Book List 2015

Books I've Read

1. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling - January 2nd
2. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling - January 4th
3. How to Travel the World on $50 a Day, Matt Kepnes - February 13th
4. Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck - March 31st

5. Mutant Message, Marlo Morgan - April 27th

Books I'm Currently Reading

In A Sunburned Country, Bill Bryson

Book List 2014

Books I've Read

1. The Mastery of Love, Don Miguel Ruiz – January 15th
2. The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz – January 20th
3. The Call of Cthulhu*, H.P. Lovecraft – January 21st
4. The Horror at Red Hook*, H.P. Lovecraft – January 21st
5. The Thing on the Doorstep*, H.P. Lovecraft – January 21st
6. The Outsiders*, S. E. Hinton – February 1st
7. The Courage to Create, Rollo May – February 5th
8. Ender’s Game*, Orson Scott Card – February 8th
9. 1984*, George Orwell – February 11th
10. Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin – February
11. A Feast for Crows, George R.R. Martin – March
12. A Dance with Dragons, George R.R. Martin - April
13. Better Days and Other Stories, Joss Whedon - April
14. The Shepherds Tale, Joss Whedon - April
15. The Witch of Portobello, Paulo Coelho - May
16. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho -June
17. Dune, Frank Herbert – July 3rd
18. Ishmael, Daniel Quinn – July 5th
19. Zoobooks: Sharks - July 19th
20. Mirabai - July 28th
21. The Five Sexes, Anne Fausto-Sterling - July 28th
22. Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse - August 4th
23. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche - August 7th
24. Lying, Sam Harris - August 7th
25. The Story of B, Daniel Quinn - August 12th
26. My Ishmael, Daniel Quinn - August 15th
27. Beyond Civilization, Daniel Quinn - August 17th
28. The Devil and Miss Prym, Paulo Coelho - August 19th
29. The Moneyless Manifesto, Mark Boyle - September 17th
30. The Happiness of Pursuit,  Chris Guillebeau - September 24th
31. Waking Up, Sam Harris - October 24th
32. Blood Music, Greg Bear - October 29th
33. The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell - November 15th
34. Still The Mind, Alan Watts - November 19th
35. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, J.K. Rowling - November 21st
36. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J.K. Rowling - November 24th
37. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J.K. Rowling - November 25th
38. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling - December 11th
39. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi - December 13th
40. Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix - December 28th

*Audiobook

Book List 2013

Books I've Read
1. Minority Report, Phillip K. Dick - January 1st
2. Autofac, Phillip K. Dick - January 3rd
3. Service Call, Phillip K. Dick - January 5th
4. Captive Market, Phillip K. Dick - January 7th
5. The Art of Non-Conformity, Chris Guillibeau - February 18th
6. Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin - April 3rd
7. A Clash of Kings, George R. R. Martin - April 26th
8. Walking, Henry David Thoreau - June 21st
9. How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, Arnold Bennett - June 24th

10. The Solo Traveler's Handbook, Janice Waugh - June 26th

11. How To Travel Full Time, Chris Wright - July 1st
12. $100 Start Up, Chris Guillebeau - July 27th
13. Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau - August 2nd
14. Voice of Knowledge, Don Miguel Ruiz - November 24th

Book List 2012

Books Ive Read:
1. Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas Adams - Jan. 1st
2. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess - Jan. 25th
3. My Stroke Of Insight, Jilly Taylor - Feb. 8th
4. Ilium, Dan Simmons - March 18th
5. Candide, Voltaire - June 21st
6. The Way To love, Anthony De Mello - September 23rd
7. Alice In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll - November 16th
8. Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll - November 26th


Books I'm Currently Reading:
Buddhas Brain, Rick Hanson


Books On The Horizon:
Synaptic Self, Joseph LeDoux
The Feeling of What Happens, Antonio Damasio
The Physics of Consciousness, Evan Walker
The Future of the Brain, Steven Rose
Welcome to Your Brain, Sandra Aamodt & Sam Wang

 

I think that's pretty sound advice whether you're trying to make books cool again or not.

Mind Wide Open

Every time I read Mind Wide Open by Steven Johnson I remember why its been such a staple in my life for the last five years. Its personable with anecdotal stories of his experiences delving into his own mind. He's funny and you can just tell he writes how he talks making it that much easier to understand this complex topic and also be able to relate to it by going "Oh yeah I've experienced that before!". Now that I am on this neuroscience kick I figured it would be good to start with what I already have so I decided to reread Mind Wide Open and take notes on it. So here are some of my favorite excerpts.


-There are four current theories of consciousness:
1. Inanimate objects, like broccoli and teakettles, are conscious in some different way from us. That qualia (the brains representation of both the external world and the body's mental state - the "faceness" of a loved one, or the "emotioness" of the emotional feeling) is a property of matter itself, and the human brain is simply the most advanced qualia recording apparatus yet evolved.
2. Something unique exists in the configuration of cells that makes consciousness happen in brains and not broccoli.
3. A mystery substance not yet understood by science - quantum behavior perhaps, or some kind of spiritual life force - that turns a bunch of interconnected cells into a feeling brain.
4. One of the properties of consciousness is that it cant explain itself regardless of how far we come scientifically.
I find this extremely interesting, I suppose I have never considered consciousness before or where it comes from. This is definitely a topic I intend to delve into further, Johnson offers a couple of recommendations on books to look into if you're interested in this topic; The Feeling of What Happens by Damasio, Consciousness Explained by Dennett, The Race for Consciousness by Taylor, and The Emperors New Mind by Penrose.

-For language to evolve, humans needed a viable theory about the minds of other people - otherwise, they'd just be talking to themselves. What a great thought! It's funny, but oh so true. We really had to have realized that other people have the same emotions and feelings as we do to have found the need for language to communicate with one another.

-The bigger the society in which the individual lives, the bigger its neocortex is relative to the rest of the brain. To thrive in a complex society, you need a big brain and vice versa.

-When you track a projectile flying through the air, your brain intuitively calculates its point of origin by imagining its trajectory in reverse. Ha!

-Sue Carter studied prairie voles, who are well known for being monogamous for their whole lives (very uncommon, less than 5% of all mammalians are). When she injected oxytocin into their brains they formed even more tenacious bonds than usual. And when she injected a oxytocin blocker they instantly became polygamous and didn't form any pair bonds. Well now I know how monogamy happens... or doesn't. Us humans obviously dont have nearly enough oxytocin to keep us totally loyal and monogamous. I wonder once this information becomes more well-known if people will seek having more oxytocin put into their brains to become truly monogamous with their partner. Would that be romantic? The new true way of getting married?

-Speakers are 46% more likely to laugh than listeners and only 15% of the sentences that triggered laughter were humorous in any way. And you're 30 times more likely to laugh when you're with people than when you're alone.

-Laughter is an instinctive form of social bonding, the largest amount of human laughter occurs in childhood - rough&tumble play, chasing, etc. Its a way of pair bonding with parents and reinforces parenting through the "tougher" years. And thus we have childhood to thank for laughter. Thank you childhood!

-Sadness is marked by a decrease of activity in the prefrontal cortex, while happiness triggered an increase in such activity. Prefrontal cortical activity is a strong predictor of idea generation and overall liveliness of thought. One of the side effects of the way the brain creates the feeling of sadness is a reduction in the overall umber of thoughts that the mind produces. Isn't that interesting? Now is it sadness that causes us to decrease our prefrontal cortical activity or is it a decrease in prefrontal cortical activity that causes sadness? That is one thing that I suppose we will never truly know, but at least you know the next time you are feeling blue and not having many grand ideas that once the sadness passes you will regain your super awesome powers of having the best ideas ever.

-Only using ten percent of your brain is a sign of efficiency, not underachievement. Arguing that we'd be better off with one hundred percent is like raving how great Shakespeare would have been if he'd managed to use all 26 letters in each of his words, instead of a small fraction of the alphabet. I myself have heard someone saying the same thing before (how if only we used 100% of our brain...) and even then I thought they sounded ridiculous, but I couldn't place why or an argument to say otherwise. But I love how Johnson stated his argument, its a good metaphor. I'm pretty sure our brains would overheat and explode if we used 100 percent of it constantly.

 

Ahhh. I see this and I feel like I can breath again. This, this is home. A comfy chair and cave full of books. Surrounded by knowledge, historians, people who have LIVED and people who have died with their small fingerprint left on the world. This is a room I cant wait to have for myself.

 

This is how I feel when I read. Shit, if I could swim in a book I would.

Pictures of The Mind

Pictures of the Mind: What the New Neuroscience Tells Us About Who We Are By Mariam Boleyn-Fitzgerald. A book I asked for for Christmas, received a couple months ago and finally started to read about a week or two ago. WHAT a read! I found it so interesting I took notes on it and I will share with you some of the most interesting of findings.


-People who experience less pleasure in response to food might overeat to compensate, whereas people who experience more pleasure stop because they are satisfied. How fascinating! They did MRI scans that came up with this conclusion, a conclusion that is basically the exact opposite of what we have always thought about the obese.

-Happiness circuits are among the most plastic circuits in the brain. Now isn't that a lovely insight?

-There is something called a "dark network" which is basically a network that is buzzing when we are doing nothing at all and goes dark when figuring out a problem or doing an activity. Its thought to play an important role in learning, memory and in maintaining energy equilibrium in the brain. Isn't that interesting? Even when we think we aren't using our brain, we are. and it turns out to be an important part to our very existence as an intelligent race.

-The larger a persons neural response to increases in the public good the more likely they will give [money] voluntarily. Not that astounding of a discovery, but an interesting study nonetheless.

-Scientists are incredibly close to "erasing" (taking away the emotional aspect of) memories. Most notably this could be used in helping people with PTSD and not having the emotional responses to memories of war, rape, violence, etc. The book talks about scientists who have already been able to achieve this with a drug and other scientists who have serious ethical issues with it. Does this effect the real "you"? By doing this can it make you not learn from your experiences? Personally, I think its a chance for people who are truly suffering from PTSD to have a second chance to live a normal life. This erasing method doesnt actually make them forget the memory, they recall it just fine, they just aren't traumatized by it any longer and that is something that those patients could really use.

-30-40% of people who have temporal lobe epilepsy have intense spiritual experiences. Like talking to god, or feeling connected with the universe, etc. I found this very interesting. It went on to talk about how the left hemisphere, the "logical" side of the brain, often tries to come up with "rational" explanations of things occurring in the right hemisphere that it cant account for, for instance a seizure in the temporal lobe making you feel all these emotions you cant explain, and thus the best explanation for such pleasurable experiences (which are in reality just chemicals being released in your brain) is a connection with god or the universe. There was also a particularly enjoyable quote from scientist Ramachandran, "God is the ultimate confabulation by the left hemisphere".



So there you have it! It is a spectacular book full of tons of really interesting information on a vast amount of different topics (in concerns to the brain of course). The book actually took an unexpected turn towards meditation and mindfulness at the end and how it actually does a lot of good things to our brain, and can produce high-frequency gamma activity, which is believed to be an indicator of neural synchrony. there is a lot of research being done currently on the link between meditation/mindfulness and happiness and other benefits.

Neuroscience is an up and coming field and there really are no limits to what we can study and what we will find. And thats a big reason why I am finding myself jumping in with both feet. Be expecting a lot of neuroscience related books in the future.

Coming next, my thoughts on Mind Wide Open by Steven Johnson and my favorite passages. This book has been my favorite book for at least five or six years, I am rereading it once again to take notes, like Ive always wanted to, and to look at it with fresh eyes and a new-found passion.

Harry Potter

So the last movie of the Harry Potter series came out and after having finally completed (visually) the series I just had to reread the books. and Im really glad I did! I must say they really hold up to rereading, and I mean several times. The amount of detail and characters and whatnot really brings you into its world and you can so see everything that is happening. I still stand by that the books are better than the movies (of course) just because of the amount of detail and getting to know the other more obscure characters and inter-relationships with one another. But really, the movies are still damn good, they really do the books justice and are just as visually as exciting and accurate as they are described in the books. And I think that is really quite a feat. I really cant wait to see if J.K. will continue to write. I really hope she does, and i dont mean more Harry Potter books (I already know thats not going to happen) but just a different series of sorts in a different world. She is a great author and really knows how to take you along the exciting and emotional rollercoaster with the characters. But we shall see, its not like she will ever "have" to work again.

Where Good Ideas Come From

Let me just start by saying Steven Johnson is one of my favorite authors. I fell in love with his writing when I first read Mind Wide Open (a book about the neuroscience of every day life) and I have read that book several times since. He has a way of talking to you like he is sitting in front of you having a conversation, not talking AT you or trying to sound like he knows more than he does. It’s really awesome.

Anyway this book I just finished, Where Good Ideas Come From, was a really great read. I finished it in about a week. It talks about his theory on where most of the best ideas/inventions come from (open source as opposed to being secretive) and how they are formed. He talks about what some of the great inventors of the last 200 years had in common (they hung out in coffeehouses or commons and talked with a varied amount of kinds of people instead of a tight-knit group, and they tended to have a lot of hobbies and varied interests in different studies.) He talked about how most great ideas are not eureka moments but slow hunches that take a long time to develop and conjure. It really is fascinating how he pulls all these ideas together. In fact it really has given me a swift kick in the ass to be more active. Be more active in pursuing all of my interests, and instead of reading in bed or on the couch to go read at a Starbucks, to take lots of walks, and write down more of my thoughts and ideas. To be ok with not getting it right all the time and to absolutely revel in all the serendipitous moments in my life. Like I said, its a great read, and I highly recommend it to those interested in where good ideas come from and potentially interested in having some of their own.

Two favorite quotes:
“Chance favors the connected mind.”

“‘Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified.’ - Benjamin Franklin”

Art Of Non-Conformity

What a book! This beautiful masterpiece is pure inspiration for those who have always felt like their path isn’t that of what society tells us it should be. It gives you hope that you can do it (and also to stay realistic in your journey of non-conformity), it makes you realize that you are certainly not alone in feeling uncomfortable living the life you were told you are supposed to have, and it makes you just want to get up and do it! Chris also has a website where he posts his newest work, ideas, and his own journey in completing his goal of visiting every single country in the world by the time he turns 35 (amazing, right?). I subscribed to his email list and get a weekly email of his most recent inspiration and story that makes you think and keeps you wanting to work toward doing whatever it is you need to do for yourself. I highly suggest buying this book, or at the very least check out the website. It’s worth the read/look and you could find it very useful to getting the courage to do what you want to do (which I know from experience, can be a very very hard thing to do).

Atlas Shrugged

Excellent book! I just could not put it down. I will admit when I came to the sixty page manifesto near the end I just had to skip it, it was pretty much reiterating everything Ayn had said already and I was going to be just so bored. Otherwise marvelous, just marvelous. Some very interesting ideas, although a bit extreme. But I suppose that’s just how she works.

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

“This, she knew, was a tribute to her, the rarest one person could pay another: the tribute of feeling free to acknowledge one’s own greatness, knowing that it is understood.”

“Two things were impossible to him: to stand still or to move aimlessly.”

“‘Every man builds his world in his own image,’ he said. “He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.”

“By holding nothing -nothing- above the verdict of my own mind.”

"I"

So I just finished Sam Harris’ book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. GREAT book, I highly recommend it to all. It also ended on a chapter that I was totally NOT expecting in the slightest. It touched on Buddhism (how it is not an actual religion), mysticism, and how they can actually be good for you and he touches on the topic of consciousness and blazay-blah. REALLY awesome. and I was totally not expecting him to go there considering he is an EXTREMELY famous atheist (lots of great TED talks out there if you’re interested) who just spent a good portion of the book tearing apart Islam and Christianity and how we need to throw them out for our own sake. (Once again, a really great read and I recommend it to all whether you are religious or not).

Anyway, so I just finished that last night and started reading Ayn Rand’s book Anthem, because it was just next in line and it too dealt HEAVILY with the notion of “I” and how imperative it is for happiness and growth. I also strongly recommend this read, and its VERY quick, I finished it in just a couple hours. And because I read at work now (awesome.) I knew I’d finish Anthem fast so I picked up another book before heading out the door and it was I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter (author of Godel, Escher, Bach). And it’s entire focus is the concept of “I” and his theories on….that.
I’m telling you this, aside from bragging about how much I read, because I just think it is SO awesome when things sometimes just seem to come together. These books, when thought about are all very seemingly random and unrelated turn out to, albeit different topics, deal with some same underlying thread. I love it.

And now, my favorite quotes of these books (thus far):

The End of Faith“Faith is rather like a rhinoceros, in fact: it won’t do much in the way of real work for you, and yet at close quarters it will make spectacular claims upon your attention.”

“Even if we were to grant that one of our religions must be correct in its every particular, given the number of conflicting views on offer, every believer should expect damnation on mere probabilistic grounds.”

“It is time we recognize that belief is not a private matter; it has never been merely private. In fact, beliefs are scarcely more private than actions are, for every belief is a fount of action in potentia. The belief that it will rain puts an umbrella in the hand of every man or woman who owns one. It should be easy enough to see that belief in the full efficacy of prayer, for instance, becomes an emphatically public concern the moment it is actually put into practice: the moment a surgeon lays aside his worldly instruments and attempts to suture his patients with prayer, or a pilot tries to land a passenger jet with nothing but repetitions of the word “Hallelujah” applied to the controls, we are swiftly delivered from the provinces of private faith to those of a criminal court.
     “As a man believes, so he will act. Believe that you are the member of a chosen people, awash in the salacious exports of an evil culture that is turning your children away from God, believe that you will be rewarded with an eternity of unimaginable delights by dealing death to these infidels - and flying a plane into a building is scarcely more than a matter of being asked to do it. It follows, then, that certain beliefs are intrinsically dangerous.”

“That such metaphorical acrobatics can be performed on almost any text - and that they are therefore meaningless- should be obvious. Here we have scripture as Rorschach blot: wherein the occultist can find his magical principles perfectly reflected, the conventional mystic can find his recipe for transcendence, and the totalitarian dogmatist can hear God  telling him to suppress the intelligence and creativity of others. This is not to say that no author has ever couched spiritual or mystical information in allegory or even produced text that requires a strenuous hermeneutical effort to be made sense of. But to dredge scripture in this manner and discover the occasional pearl is little more than a literary game.”

“At the core of every religion lies an undeniable claim about the human condition: it is possible to have one’s experience of the world radically transformed… -most of us know, however dimly, that extraordinary experiences are possible. The problem with religion is that it blends this truth so thoroughly with the venom of unreason. Take Christianity for example: it is not enough that Jesus was a man who transformed himself to such a degree that the Sermon on the Mount could be his heart’s confession. He also had to be the Son of God, born of a virgin, and destined to return to earth trailing clouds of glory. The effect of such dogma is to place the example of Jesus forever out of reach. His teachings ceases to be a set of empirical claims about the linkage between ethics and spiritual insight and instead becomes a gratuitous, and rather gruesome, fairy tale. According to the dogma of Christianity, becoming just like Jesus is impossible. One can only enumerate one’s sins, believe the unbelievable, and await the end of the world.”

“Respect for diversity in our ethical views is, at best, an intellectual holding pattern until more of the facts are in.”

Anthem“There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. That and nothing else. At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold of freedom for which the blood of centuries behind him has been spilled.”

“My happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is my own goal. It is my own purpose.”

I Am A Strange Loop“Despite its title, this book is not about me, but about the concept of “I”. It’s thus about you, reader, every bit as much as it is about me. I could just as well have called it “You Are A Strange Loop”. But the truth of the matter is that, in order to suggest the book’s topic and goal more clearly, I should probably have called it “‘I’ Is A Strange Loop”- but can you imagine a clunkier title? Might as well call it “I Am A Lead Balloon”. ”