New book reviews are available from Metapsychology Online. Here we link to the most relevant texts.

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Keith Oatley and Jennifer M. Jenkins’s best-selling book on the psychology of emotions is the most highly regarded and engaging text for the emotions course. While retaining its interdisciplinary breadth, historical insights, and engaging format, this new edition adds the expertise of well-respected researcher and dedicated teacher Dacher Keltner.

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Consciousness and Mind presents David Rosenthal’s influential work on the nature of consciousness. Central to that work is Rosenthal’s higher-order-thought theory of consciousness, according to which a sensation, thought, or other mental state is conscious if one has a higher-order thought (HOT) that one is in that state. The first four essays develop various aspects of that theory.

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Human beings are active agents who can think. To understand how thought serves action requires understanding how people conceive of the relation between cause and effect, that is, between action and outcome. In cognitive terms, the question becomes one of how people construct and reason with the causal models we use to represent our world.

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This is the first volume of a projected three-volume set on the subject of innateness. The extent to which the mind is innate is one of the central questions in the human sciences, with important implications for many surrounding debates. By bringing together the top nativist scholars in philosophy, psychology, and allied disciplines these volumes provide a comprehensive assessment of nativist thought and a definitive reference point for future nativist inquiry.

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In The Space Between our Ears Michael Morgan explains how our brain interprets what we see. Using a wealth of sources from over the centuries including philosophical writings, scientific thinking, experiments, passages from poems and novels, and scenes from films, Morgan reveals the difficulty in working out exactly how we make and receive our visual perceptions.

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The Three-Pound Enigma: The Human Brain and the Quest to Unlock Its Mysteries by Shannon Moffett

At the end of the day, what makes you you?

Bookslut

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As in the field of psychology generally, within the area of hypnosis there is often a gap between the world of the laboratory and the world of clinical practice. Many clinicians complain that most research in hypnosis fails to address the issues that they confront daily in their practices. On the other side of the divide, researchers may feel that their work is ignored by most clinicians.

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A powerful new view of the human brain and free will

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The main message of this monograph is that the appearance of the mammalian brain with the ability to acquire drives ensured the development of social life, and eventually led to the evolution of the human society. This most sophisticated form of organized life on earth is still in the trial and error phase of its development. It seeks to outgrow the myth-directed era of its history and come to its final state, the ration-directed human society.

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Brain Control of Wakefulness and Sleeping explores the history of efforts to understand the nature of waking and sleeping states from a biological point of view. This research represents the synthesis of the work of two individuals who have devoted their careers to investigating the mysterious states of the mind. This landmark book will interest the beginner scientist/researcher as well as the sleep clinician, with chapters on subjects including Neuronal Control of REM Sleep, Motor Systems and the Role of Active Forebrain, and Humoral Systems in Sleep Control. The authors explore the behavioral and physiological events of waking and sleep, analyzing the current realities and the future possibilities of unifying basic studies on anatomy and cellular psychology.

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Several books chronicle attempts, most of them during the last 40 years, to teach animals to communicate with people in a human-designed language. These books have typically treated only one or two species, or even one or a few research projects.

We have provided a more encompassing view of this field. We also want to reinforce what other authors, for example Jane Goodall, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Penny Patterson, Birute Galdikas, and Roger and Deborah Fouts, so passionately convey about our responsibility for our closest animal kin.

This book surveys what was known, or believed about animal language throughout history and prehistory, and summarizes current knowledge and the controversy around it.

The authors identify and attempt to settle most of the problems in interpreting the animal behaviours that have been observed in studies of animal language ability.

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“The book presents the author’s ambitious attempt to formulate a general theory of how all animals (from the most primitive to the most complex, hence humans included) deal with their environment.”

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Today the word “lobotomy” evokes images of medical savagery: innocent lives wrecked by experimental procedures and misguided psychiatrists using the insane as guinea pigs. The man behind this controversial surgical procedure, whose tireless advocacy led to 50,000 lobotomies performed in the United States, is the subject of a new biography by Jack El- Hai. The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness, from John Wiley & Sons, offers us a picture of the man behind the knife, Dr. Walter Freeman.

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Darwin considered an understanding of the evolution of the human mind and brain to be of major importance to the evolutionary sciences. This ground-breaking book sets out a comprehensive, integrated theory of why and how the human mind has developed to function as it does. Geary proposes that human motivational, affective, behavioral, and cognitive systems have evolved to process social and ecological information (e.g., facial expressions) that covaried with survival or reproductive options during human evolution. Further, he argues that the ultimate focus of all of these systems is to support our attempts to gain access to and control of resources — more specifically, the social (e.g., matees), biological (e.g., food), and physical (e.g., territory) resources that supported successful survival and reproduction over time. In this view, Darwin’s conceptualization of natural selection as a “struggle for existence” becomes, for us, a struggle with other human beings for control of the available resources. This struggle provides a means of integrating modular brain and cognitive systems such as language with those brain and cognitive systems that support general intelligence. To support his arguments, Geary draws upon an impressive array of recent findings in cognitive science and neuroscience, as well as primatology, anthropology, and sociology. The book also explores a number of issues that are of interest in modern society, including how general intelligence relates to academic achievement, occupational status, and income. Readers will find this book a thought-provoking read and an impetus for new theories of mind.

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