The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins

A bit "dumbed down" from some of his earlier work, I guess in a bid to try and win a wider audience.  He draws on various magical and miraculous stories from various texts and explains why teh simple explanation is much more plausible, and in fact all the more 'magical' in the sense of wondrous.

All peoples around the world have origin myths, to account for where they came from. Many tribal origin myths talk only about that one particular tribe – as though other tribes don’t count! In the same way, many tribes have a rule that they mustn’t kill people – but ‘people’ turns out to mean only others of your own tribe. Killing members of other tribes is just fine!Read more at location 302 •
You were once a baby. Now you are not. When you are a lot older you’ll look quite different again. Yet every day of your life, when you wake up, you are the same person as when you went to bed the previous night. A baby changes into a toddler, then into a child, then into an adolescent; then a young adult, then a middle-aged adult, then an old person. And the change happens so gradually that there never is a day when you can say, ‘This person has suddenly stopped being a baby and become a toddler.’ And later on there never comes a day when you can say, ‘This person has stopped being a child and become an adolescent.’ There’s never a day when you can say, ‘Yesterday this man was middle-aged: today he is old.’Read more at location 385 •
So, the question of who was the first person, and when they lived, doesn’t have a precise answer. It’s kind of fuzzy, like the answer to the question: When did you stop being a baby and become a toddler? At some point, probably less than a million years ago but more than a hundred thousand years ago, our ancestors were sufficiently different from us that a modern person wouldn’t have been able to breed with them if they had met.Read more at location 408 •
Next time you see an animal – any animal – or any plant, look at it and say to yourself: what I am looking at is an elaborate machine for passing on the genes that made it. I’m looking at a survival machine for genes. Next time you look in the mirror, just think: that is what you are too.Read more at location 812 •
armed with science, we can at least ask sensible, meaningful questions about it and recognize credible answers when we find them. We don’t have to invent wildly implausible stories: we have the joy and excitement of real scientific investigation and discovery to keep our imaginations in line. And in the end that is more exciting than fantasy.Read more at location 2229 •
Bad things happen because things happen. Whether they are bad or good from our point of view doesn’t influence how likely it is that they will happen. Some people find it hard to accept this. They’d prefer to think that sinners get their come-uppance, that virtue is rewarded. Unfortunately the universe doesn’t care what people prefer.Read more at location 2562 •
There are things that not even the best scientists of today can explain. But that doesn’t mean we should block off all investigation by resorting to phoney ‘explanations’ invoking magic or the supernatural, which don’t actually explain at all.Read more at location 2909 •
The eminent science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke summed the point up as Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens by David Brooks

A very interesting approach to writing a book that looks at what are the secrets for a happy and successful life - it follows teh story of two individuals from birth through to death and how they come from very different backgrounds, eventually marry and spend a life together.  The story itself is not a completely happy one (I won't spoil the ending) but it really makes you think about how much we can really mould future generations, given where individuals start from.

It reviews teh evidence about what can (and what cannot) make a difference to peoples lives.


And over the past generations we have seen big policies yield disappointing results. Since 1983 we’ve reformed the education system again and again, yet more than a quarter of high-school students drop out, even though all rational incentives tell them not to. We’ve tried to close the gap between white and black achievement, but have failed. We’ve spent a generation enrolling more young people in college without understanding why so many don’t graduate.Read more at location 127 •
Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov of Princeton have found that people can make snap judgments about a person’s trustworthiness, competence, aggressiveness and likability within the first tenth of a second. These sorts of first glimpses are astonishingly accurate in predicting how people will feel about each other months later. People rarely revise their first impression, they just become more confident that they are right. In other research, Todorov gave his subjects microsecond glimpses of the faces of competing politicians. His research subjects could predict, with 70 percent accuracy, who would win the election between the two candidates.Read more at location 284 •
As Geoffrey Miller notes in The Mating Mind, people tend to choose spouses of similar intelligence, and the easiest way to measure someone else’s intelligence is through their vocabulary. People with an 80 IQ will know words such as “fabric,” “enormous,” and “conceal” but not words such as “sentence,” “consume,” and “commerce.” People with 90 IQs will know the latter three words, but probably not “designate,” “ponder,” or “reluctant.” So people who are getting to know each other subconsciously measure to see if their vocabularies mesh, and they adapt to the other person’s level.Read more at location 327 •
It is an elemental fact of life that we get to choose what we will order, but we do not get to choose what we like.Read more at location 332 •
The truth is, starting even before we are born, we inherit a great river of knowledge, a great flow of patterns coming from many ages and many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past, we call genetics. The information revealed thousands of years ago, we call religion. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago, we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago, we call family, and the information offered years, months, days, or hours ago, we call education and advice. But it is all information, and it all flows from the dead through us and to the unborn.Read more at location 647 •
This activity of blending neural patterns is called imagination. It seems easy but it is phenomenally complex. It consists of taking two or more things that do not exist together, blending them together in the mind, and then creating an emergent third thing that never existed at all.Read more at location 933 •
If there is one thing developmental psychologists have learned over the years, it is that parents don’t have to be brilliant psychologists to succeed. They don’t have to be supremely gifted teachers. Most of the stuff parents do with flashcards and special drills and tutorials to hone their kids into perfect achievement machines don’t have any effect at all. Instead, parents just have to be good enough. They have to provide their kids with stable and predictable rhythms. They need to be able to fall in tune with their kids’ needs, combining warmth and discipline. They need to establish the secure emotional bonds that kids can fall back upon in the face of stress. They need to be there to provide living examples of how to cope with the problems of the world so that their children can develop unconscious models in their heads.Read more at location 1097 •
“All of us, from cradle to grave, are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figures.”Read more at location 1111 •
The people in the executive suites believed that the school existed to fulfill some socially productive process of information transmission—usually involving science projects on poster boards. But in reality, of course, high school is a machine for social sorting. The purpose of high school is to give young people a sense of where they fit into the social structure.Read more at location 1301 •

Of course, Ms. Taylor wanted to impart knowledge, the sort of stuff that shows up on tests. But within weeks, students forget 90 percent of the knowledge they learn in class anyway. The only point of being a teacher is to do more than impart facts; it’s to shape the way students perceive the world, to help a student absorb the rules of a discipline. The teachers who do that get remembered.Read more at location 1438 •
A person who is interrupted while performing a task takes 50 percent more time to complete it and makes 50 percent more errors. The brain doesn’t multitask well. It needs to get into a coherent flow, with one network of firings leading coherently to the next.Read more at location 1601 •
“Fake it until you make it.” Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia puts it more scientifically: “One of the most enduring lessons of social psychology is that behavior change often precedes changes in attitude and feelings.”Read more at location 2171 •
top performers devote five times more hours to become great than the average performers devote to become competent.Read more at location 2277 •
There is no one personality style that leads to corporate or any other kind of success. But they found that the traits that correlated most powerfully with success were attention to detail, persistence, efficiency, analytical thoroughness, and the ability to work long hours. That is to say, the ability to organize and execute.Read more at location 2302 •
That same year Murray Barrick, Michael Mount, and Timothy Judge surveyed a century’s worth of research into business leadership. They, too, found that extroversion, agreeableness, and openness to new experience did not correlate well with CEO success. Instead, what mattered was emotional stability and conscientiousness—being dependable, making plans, and following through.Read more at location 2308 •

Incognito, the secret lives of the brain by David Eagleman

A very readable book outlining the advances in understanding mind and brains.  The essence is that the conscious part (the part we call me) is actually a very thin layer on top of our existence.  Almost all of what we do is unconscious, our conscious sense of self just rationalises what we have just done to make sense of it for future occasions.  The only time we really use our conscious self is when setting goal sor long-term plans, but even then we are driven by our unconscious experience and desires.

The fact that what we think we preceive, is actually a construction of our brains and is quite often not so strongly connected with pyhsical external reality.  The book does have some philosophical implications for freewill, mentions them but doesn't really answer the problems it raises.

The first thing we learn from studying our own circuitry is a simple lesson: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control.Read more at location 84 •
Most of its operations are above the security clearance of the conscious mind. The I simply has no right of entry.Read more at location 87 •
Consciousness developed because it was advantageous, but advantageous only in limited amounts.Read more at location 113 •  You may wish to know what’s happening at any moment in your great nation, but you can’t possibly take in all the information at once. Nor would it be useful, even if you could. You want a summary.Read more at location 117 •
You gleefully say, “I just thought of something!”, when in fact your brain performed an enormous amount of work before your moment of genius struck.Read more at location 132 •
One does not need to be consciously aware to perform sophisticated motor acts. You can notice this when you begin to duck from a snapping tree branch before you are aware that it’s coming toward you, or when you’re already jumping up when you first become aware of the phone’s ring.Read more at location 169 •
try this demonstration: have a friend hold a handful of colored markers or highlighters out to his side. Keep your gaze fixed on his nose, and now try to name the order of the colors in his hand. The results are surprising: even if you’re able to report that there are some colors in your periphery, you won’t be able to accurately determine their order.Read more at location 391 •
The brain generally does not need to know most things; it merely knows how to go out and retrieve the data. It computes on a need-to-know basis.Read more at location 457 •
You’re not perceiving what’s out there. You’re perceiving whatever your brain tells you.Read more at location 522 •
From the natural laboratory of evolution comes a related phenomenon in humans. At least 15 percent of human females possess a genetic mutation that gives them an extra (fourth) type of color photoreceptor—and this allows them to discriminate between colors that look identical to the majority of us with a mere three types of color photoreceptors.36 Two color swatches that look identical to the majority of people would be clearly distinguishable to these ladies. (No one has yet determined what percentage of fashion arguments is caused by this mutation.)Read more at location 692 •
The bottom line is that time is a mental construction, not an accurate barometer of what’s happening “out there.” Here’s a way to prove to yourself that something strange is going on with time: look at your own eyes in a mirror and move your point of focus back and forth so that you’re looking at your right eye, then at your left eye, and back again. Your eyes take tens of milliseconds to move from one position to the other, but—here’s the mystery—you never see them move. What happens to the gaps in time while your eyes are moving? Why doesn’t your brain care about the small absences of visual input?Read more at location 829 •
consciousness tends to interfere with most tasks (remember the unhappy centipede in the ditch)—but it can be helpful when setting goals and training the robot. Evolutionary selection has presumably tuned the exact amount of access the conscious mind has: too little, and the company has no direction; too much, and the system gets bogged down solving problems in a slow, clunky, energy-inefficient manner.Read more at location 1175 •
Our conscious assessment of an activity as easy or natural can lead us to grossly underestimate the complexity of the circuits that make it possible. Easy things are hard: most of what we take for granted is neurally complex.Read more at location 1420 •
We live inside the umwelt of our instincts, and we typically have as little perception of them as the fish does of its water.Read more at location 1433 •
The chicken/shovel experiment led Gazzaniga and LeDoux to conclude that the left hemisphere acts as an “interpreter,” watching the actions and behaviors of the body and assigning a coherent narrative to these events. And the left hemisphere works this way even in normal, intact brains. Hidden programs drive actions, and the left hemisphere makes justifications. This idea of retrospective storytelling suggests that we come to know our own attitudes and emotions, at least partially, by inferring them from observations of our own behavior.Read more at location 2166 •
Minds seek patterns. In a term introduced by science writer Michael Shermer, they are driven toward “patternicity”—the attempt to find structure in meaningless data.42 Evolution favors pattern seeking, because it allows the possibility of reducing mysteries to fast and efficient programs in the neural circuitry.Read more at location 2248 •
Human programmers approach a problem by assuming there’s a best way to solve it, or that there’s a way it should be solved by the robot. But the main lesson we can extract from biology is that it’s better to cultivate a team of populations that attack the problem in different, overlapping manners.Read more at location 2394 •
“Evolution is smarter than you are.” If I had a law of biology, it would be: “Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don’t stop.”Read more at location 2401 •
Libet’s experiments caused a commotion.15 Could it be true that the conscious mind is the last one in the chain of command to receive any information? Did his experiment drive the nail into the coffin of free will?Read more at location 2702 •
The heart of the problem is that it no longer makes sense to ask, “To what extent was it his biology and to what extent was it him?” The question no longer makes sense because we now understand those to be the same thing. There is no meaningful distinction between his biology and his decision making. They are inseparable.Read more at location 2842 •
main difference between teenage and adult brains is the development of the frontal lobes. The human prefrontal cortex does not fully develop until the early twenties, and this underlies the impulsive behavior of teenagers. The frontal lobes are sometimes called the organ of socialization, because becoming socialized is nothing but developing circuitry to squelch our basest impulses.Read more at location 2958 •
you choose neither your nature nor your nurture, much less their entangled interaction. You inherit a genetic blueprint and are born into a world over which you have no choice throughout your most formative years. This is the reason people come to the table with quite different ways of seeing the world, dissimilar personalities, and varied capacities for decision making. These are not choices; these are the dealt hands of cards.Read more at location 3478 •
As the quip goes: If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn’t be smart enough to understand them.Read more at location 3620 •

The Human Mind, and how to make the most of it

Robert Winston's book to accompany the BBC TV series. Explores the biology of, primarily damaged, brains to understand our minds and the faculties we all have. He looks at the biology of the brain and how the mind is a description of teh working action of the brain. Finally he touches on the evolutionary drivers that have caused our brains to develop as they have.

p121 the process of recognition by pattern matching the firing of individual memories of all the attributes of an object. So that the individual attributes can be shared across a number of objects.
p146 on the biological process that underlies mastering a task so that it becomes subconscious
p149 on the location of 'will' as in 'free will' in the brain. Given that actions or descisions to act become conscious only some time (p173) after an action has been initiated then is there such a thing as free will at all?
p208 a biological explanation for teenager anger.
p459 Stephen Wiltshire gets his own mention!

The Ancestors Tale - A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life

Richard Dawkins travels back over the human family tree to the dawn of life and introduces us to the other life forms that branched out along the way (including who there descendants are today, or were in the fossil record)

I must admit I lost interest before the end of the book. Once you get the idea it is more of a review of the taxonomy of life than a deeply philosophical study that many of his other books are. I would recommend it to anyone interested in biology or taxonomy though.

In the blink of an eye: how vision kick-started the big bang of evolution

Andrew Parker gives a decryption of the Cambrian Explosion in evolutionary history and makes a very good argument that it was the evolution of vision that kick-started it.

The Origins of Virtue

Matt Ridley explores how despite being constructed by 'selfish genes' we are built to be social, trustworthy and co-operative.

Why did virture come about?

The Blind Watchmaker

Richard Dawkins seminal work on the way evolution operates blindly with no purpose and creates the wonderful incredibly diverse world we see around us.

If you read no other book by Dawkins (and many of his later works tend to become more polemical) then you should read this one.