pedantry, but enjoyable pedantry, and often slyly slipping in ironic comments on the professional behavior and private lives of those doctors.  The novel has enough highly dramatic scenes that it would make a striking film, especially if the directors searched for the subtlest actors they could find. I don't know what the ending of the book indicates --the dream of science vanquishing diseases; people should be allowed to find their own religions; the Rabbi's final words "Love one another."  (However, get rid of the dozens of typos!)
4265432
A short story detailing the thoughts of two individuals on two different by intertwining paths. A ending leaving you to think of the individuals motivations. Great short story.