I am an artist and mathematical neuroscientist. I’ve spent my life cracking some of reality’s greatest mysteries, including consciousness, self-consciousness, language, music, suffering, pain, anesthesia, compassionate love, extraterrestrial communication, and autism.
I wrote...
Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos
How did stone and mud transform into sentient creatures that hurt, love, and dream—and puzzle over the mystery of being able to hurt, love, and dream? Until recently, science offered few answers to this existential question. But no longer. Journey of the Mind is the first book to offer a unified account of the mind that explains how consciousness, language, the Self, and civilization arose incrementally out of chaos. The journey begins three billion years ago with the emergence of the simplest possible mind, the microscopic archaeon, then progresses through amoebas, worms, frogs, birds, monkeys, and humans, explaining what each new mind could do that previous minds could not. It concludes by contemplating the ultimate fate of all minds in the universe.
To fathom the mystery of consciousness, one needs to be ready to violate the entrenched convictions of conventional mindscience and let your mind roam freely over more inventive and limber perspectives.
Such as the literary inventions of Jorge Borges. His short stories/essays (it’s never really clear which category is more appropriate) are all wildly creative and astute models of sentience. I learned more about consciousness from “The Library of Babel,” “Tlön," Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and “The Lottery of Babylon” than I did from any neuroscience text.
All of Borges' dazzling fictions have been freshly translated and gathered for the first time into a single volume - from his 1935 debut with The Universal History of Iniquity, through the immensely influential collections Ficciones and the The Aleph, to his final and never before translated work from the 1980s, Shakespeare's Memory.
There are many authors who attempt to capture the human experience of consciousness in words. Pioneers like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and William Faulkner all pushed the bounds of literary convention to try to express the subjective stream of consciousness that all humans, presumably, revel in.
Nevertheless, I think the very best literary modeler of human consciousness adopted the same approach as the very best scientific modeler of human consciousness: instead of jumping in and examining consciousness with a microscope, he stepped back—way back—and chronicled everything that was going on all at once... and out of this beautiful turbulence emerged a clear-eyed vision of experience itself.
Tolstoy paints a tapestry that is shockingly cosmic in its vastness, while simultaneously zooming in for microscopic close-ups of the tiniest action—and then showing that it is the holistic interplay of all these levels of purpose and intention that gives rise to the marvel of sentient awareness.
From the award-winning translators of Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov comes this magnificent new translation of Tolstoy's masterwork.
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
War and Peacebroadly focuses on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both…
This is it. The Bible of the Mind. The Codex of Consciousness. The Scroll of the Soul. Stephen Grossberg’s masterwork is a comprehensive mathematical account of human cognition.
Pick any part of the brain, any mental function—a sodium channel, a pyramidal neuron, a circadian circuit, a cerebellar lobe, audio recognition, hate, melodic preferences, linguistic meaning, throwing a spear at a target, visual memory, schizophrenia, free will—and Dr. Grossberg has put math to it. You’ll find that math in this book.
But be forewarned: this book is very, very, very challenging. The math isn’t derived from some other field of science. Because consciousness is not a subset of electromagnetism or a variety of planetary orbit. Consciousness is its own unique thing in the cosmos, and demands its own unique math.
Sophisticated, ornery math. Inaccessible math for most of us, sadly, but if you want to take a shot at the Finnegan’s Wake of Consciousness Studies—a book that holds all the answers if you’re willing to dig, dig, dig—then CMRB is it.
How does your mind work? How does your brain give rise to your mind? These are questions that all of us have wondered about at some point in our lives, if only because everything that we know is experienced in our minds. They are also very hard questions to answer. After all, how can a mind understand itself? How can you understand something as complex as the tool that is being used to understand it?
This book provides an introductory and self-contained description of some of the exciting answers to these questions that modern theories of mind and brain have…
A pleasant and accessible introduction to thinking about the world in terms of systems.
In terms of dynamics, which is the mathematical and intuitive basis for the Dynamic Mind perspective on consciousness that Sai Gaddam and I lay out in my book. Thinking about reality in terms of dynamics instead of digits—as activity rather than stuff—requires a revolution in your intuition.
If you want to learn to think about the mind as a basketball game rather than a computer (essential if you want to fathom consciousness), this book is a great place to start.
The classic book on systems thinking, with more than half a million copies sold worldwide!
This is a fabulous book. This book opened my mind and reshaped the way I think about investing. Forbes
Perfect for fans of Kate Raworth, Rutger Bregman and Daniel Kahneman!
The co-author of the international best-selling book Limits to Growth, Donella Meadows is widely regarded as a pioneer in the environmental movement and one of the world's foremost systems analysts . Her posthumously published Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to…
To crack the mystery of consciousness requires that one understand the relationship between the physical dynamics of your brain and the psychological dynamics of your subjective experience.
One of the best books to start to build your intuition and understanding of the link between the way of matter and the way of Mind is Vision and Art. I’ve always been particularly enchanted with the book’s account of the famously enigmatic Mona Lisa smile. By understanding the mechanical activity of our mind’s visual circuits, we can start to appreciate how and why we respond to visual art at all.
In this new expanded edition Livingstone thoroughly updates this groundbreaking study with the latest findings gathered from her research, with 32 additional pages of new text and images, including 3 brand new chapters. She begins by offering a comprehensive account of the biology of vision, drawing on the history of science and her own cutting edge discoveries. She then turns to art and delves into the science underlying various phenomena in painting, using many examples from the mysterious allure of the Mona Lisa to the amazing atmospheric effects of the impressionists to illustrate her points. Along the way, she shows…
I grew up on a family farm surrounded by larger vegetable and dairy operations that used migrant labor. From an early age, my siblings and I were acquainted with the children of these workers, children whom we shared a school desk with one day and were gone the next. On summer vacations, our parents hauled us around in a station wagon with a popup camper, which they parked in out-of-the-way hayfields and on mountainous plateaus, shunning, much to our chagrin, normal campgrounds, and swimming pools. Thus, I grew up exposed to different cultures and environments. My writing reflects my parents’ curiosity, love of books and travel, and devotion to the natural world.
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken in temporarily by Sadie’s aunt, a human rights activist who heads a cultural exchange program.
Stefan promptly runs afoul of local authority, but Sadie, intrigued by him and captivated by his story, has grown sympathetic to his cause and complicit in his pushback against prejudiced accusations. Their mutual attraction is stymied when Stefan’s older brother, Joachim, who stayed behind, becomes embroiled in the resistance, and Stefan is compelled to return to Canada. Sadie, concerned for his safety, impulsively follows on a trajectory doomed by cultural misunderstanding and oncoming winter.
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through the pitfalls of young adulthood. Hundreds of miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are forced off their land by multinational energy companies and flawed treaties. They are taken in temporarily by Sadie's aunt, a human rights activist who heads a cultural exchange program. Stefan, whose own father died in prison while on a hunger strike, promptly runs afoul of local authority, but Sadie, intrigued by him and captivated by his…
Interested in
the Mona Lisa,
sustainable development,
and
Russia?
10,000+ authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them.
Browse their picks for the best books about
the Mona Lisa,
sustainable development,
and
Russia.
