Dehaene researches cognitive neuroscience. This book describes the experimental research he has done on human consciousness. In computer AI research and philosophy, it is commonly stated that we do not understand how human consciousness can arise from computation. Dehaene argues that we do have evidence from brain studies that provide (or are starting to provide)… Read More: Consciousness and the Brain — Stanislas Dehaene »
Barzilai is a founding director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. This book provides a summary of the research on lifespan/healthspan that he has been involved with. The research has enrolled a large group of centenarians and their spouses, children, and neighbours in the New York area. The group… Read More: Age Later — Nir Barzilai »
Context: Watched a YouTube TED talk a while ago. Interesting ideas. Hoffman is a cognitive scientist at University of California, Irvine. Hoffman’s main argument is that our senses are tuned by evolution for ‘fitness’. They are NOT tuned to perceive the ‘true’ nature of the world. The analogy is that what we perceive is similar… Read More: The Case Against Reality — Donald Hoffman »
Doug Brignole was a body builder for over 40 years. This first half of this book describes the principles that underly his training. The second half goes into detail about all the major muscle groups and the exercises that he recommends to train them. Principles covered in the first chapters: Brignole’s emphasis is on efficiency… Read More: The Physics of Resistance Exercise — Doug Brignole »
Context: The current Russia/Ukraine war triggered an interest in why my grandparents came to Canada. Various factoids in the news suggest that there is a very unusual relationship between the countries in that area. I Googled for books about Ukrainian history, and this was a top recommendation. Interesting factoid: The word Ukraine means borderland in… Read More: Borderland — Anna Reid »
“How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World” Nina Kraus is director of the Brainvolts lab at Northwestern University. They have developed a technique called FFR (Frequency Following Response) that can measure the brain’s sound processing. Using FFR, over the past 30 years or so, they’ve done a lot of investigations into how the brain’s… Read More: Of Sound Mind — Nina Kraus »
The history of the shipping container. A surprisingly interesting topic. I picked up the book because of recent stories about supply-chain issues. There’s also an interesting overlap with military logistics. The American military started using containers in the Vietnam war. In the Russia/Ukraine war, a lot of the reporting I see comes down to the… Read More: The Box — Marc Levinson »
12 More Rules for Life A follow-on from “12 Rules for Life”. Peterson uses the Order vs. Chaos paradigm in much of his writing and lectures. 12-Rules puts the emphasis on Order to counteract the problems of excessive Chaos. Beyond-Order is the flip side of this — puts the emphasis on the value of Chaos… Read More: Beyond Order — Jordan B Peterson »
The Visionary Life of John von Neumann. This book is sort-of a biography of Neumann… But the majority of the book is a description of the “fields” that Neumann contributed to and the other participants in those fields. To understand why Neumann’s work was important, the context of the time is described. Then, the subsequent… Read More: The Man from the Future — Annayo Bhattacharya »
The framing of the book is the contrast between the “Scout Mindset” versus the “Soldier Mindset”. Describes the concept of “motivated reasoning”. The motivation can be “Must I believe this?” versus “Can I believe this?” versus “What is the truth?”. The soldier uses must/can versus the scout’s what. She uses a lot of anecdotes to… Read More: The Scout Mindset — Julia Galef »