book reviews
Book reviews by and for those seeking to understand the human mind for all its strengths, quirks and shortcomings.
Terry Pratchett: Made Me Believe In Magic
When Terry Pratchett died I felt like a family member had died. His books were an integral part of my early life, hell they still are. When I was younger I would have one of his books everywhere so I could read one wherever I was.
By Sam Finlayson4 years ago in Psyche
Anxious People
Anxiety is the equivalent of a plague for our generation. There is not even a single person unaffected by it as far as I know. Some hide it under the façade of extreme pleasantness and for some, it may be rudeness. We suffer in the self-made prisons thinking we are all alone in our suffering. We imagine that we are all broken and somehow that brokenness we treat as something unmendable. Many of our life-threatening problems will disappear if we open up a bit to others. But in a highly connected world, who has the time to sit down and listen without flipping through the mobile phone even once?
By chembarathi4 years ago in Psyche
Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience — Sixteen Years Later
Authors note: Portions of this are directly reposted from a response I had written to a Jack Preston King review/discussion of the book How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett. From the little I have read of her work (I have not read her current book, which is the subject of Jack’s discussion) Dr. Barrett writes and thinks very much in the tradition of Patricia Churchland Smith, a neuroscientist/philosopher of great renown. That said I view her positions as misguided and she is the queen of the mereological fallacy often using the brain and the person interchangeably as she views them as one and the same. She also believes that if we fully understood everything about how the brain works, we could recreate particular states of consciousness. She is the ultimate reductionist and views consciousness as nothing more than a particular series of electro-chemical reactions in the brain which, like particular states of consciousness, we could replicate artificially if we fully understood. No body would be required for this miraculous achievement. My guess is the AI crowd is a big fan of her work, myself, not so much. I do not know if Dr. Barrett would go so far but it seems she commits the mereological fallacy almost as frequently. In any event, neither would fare well at the hands of Bennet and Hacker. In fact Dr. Churchland-Smith is a frequent target of their logical breakdowns of various neuroscientific studies and claims about the brain and consciousness, which they dissect and show to be in error point by point.
By Everyday Junglist4 years ago in Psyche
When I Really Shouldn't Have Judged a Book By Its Cover
With how damaging anxiety can be to your health, some will try almost anything they can think of if it will make them feel better. From medications to meditation, endless hours of books, supplements, diets, and everything else in between, navigating self-help material is like wading in muddy water. What makes those conditions even worse is when someone who doesn't know about this topic at all, tries to contribute to it.
By Grace Linn4 years ago in Psyche
Brain imaging, Consciousness, Jaynes and Wittgenstein
Author's preface: The first part of this piece relies very heavily on direct quotations from the piece referenced. Thank you author Colin Klein for a wonderful review and author/researcher Robert Shulman for one hell of a book.
By Everyday Junglist4 years ago in Psyche
These Books Will Change the Way We Teach Children About Mental Health
Child mental health is so incredibly important, but it is now more vital than ever. Studies have shown that the mental health of our children has declined throughout the pandemic, and depression and anxiety are still on the rise. When I was a child, we never learned about mental health, and my various mental illnesses went undiagnosed until I entered adulthood. It was only when I suffered a nervous breakdown as an adult and was admitted to a behavioral health hospital that I received my diagnoses. At this time, I also began to work on and think about my mental health for the first time. Fortunately, mental health is more widely discussed now that it is more of a central topic regarding the impacts of the pandemic on our health.
By Ashley Nestler, MSW4 years ago in Psyche
10 Books to Read That will Make you Sound Smart
Ten little books to make you smart! Books to read to become smarter, Reading can make people smart, reading can broaden one's horizons, reading can cultivate sentiment, and reading can change destiny. So we still have to read more and read well.
By Muhiuddin Alam5 years ago in Psyche
“The Future of an Illusion”: Allelu-Freud
Peter Gay points out that “Freud was a consistent, aggressive, dogmatic atheist, a child of the Enlightenment who saw a world at war to the death between science and religion. To study religion, he was convinced, one must take a stand outside it: only the unbeliever can truly understand belief” (Gay 429). In other words, Freud felt that in order to evaluate any religion, one had to be an atheist. It is a powerful statement that follows a specific pattern of logic that beautifully reverberates in the saying: All the thoughts of a lizard are lizard. Still, should we take this notion for granted? I think that this essay will answer the question quite clearly, for I will deal with four critics and their views vis-à-vis The Future of an Illusion, but also with their position towards religion. Furthermore, I shall analyze the text of The Future of an Illusion in order to ascertain any relationship between its rhetorical devices and the proposition of this essay.
By Patrick M. Ohana5 years ago in Psyche
Freud’s “Totem and Taboo”
Like mathematics, every field of knowledge would love to pride itself on being peerless and free from any other influential sphere of study. Anthropology was heading in that direction when it encountered Freud, or when Freud went out of his way to encounter it. Of course, most fields owe something, directly or indirectly, to the exact science of mathematics and or to the more subjective sphere of philosophy, but can still voice their adopted independence. Freud changed all that for anthropology. Although he was specifically studying the human psyche, he was also examining all the developmental and cultural aspects of humans, thus stepping into the realm of anthropology and creating psychoanalytic anthropology.
By Patrick M. Ohana5 years ago in Psyche
