Here are 100 books that On the Shadows of the Ideas fans have personally recommended if you like
On the Shadows of the Ideas.
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Memory techniques saved my life, but I still struggled with depression. When I learned how to combine memory techniques with meditation, I was finally able to experience peace with many aspects of the disease, particularly the unwanted thoughts it placed in my mind. Much good research demonstrates just how powerful memory and meditation are for people who are suffering. Combined, the two practices create even more beneficial outcomes.
Happiness Beyond Thought gives practical guidance on experiencing mental peace that lasts. It isn't caught up in mysticism, but manages to show how some of the wisdom in ancient spiritual traditions make solid scientific sense. As a scientist himself, Weber wanted a secular means of experiencing mental clarity. Since clearing his own mind of unwanted thoughts, he has helped many others do the same.
Although it might seem like it is impossible to rid your mind of unwanted thoughts, Weber is careful to explain that he is focused on a particular kind of thought. Once you understand this genre of thinking, it's much easier to reduce its energy-draining impact on your life. The exercises are simple, but not too simple. When your mind is clear, your memory improves because you have more space for reflective thinking. It's that simple and I highly recommend this book.
Praise for Happiness Beyond Thought"Husband, father, scientist, military officer, and senior executive in industry and academia, Gary Weber has led a full and successful worldly life. Throughout all of this, Gary has relentlessly pursued a path of practice and inquiry in order to understand life and achieve enlightenment. It is rare to find one who has reached this goal, and rarer still to find such a one who has been so immersed in worldly life.With this book, Gary has successfully integrated his profound realization with traditional non-dualistic teachings, as well as insights from Zen Buddhism and modern brain research, into…
Memory techniques saved my life, but I still struggled with depression. When I learned how to combine memory techniques with meditation, I was finally able to experience peace with many aspects of the disease, particularly the unwanted thoughts it placed in my mind. Much good research demonstrates just how powerful memory and meditation are for people who are suffering. Combined, the two practices create even more beneficial outcomes.
In this follow-up to Happiness Beyond Thought, Dr. Gary Weber takes things to the next level by examining a text called Ribhu Gita. Whereas many meditation traditions like Zen are based around difficult-to-understand koans, Weber provides translations and commentary on an easy-to-memorize text that cuts to the core of what "enlightenment" is all about.
Through a series of negations, you learn to think better about your mind, your body, and your fears. As concerns about each of these topics diminish, you're able to enjoy the present moment more fully. When you're more present, you pay more attention and remember more as a result.
Although it is not absolutely necessary to read Happiness Beyond Thought first, it is how I read the books and I do think it would be helpful. Weber provides video links to demonstrations of how he works with the text himself, including mudras that connect you…
The seemingly insoluble problems of our species at the current time is our inability to successfully cope with the complexities of our massively-complex, highly-integrated society using our outdated software programs created when we were hunter-gatherers. This book outlines the problem areas with our current software, how to address them, demonstrates tools to facilitate this change and then gives a demonstration of how the process unfolds in a dialogue with a successful practitioner of the process and its improved software. The first section of the book focuses on a systematic approach to working directly on the problems with the current operating…
Memory techniques saved my life, but I still struggled with depression. When I learned how to combine memory techniques with meditation, I was finally able to experience peace with many aspects of the disease, particularly the unwanted thoughts it placed in my mind. Much good research demonstrates just how powerful memory and meditation are for people who are suffering. Combined, the two practices create even more beneficial outcomes.
One of the most direct spiritual movements is actually philosophical. In The Essence of Enlightenment, James Swartz discusses the concepts that underly a deeply misunderstood tradition called Advaita Vedanta.
Although he retains some of the unhelpful mysticism, the book is still great for its discussion of using philosophical knowledge to reduce your head trash and live more fully in the moment. One of the strengths of the book is its discussion of how to prepare yourself for being able to use the philosophy in everyday life. Although it can be strange to think that you have to be "qualified" to use philosophy, it does make sense and it is a very practical means of cleansing your mind.
The counterintuitive, radical message of Vedanta, the ancient science of self-inquiry, is that reality is non-dual consciousness. What this means and how it benefits people in their quest for freedom from limitation is the subject of this inspirational book.
In an accessible style, James Swartz's new book develops teachings introduced in his popular first one, How to Attain Enlightenment, covering topics such as values and the enlightened person, dharma and the essence of enlightenment, and the relationship between consciousness, the individual, and the total. Demystifying enlightenment, Swartz makes Vedanta understandable to all.
Memory techniques saved my life, but I still struggled with depression. When I learned how to combine memory techniques with meditation, I was finally able to experience peace with many aspects of the disease, particularly the unwanted thoughts it placed in my mind. Much good research demonstrates just how powerful memory and meditation are for people who are suffering. Combined, the two practices create even more beneficial outcomes.
As a student of Giordano Bruno, Alexander Dicsone keenly observed the problems his students had with Bruno's meditative memory techniques. In two commentaries, he unfolded the memory tradition from another angle, including how to use the moon as a Memory Palace.
The book is not only instructional but humorous and the translation is a delight to read. It is also annotated for the more serious reader who wishes to go deeper into the references in the text and follow up with additional resources.
A compendium of The Shadow of Reason and Judgement (1583) & Thamus - The Virtue of Memory (1597) By Alexander Dickson Translated by Paul Ferguson Introduced by Martin Faulks
I’m a cognitive psychologist, originally from Scotland, but I have lived and worked in Canada for the last 50 years, first at the University of Toronto, and then at a research institute in Toronto. My passion has always been to understand the human mind – especially memory – through experimental research. Memory is fundamental to our mental life as humans; to a large extent it defines who we are. It is a complex and fascinating topic, and my career has been devoted to devising experiments and theories to understand it better. In our recent book, Larry Jacoby and I attempt to pass on the excitement of unravelling these fascinating mysteries of memory.
If you are really serious about reading up on current research on human memory, then you can do no better than to dive into this excellent textbook written by three prominent British researchers.
The material probably takes more effort to master than the facts and ideas presented in other books on this list, but the reward is an up-to-date understanding of theories and findings in this fast-moving research field, including many studies of how memories are represented in the brain.
The book is lavishly illustrated, and contains many references to real-life situations, thereby relating the theoretical ideas to everyday life. The book is authoritative yet very accessible and entertaining. Highly recommended!
The third edition of Memory provides students with the most comprehensive introduction to the study of human memory and its applications in the field. Written by three leading experts, this bestselling textbook delivers an authoritative and accessible overview of key topic areas.
Each chapter combines breadth of content coverage with a wealth of relevant practical examples, whilst the engaging writing style invites the reader to share the authors' fascination with the exploration of memory through their individual areas of expertise. Across the text, the scientific theory is connected to a range of real-world questions and everyday human experiences. As a…
Born in Budapest, Hungary, Susan Rubin Suleiman emigrated to the U.S. as a child with her parents. She has had a distinguished career as a professor of French and comparative literature at Harvard, publishing more than a dozen books and over 100 scholarly articles. Her acclaimed memoir about returning to Budapest, Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook, appeared in 1996; in 2023, she published Daughter of History: Traces of an Immigrant Girlhood, a memoir of immigration which was a finalist for a 2024 National Jewish Book Award. She has been awarded many honors, including the Radcliffe Medal for Distinguished Achievement in 1990 and France’s highest honor, the Légion d’Honneur, in 2018.
Andreas Huyssen is the author of many distinguished books, but this one is especially important because it expanded the study of public memory to South America, which has had its own share of traumatic pasts to memorialize. Huyssen argues that World War II and the Holocaust have provided “templates” for memorialization that have been adapted by the Memory Park in Buenos Aires, among other examples.
Memory of historical trauma has a unique power to generate works of art. This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York-three late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas. Berlin experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall and the city's reemergence as the German capital; Buenos Aires lived through the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and their legacy of state terror and disappearances; and New York City faces a set of public memory issues concerning the symbolic value of Times Square as threatened public…
I’m a middle school librarian, former language arts teacher, and middle grade author. I have a passion for all things literary, especially as they relate to kids in grades 5-8. I also grew up in New Jersey, so I come by my fascination with the Mob as a result of proximity. What I enjoy most about books about criminals is the moral gray area that some criminals exist in. They’re doing bad things—robbing banks, selling stolen goods, killing people—but their hearts are pulling them in another direction. Middle school kids also feel that tug of moral dilemmas, figuring out what is just and unjust, and I love to help them wrestle with those ideas.
If you love a smart, self-referential book in the mode of A Series of Unfortunate Events, you will love Adam Perry’s book. Right from the beginning, the book speaks directly to the reader with warnings about what’s ahead: monsters and villains and horrible deaths. But instead of being a Stephen King horror novel for the middle grade set, the book has a fairy tale-meets-Thursday Next vibe. The protagonist, Oliver, steals books from the library, but since no one reads anymore, he’s not overly concerned about his thievery. That is, until he steals a book that is also being sought by the Pribbles, two inventors that have devised a set of goggles to steal the book directly from Oliver’s mind. Mayhem and shenanigans ensue, and it’s all just delightful.
"A genre-bending, heart-pounding middle-grade romp into a potential future. . . . Perry's layered approach makes for a masterpiece that feels both familiar yet wholly new." --Shelf Awareness, STARRED REVIEW
"This takes getting lost in a book to a whole new level. I loved it!" --James Riley, New York Times-bestselling author of the Story Thieves series
"Once you start this book, you truly can't stop. An adventure full of cheeky charm and delightful whimsy." --Marie Lu, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Skyhunter
"A fast, fun, furiously inventive, and frequently frightful read." --Geoff Rodkey, New York Times-bestselling author of the…
First off, I have a PhD in English from Lehigh University. I’m particularly interested in seeking out literary science (and speculative) fiction, SF that has style, that is well-written, well-plotted, SF that avoids the flat characters and cliched writing to which the genre can be all too prone. Some readers find genre fiction in general off-putting, associating it with poor style. Literary genre fiction thus gets sequestered beside its less-felicitous brethren and sistren. Which is too bad. Because plenty of stylistically-adept SF exists. One just needs someone to sift through the detritus for one, prize out the pearls, and display them in fine settings for one’s perusal.
It is a truism that Science Fiction dates itself. SF stories that were written only a few years previous often fail to foresee technological innovations ̶ cell phones, GPS, gene-splicing ̶ that seem obvious and inevitable to hindsight-blessed present-day readers. Those disconcerted by such, let us call them “backwards anachronisms,” should find Quantum Thief a welcome relief for decades to come, because the novel is set so far in the future that hi-tech things like, say, cell phones seem quaint curios out of far-distant days of yore. Long-distance communications in Quantum Thief are effected by something more like telepathy (although the word is never used).
“Quantum” is the operative term in this novel, make no mistake.
Be forewarned: Quantum Thief is chock-full of coined terminology. But have no fear. You have a choice. Either use the online glossary - or you can just read for the story and absorb the…
The solar system's greatest thief is wanted for murder. To prove his innocence, he needs to pull off a heist even he thought was impossible . . .
The Quantum Thief is a dazzling hard SF novel set in the solar system of the far future - a heist novel peopled by bizarre post-humans but powered by very human motives of betrayal, revenge and jealousy. It is a stunning debut.
Jean le Flambeur is a post-human criminal, mind burglar, confidence artist and trickster. His origins are shrouded in mystery, but his exploits are known throughout the Heterarchy - from breaking…
I am Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University. I have written widely in the areas of social and cultural history, the sociology of art and culture, and media and communication studies. Recent projects have involved books on song and music in the workplace, popular culture, cultural studies, advertising and racism, and blackface minstrelsy. I co-wrote Media and the Management of Change with Emily Keightley, the last volume in a trilogy on media and memory and the interaction of memory and imagination.
Focusing in the main on the psychology of memory, in this excellent book Kurt Danziger argues that conceptually memory has changed considerably over time, not least because of the shifting historical contexts in which it has been applied. The book covers such critical issues as different kinds of memory, memory and metaphor, the cultivation of memory, and memory and truth. Danziger’s contention throughout the book is that memory and remembering are ineluctably social, and any sound understanding of them needs to account for how various historical factors and cultural practices have shaped and helped constitute them.
Memory is one of the few psychological concepts with a truly ancient lineage. Presenting a history of the interrelated changes in memory tasks, memory technology and ideas about memory from antiquity to the late twentieth century, this book confronts psychology's 'short present' with its 'long past'. Kurt Danziger, one of the most influential historians of psychology of recent times, traces long-term continuities from ancient mnemonics and tools of inscription to modern memory experiments and computer storage. He explores historical discontinuities, showing how different kinds of memory became prominent at different times, and examines these changes in the context of specific…
I am Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University. I have written widely in the areas of social and cultural history, the sociology of art and culture, and media and communication studies. Recent projects have involved books on song and music in the workplace, popular culture, cultural studies, advertising and racism, and blackface minstrelsy. I co-wrote Media and the Management of Change with Emily Keightley, the last volume in a trilogy on media and memory and the interaction of memory and imagination.
This is one of the best critical surveys of the relationship between memory and history I have encountered. Geoffrey Cubitt is concerned with memory as both personal and social, along with the various dynamics between them. The book is interdisciplinary in conception and operation, exploring how history and memory inform one another in complementary and contradictory ways, and how both cross and re-cross varying scales of past/present relations. Regardless of whether readers approach this book from the perspective of memory or history, they will find it a comprehensive assessment of their complex interaction.
In recent years, 'memory' has become a central, though also a controversial, concept in historical studies - a term that denotes both a new and distinctive field of study and a fresh way of conceptualizing history as a field of inquiry more generally.
This book, which is aimed both at specialists and at students, provides historians with an accessible and stimulating introduction to debates and theories about memory, and to the range of approaches that have been taken to the study of it in history and other disciplines
Contributing in a wide-ranging way to debate on some of the central…
