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 Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

Quite a disturbing book about how the medical profession have been on a drive to have an easy simple way of detecting psychopaths.  Unfortunately most of us display some of the traits on the PCL-R Hare checklist at some point, and once you have been labelled it is very difficult to prove otherwise since the more you deny it the stronger you are seen to be a psychopath.

The actual book is engaging and written as a story of how a journalist investigates a series of particular cases rather than a dry academic text.  It doesn't just cover those in mental institutions but also reality TV contestants, ADHD in schools, senior corporate managers, .....

Really made me think - am I a psychopath, how many people I know are psychopaths by these definitions?

They say Hubbard was the very first man to reveal that psychiatrists were dosing patients with massive amounts of LSD and electro-convulsive therapy in secret CIA-funded attempts to create brainwashed assassins. He published his account of the experiments in 1969 and it wasn’t until June 1975 that the Washington Post announced to an unsuspecting world that these programmes (codenamed MK-ULTRA) existed.Read more at location 789

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Their conclusions became the basis for his now-famous twenty-point Hare PCL-R Checklist. Which was this: 

ITEM 1:  Glibness/superficial charm 

ITEM 2:  Grandiose sense of self-worth 

ITEM 3:  Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom 

ITEM 4:  Pathological lying 

ITEM 5:  Cunning/manipulative 

ITEM 6:  Lack of remorse or guilt 

ITEM 7:  Shallow affect

ITEM 8:  Callous/lack of empathy 

ITEM 9:  Parasitic lifestyle 

ITEM 10:  Poor behavioral controls 

ITEM 11:  Promiscuous sexual behavior 

ITEM 12:  Early behavior problems 

ITEM 13:  Lack of realistic long-term goals 

ITEM 14:  Impulsivity 

ITEM 15:  Irresponsibility

ITEM 16:  Failure to accept responsibility for own actions 

ITEM 17:  Many short-term marital relationships 

ITEM 18:  Juvenile delinquency 

ITEM 19:  Revocation of conditional release 

ITEM 20:  Criminal versatilityRead more at location 1500

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They love winning. If you take loving kindness out of the human brain there’s not much left except the will to win.’ ‘Which means you’ll find a preponderance of them at the top of the tree?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The higher you go up the ladder the greater the number of sociopaths you’ll find there.’Read more at location 1772

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Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work – co-authored with a psychologist named Paul Babiak.Read more at location 2141

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Practically every peak-time programme is populated by people who are just the right sort of mad, and I now knew what the formula was. The people who are the right sort of mad are a bit madder than we fear we’re becoming, and in a recognizable way. We might be anxious but we aren’t as anxious as them. We might be paranoid but we aren’t as paranoid as them. We are entertained by them, and comforted that we’re not as mad as they are.Read more at location 3265

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There is no evidence that we’ve been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.Read more at location 4220

Born Liars why we can't live without deceit by Ian Leslie

A book investigating why we are programmed to deceive, most of all to deceive ourselves.  Touches on topics from several other books I have read, explaining that what we perceive as reality is actually constructed by our minds some time after the event (so as to best fit with our mental view of the world).

Interesting chapters on child development and at what point they are able to deceive and detect deception.

Looks at how the evolutionary explosion in teh size of our brain can be traced back to having to manage living in larger social groups with an 'arms race' of deception and detection.


Based on the size of our brains, he said, we should be able to cope with a social group – people we would happily meet for a drink, say – of about a hundred and fifty people. Sure enough, when he combed through the anthropological and sociological literature, he found that a hundred and fifty worked as a rough average of the size of many human social groups, from hunter-gatherer societies to modern army units and company departments.Read more at location 215 •
Two-year-olds start to sense that their parents have feelings, and that they can affect those feelings by what they do. They then proceed to test this fascinating insight to destruction.Read more at location 368 •
Great liars tend to be great readers of human behaviour. Think of Iago, a ‘people person’ if ever there was one, subtly drawing out Othello’s rage, or reflect that Bill Clinton is famous for being both a convincing liar and a politician of exceptional empathy.Read more at location 438 •
What’s clear is that, faced with a group of people and asked to identify the liar, you’d be better off picking the most charismatic and fluent person in the room rather than, as we’re inclined to, the shifty-looking mumbler in the corner. Lying requires high cognitive, emotional and social abilities. The best liars tend to be charming, empathetic, and capable of thinking several moves aheadRead more at location 927 •
When you are talking to someone, there are at least two things more prominent in your mind than in theirs – your thoughts, and their face. As a result you tend to judge others on what you see, and ourselves by what you feel.Read more at location 1111 •
This description of memory tallies with the experimental evidence of Elizabeth Loftus, and with the findings of modern neuroscience. Remembering is an act of creative reconstruction rather than simple replaying. Every time a memory is recalled it is re-formed, and in the process it becomes mingled with the stories of others and shaped by our own anxieties, desires and imaginings. As the neurologist Antonio Damasio puts it, the brain carries ‘no hard copies’.Read more at location 1731 •
that our feeling of free will is nothing but a trick of perspective – a deception practised by the brain. A conscious ‘decision’ is merely a story we tell ourselves to explain what has happened to us, or what our bodies have already executed. This is a deeply contentious position, although many neuroscientists agree with him. There is certainly a huge amount of experimental evidence that our unconscious brain guides and determines many of the everyday decisions we think of as conscious ones.Read more at location 1869 •
Anthony Greenwald compressed this even further when he coined the word beneffectance to describe the normal human tendency to interpret reality so as to present ourselves as both beneficial and effective. Whenever either of these propositions are thrown into question, we are good at inventing stories that resolve the inconsistency between our actions and our self-image. Most of the time we’re not aware of doing so.Read more at location 2283 •

scientist Harold McGee has pointed out that the pungent smell of certain cheeses, like Vieux Boulogne, is the smell of decay – something we are hard-wired to find disgusting (and thus to avoid for our own good). That some people, in certain countries – especially France, of course – find such smells appetising is testament to the extent that our senses are in thrall to the beliefs we inherit from the culture in which we live.Read more at location 3071 •
Other studies have shown that green pills are better at reducing anxiety, and white pills are best for soothing ulcers. Patients who take four sugar pills a day clear their gastric ulcers faster than those who take two sugar pills a day. Large pills work better than medium-sized pills, and very small pills work best of all. Placebos that patients believe to be expensive work better than those they think cost less. Fake surgery involving impressivelooking, excitingly-named machines works extremely well indeed.Read more at location 3211 •
The anthropologist Robin Fox put it to me like this: ‘The brain’s business is not to give us an accurate or objective view of the world, but to give us a useful view – one we can act on.’ Its primary job is to help the packet of tissue, bone and muscle in which it’s encased to survive and thrive; reporting reality is an important but secondary consideration. So is telling the truth to others.Read more at location 3570 •

The Ego Trick by Julian Baggini

A book exploring what constitutes the single 'I' that appears to be going on inside our heads.  As well as dipping into cognitive neuroscience and the philosophy of self, the book looks ate various human case studies of individuals that give us insights into the system from those suffering from dementia, with various brain defects and damage, through to those with depression or undergoing gender reassignment.

In the end the book explains that what appears to us to be a singular self, is in fact just a trick, played on us by our brains as a complicated bundle of mental processes go about their daily function (normally with very little input or control from us).

To underestimate the extent to which the medium of our existence – the particular body each of us is given – shapes the person we become would be folly. But to think the person just is the medium is equally misguided. more at location 252
Unable to write or take notes, he had to think and remember what he wanted to say, and then dictate it to others. As a result, his memory improved considerably. But ‘The pleasures of mental agility are much over-stated, inevitably – as it now appears to me – by those not exclusively dependent upon them.Read more at location 303
The unity of the self is not to be explained in terms of a single, unified brain region, which acts as the master controller.Read more at location 385
Commissurotomy therefore seems to show that selves can be divided – at least temporarily – or that they needn’t have just one centre of consciousness after all.Read more at location 504
The unity and permanence we feel over time largely depends on our ability to construct an autobiographical narrative that links our experiences over time. But individual experiences and sense of self at any particular time can vary enormously. What is more, the autobiographical self is very good at self-revision. In effect, we are constantly rewriting our histories to keep our inner autobiographies coherent.Read more at location 566
To put it another way, the self is a construction of the mind, one flexible enough to withstand constant renovation, partial demolition and reconstruction, but one that can be brought down if the foundations are undermined.Read more at location 574
Many philosophers have argued that we are constituted by a psychologically continuous web of thoughts, feelings, beliefs and memories. Dementia says, well, okay, let’s pick that web apart, piece by piece and see if anything of you remains.Read more at location 630
We all ignore and do not commit to memory facts and events that conflict with the way we see ourselves and the world. We remember selectively, usually without conscious effort or desire to do so. And yet because we believe memory records facts, objectively, we fail to see that all this means that we are constructing ourselves and the world.Read more at location 694
They started from the correct idea that thoughts, feelings and sensations were not physical things. The category mistake was to conclude that they must therefore be a different kind of thing, a non-physical thing. But there is another, more plausible alternative: they are not things at all. Rather, thinking and feeling are what brains and bodies do. Mind should not be thought of a substance, but as a kind of activity.Read more at location 903
It’s a bit like a picture made up of hundreds of black and white dots. It could be that 90 per cent of the dots are identical, but the 10 per cent that differ create a totally different image.Read more at location 1177
‘The point of philosophy,’ wrote Bertrand Russell, ‘is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.’1Read more at location 1647
The Ego Trick should be seen in this way. There is no single thing which comprises the self, but we need to function as though there were. As it happens, the mind, thanks to the brain and body, has all sorts of tricks up its sleeve that enable us to do this. Because it succeeds, selves really do exist. We only go wrong if we’re too impressed by this unity and assume that it means that underlying it is a single thing. But the self is not a substance or thing, it is a function of what a certain collection of stuff does.Read more at location 1709
The unity we experience, which allows us legitimately to talk of ‘I’, is a result of the Ego Trick – the remarkable way in which a complicated bundle of mental events, made possible by the brain, creates a singular self, without there being a singular thing underlying it.Read more at location 1757
Hobbes’s famous example of the ship of Theseus.21 This vessel is taken into dry dock for repairs. The masts are broken, so these are replaced. The hull is rotting, so that too is rebuilt with new timber. Then it’s noticed the deck is looking a bit worn, so that too is replaced. And so on, until no parts of the ship are the same as when it came in. So is it the same ship? And what if someone took all the old bits and put them back together? Would that have a stronger claim to being the original ship of Theseus?Read more at location 1899
Everyone is familiar, I think, with the realisation that our competence to use a word accurately often exceeds our ability to define it precisely. Wittgenstein’s insight is that this is not paradoxical, but a reflection of the true nature of meaning itself.Read more at location 1953

Making up the mind - Chris Frith

A delightful book that gently constructs a theory of mind of consciousness even  though it sets out not to do so.
Intriguingly it shows how much of our existence is unconscious, far more than we believe.
We construct mental models of the world in order to make predictions about it and then compare the input from our senses (or just from running our internal model in thought experiments) to improve the model.


Loc. 290 Our brain consumes about 20% of our body’s energy even though the brain is only 2% of our body in terms of its weight.
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Loc. 492 But this long-term change in the brain had no effect on his conscious mind. He could not remember anything that happened yesterday. Such people show that our brain can know things about the world that our mind does not know.
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 Loc. 502-4DF’s brain “knows” about the angle of the rod and can use this information to control the movements of her hand. But DF can’t use this information to see the orientation of the rod. Her brain knows something about the physical world, while her conscious mind does not.
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Loc. 708-12 Not only do we seem to perceive the world instantly and without effort, we also seem to perceive the whole visual scene in vivid detail. This too is an illusion. Only the middle of the visual scene that strikes the center of our eye can be seen in detail and in color. This is because only the middle of our retina (the fovea) has closely packed, color-sensitive neurons (cones). Beyond about 10 degrees from the middle the neurons are further apart and detect only light and shade (rods). The edge of our view of the world is blurred and has no color.
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Loc. 1059-62 The urge to lift the finger occurred about 200 msec before the finger was actually lifted. But the key observation that caused so much fuss was that the change in brain activity occurred about 500 msec before the finger was lifted. So brain activity indicating that the volunteer was about to lift a finger occurred about 300 msec before that volunteer reported having the urge to lift his or her finger.
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Loc. 1370-73 Pavlov reports that even after 374 combinations of a loud buzzer and food, no learning took place. This was because the sound of the buzzer always occurred 5 to 10 seconds after the food was put into the mouth. An arbitrary stimulus is only interesting if it predicts that something nice or nasty is going to happen in the future. If the stimulus comes after the important event, it is of no interest at all.
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Loc. 1468-73 The activity in these cells does not signal reward. It does not even signal that reward will be coming soon. The activity in these cells tells us that there is an error in our prediction about reward. If the juice arrives when we expect it to arrive, then there is no error in our prediction and the dopamine nerve cells do not send out a signal. If the juice arrives unexpectedly, then the reward is better then we expected and the nerve cells send out a positive signal. If the juice fails to arrive when it should, then the reward is worse than we expected and the nerve cells send out a negative signal. These signals about the errors of our predictions enable us to learn about the world without needing a teacher. If our prediction about the world is wrong, then this is a sign to us that we need to do something in order to make our prediction better.
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Loc. 1561-63 The volunteer’s brain now responded to this angry face as if it was a loud noise. But the volunteer himself was not aware of having seen the angry face, because it had been masked with another face. The volunteer was learning a conditioned response even though he was not aware of seeing the stimulus that elicited this conditioned response.91
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Loc. 2037-39 What I perceive are not the crude and ambiguous cues that impinge from the outside world onto my eyes and my ears and my fingers. I perceive something much richer - a picture that combines all these crude signals with a wealth of past experience.114 My perception is a prediction of what ought to be out there in the world. And this prediction is constantly tested by action.
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Loc. 2078-81 Our brains build models of the world and continuously modify these models on the basis of the signals that reach our senses. So, what we actually perceive are our brain’s models of the world. They are not the world itself, but, for us, they are as good as. You could say that our perceptions are fantasies that coincide with reality. Furthermore, if no sensory signals are available, then our brain fills in the missing information.
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Loc. 2129-31 The imagination is utterly uncreative. It has no predictions to make and no errors to resolve. We don’t create in our heads. We create by externalizing our thoughts with sketches and doodles and rough drafts so that we can benefit from the unexpectedness of reality. It is this continual unexpectedness that makes interacting with the real world such a joy.
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Loc. 2170-72 Even stick figures have a gender For a moving version try http://www.biomotionlab.ca/Demos/BMLgender.html from Prof Nikolaus Troje’s Biomotion lab.
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Loc. 2275-77 To imitate someone, we watch their movements closely, but we don’t copy these movements. We use the movements to discover something in the mind of the person we are watching: the goal of their movement. Then we imitate them by making a movement that achieves the same goal.
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Loc. 2362-64 These mental times and physical times are not the same. In your mind the button press occurs slightly later and the bell starts to ring slightly earlier. For you the cause and effect of your action seem closer together. In mental time the components of your actions are bound together.
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Loc. 2461-65 I think that I have direct contact with the physical world, but this is an illusion created by my brain. My brain creates models of the physical world by combining signals from my senses and prior expectations, and it is these models that I am aware of. I acquire my knowledge of the mental world - the minds of others - in the same way. However it may seem to me, my contact with the mental world is neither more nor less direct than my contact with the physical world. Using cues acquired from my senses and prior knowledge acquired from my experience, my brain creates models of the minds of others.
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Loc. 2719-20  We understand that people’s behavior is controlled by beliefs even if these beliefs are false. And we soon learn that we can control people’s behavior by giving them false beliefs. This is the dark side of communication.
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 Loc. 2923-26 But when we punish free riders, we are not deliberately trying to increase cooperation or thinking about how the group will benefit in the long term. We get immediate satisfaction from punishing people who have behaved unfairly. We do not feel any empathy for the suffering of these undesirable people. We have learned to dislike them. Our brain even gives us pleasure from the punishment of free riders.

What the dog saw - Malcolm Gladwell

There were mixed reviews on this book on Amazon but mostly they complained that this was just recycled stories from newspaper articles he had written.  Not having read the newspaper I bought the book anyway and found it entertaining.

Loc184 “To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish"

Loc310 great story about the founders of Ronco etc. They were, he says, waiting for him to fail: he had never worked that particular slicer before and, sure enough, he was massacring the vegetables. Still, in a single pitch he took in $200. “Their eyes popped out of their heads,” Arnold recalls. “They said, ‘We don’t understand it. You don’t even know how to work the damn machine.’ I said, ‘But I know how to do one thing better than you.’ They said, ‘What’s that?’ I said, ‘I know how to ask for the money.’ And that’s the secret to the whole damn business.”

Loc345 Thirty years ago, the videocassette recorder came on the market, and it was a disruptive product, too: it was supposed to make it possible to tape a television show so that no one would ever again be chained to the prime-time schedule. Yet, as ubiquitous as the VCR became, it was seldom put to that purpose. That’s because the VCR was never pitched: no one ever explained the gadget to American consumers — not once or twice but three or four times — and no one showed them exactly how it worked or how it would fit into their routine, and no pair of hands guided them through every step of the process. All the VCR-makers did was hand over the box with a smile and a pat on the back, tossing in an instruction manual for good measure. Any pitchman could have told you that wasn’t going to do it.

Loc607 Moskowitz does not believe that consumers — even spaghetti lovers — know what they desire if what they desire does not yet exist. “The mind,” as Moskowitz is fond of saying, “knows not what the tongue wants.”

Loc901 on power laws in economics: “No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.”

Loc. 1828 Dogs aren’t smarter than chimps; they just have a different attitude toward people. “Dogs are really interested in humans,” Hare went on. “Interested to the point of obsession. To a dog, you are a giant walking tennis ball.”

Loc 1858 Combinations of posture and gesture are called phrasing, and the great communicators are those who match their phrasing with their communicative intentions

Loc2427 Homelessness doesn’t have a normal distribution, it turned out. It has a power-law distribution. “We found that eighty percent of the homeless were in and out really quickly,” he said. “In Philadelphia, the most common length of time that someone is homeless is one day. And the second most common length is two days. And they never come back. Anyone who ever has to stay in a shelter involuntarily knows that all you think about is how to make sure you never come back.”

Loc 2455 The homelessness problem is like the LAPD’s bad-cop problem. It’s a matter of a few hard cases, and that’s good news, because when a problem is that concentrated you can wrap your arms around it and think about solving it. The bad news is that those few hard cases are hard.They are falling-down drunks with liver disease and complex infections and mental illness. They need time and attention and lots of money. But enormous sums of money are already being spent on the chronically homeless, and Culhane saw that the kind of money it would take to solve the homeless problem could well be less than the kind of money it took to ignore it. Murray Barr used more healthcare dollars, after all, than almost anyone in the state of Nevada. It would probably have been cheaper to give him a full-time nurse and his own apartment.

Loc. 2538-39 Power-law problems leave us with an unpleasant choice. We can be true to our principles or we can fix the problem. We cannot do both.

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Loc2829Welch writes in his new book, Should I Be Tested for Cancer?, a brilliant account of the statistical and medical uncertainties surrounding cancer screening.

Loc4095 Frightening impact poor teahcers have out of all proportion to other effects in students outcomes

Nonetheless, if you follow Brown and Smith for three or four years, their effect on their students’ test scores starts to become predictable: with enough data, it is possible to identify who the very good teachers are and who the very poor teachers are. What’s more — and this is the finding that has galvanized the educational world — the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast.

Loc 4098 Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a bad school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile.

Loc4897 The correlation between the two, she found, was astoundingly high. A person watching a two-second silent video clip of a teacher he has never met will reach conclusions about how good that teacher is that are very similar to those of a student who sits in the teacher’s class for an entire semester.

Loc5081 tips on getting teh job you want 

the kinds of things that employers are looking for — what are they looking for in terms of personality. One of the most important things is that you have to come across as being confident in what you are doing and in who you are. How do you do that? Speak clearly and smile.”

The Way we're working isn't working - Tony Schwartz

A thoughtful book encouraging us to take a step back from the 'more, bigger, faster' world we seem to inhabit today.  The book is written for individuals, leaders and organisations and develops ideas on how to improve the situation as well as uncovering the issues.

The main thrust of the book is that to operate at your very best you need periods of recovery in between bursts of high activity.  This is true for mental activity as well as physical.

The idea that we have a certain capacity for avoiding temptation (or delaying gratification) and that this is consumed by every little thing we resist.  So to help diet - hide the food, to avoid email interruptions turn off desktop alerts or flashing lights.

I actually tried out one idea - to turn off my email for a week whilst on holiday for 5 days.  I did succeed (helped by turning off the flashing light on my PDA which is still off by the way) but in the end I still had over 300 emails to deal with, although I was more effective and efficient in dealing with them in one go.

The final chapter of the book was an interesting idea a summary of the key messages from each of the preceding 20 chapters (one summary per page)

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!

Predictably Irrational

A book that explores some of the Buyology ideas in more depth as well as ome other fascinating insights into why we don't make rational descisions (even though we tell ourseleves that we do, and we really believe that we do).

p18 tips for a contented life: ensure you earn more than your wife's sister's husband!
p21 the more we have the more we want - a never eanding emotional treadmill of consumption
p97,101 that aroused men (and boys) have a seriously reduced capacity for judgement when aroused - certainly a novel way to attack teenage pregnancy

13 Things that don't make sense

A collection of chapters on 13 scientific anomolies that don't make sense and are possibly where the next big breakthrough will come from.

Ranging from astromony, cold fusion, life itself, death, sex and free will. Thought provoking and entertaining. I especially liked the overview of the free will debate.

How to be a Complete & Utter failure in Life Work & Everything

I came across Steve McDermott at a seminar in Brighouse in January 2008 and enjoyed his presentation so much I got hold of the book. I must confess I was a little apprehensive as I wasn't immediately drawn to the title or the cover - however the content was bloody brilliant! I could hear Steve's voice and delivery in my head as I read it.

Written in an innovative style of telling you what not to do to be a failure, your subconscious (which has no concept of don't) just absorbs it all as what to do.

I read quite a few books whilst travelling and I tend to judge them by the number of margin notes I make - this one has my highest so far. Some of the ones I liked most:

If you don't think about the future - you don't have one p8
Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have it, you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known p10
A life view for happiness - try new things (one which I'm happy to say I work on adhering to) p88
Better to ask for forgiveness than permission p95
You choose what the voices inside your head tell you p103
A plea for lifelong learning, You live and learn, then you die and forget it all p156, p158
The top indicator of ability to rise to the top of an organisation is an ability to speak powerfully in public p168
Top tips for being a successful leader p162
The acid test of are you really one p164

And finally one activity that really made a difference to me personally was to spend 15 minutes writing down your most important values, then pick the top five (see Brian Mayne's Life Mapping) p21

Humourous but with a serious message about how to live a happier life.

The Black Swan

An excellent follow-on book to Fooled by Randomness, again a mixture of statistics and philosophy (but don't let that put you off).
Many people confuse the statement that "almost all terrorists are Moslems" with "allmost all Moslems are terrorists". Assume that the first statement is true, that 99% of terrorists are Moslems. This would mean that only 0.001% of Moslems are terrorists since there are around 1 billion Moslems and only say 10,000 terrorists overall in the world.
Your personal happiness depends far more on the number of happy events than their size so far better to have lots of mildly good things than one great thing in your life.
On the futility of budgets (p163)
Prediction requires knowing about technologies that will be discovered in the future. But that very knowledge would allow us to start developing them. Ergo, we do not know what we will know.
And his recepie for success: work hard in chasing opportunities and maximising exposure to them. (p209)

The pig that wants to be eaten - 100 experiments for the armchair philosopher

A great book to dip into, especially for anyone who enjoys a good argument or who is trying to set a topic for a debating society.

Each chapter starts by outlining a particular scenario that is designed to then lead to a debate on a specific legal or moral or ethical point.

A particular favorite of mine is 'The poppadom paradox' where Sakisa savours the arrival of the poppadoms at her table in an indian restaurant. Her issue is that she believes she is a multiculturalist enjoying aspects of many other cultures - but to enjoy an experience fully she needs others (such as the indian waiter) to remain monoculturalists and play their role for her enjoyment as authentically as possible - but where does that leave Sakisa and her dream of a multiculturalist society!

The Stuff of Thought

A detailed study into how our brains function, based on a decomposition of the language structures we use.

Steven Pinker puts forward the argument that we are at a basic level merely a machine to process actions on objects.

Quite a technical read and reasonably theoretical in places - I wouldn't recommend it asa first book on the subject.

I am a Strange Loop

Douglas Hofstader explores further the concept of self-recursive systems and how can we each sense that we exist as an 'I' inside our heads, and that this existence seems to be the most 'real' thing there is.

How can this 'I' arise from just a collection of particles, collected into neurons, containing symbols in a vast processing machine of our brain?

As ever, his books are very readable and not overly technical and thoroughly enjoyable

Seeing Red

A delightful little book at 134 pages, it appears to be going to be an easy read though in fact although it is more work than you expect, your efforts will be rewarded.

An in-depth explanation of what is going on in your brain and mind when you see red (my italics).

The book comes from a series of lectures that Nicholas Humphrey gave at Harvard in 2004 when he projected a red screen on the wall and then promised to explain in the next 3 hours what students were actually experiencing.

Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Daniel Dennett, explores how Darwinian evolutionary theory can be successfully applied to many fields beyond biology.

He looks at the evolution of language, culture, ethics and the origins of life itself.

As ever his books are very well written and a delight to read.

Breaking the Spell - Relidgion as a natural phenomenon

Daniel Dennett studies the roots of religion and belief and why it evolved within society.

Why are such ideas so common across societies and so powerful within them? He doesn't contest religious beliefs but rather argues that we need to understand why the phenomenon is so deeply rooted.

The Paradox of Choice - Why More is Less

An insigtful book for anyone trying to sell. Schwartz explains why having more choice actually reduces the chances of a successful sale, or from th eother side why increased choice increases stress and decreases happiness.

As well as the explanation, he gives practical advice on how to survive in a world where the mantra of ever increasing choice is alomost unavoidable - or how to lead a more contented life.

Those who manage to be grateful for what they have, who experience and express gratitude - lead longer healthier lives and are more optimistic about the future. Such individuals are more alert, enthusiastics, and energetic and are more likely to achieve personal goals.

Stumbling on Happiness

Every now and then you stumble across a wonderful book that you only picked up because of the strange title whilst browsing the bookshelves waiting for another delayed flight - well this is one of those little gems.

The essence of the book is that we try and do the things today that we think will make us happy tomorrow and when we get there we are often saddened to discover that we made the wrong choices and worse than that we are so ungrateful towards the idiot who made those choices.

How can this happen, shouldn't we be the best people to judge what the tastes, preferences, needs, and desires of the people we will become next year (or at least tomorrow)?

Well the book explains why we are typically so poor at it and it does give some tips on how to be a little better at enjoying life.

There are echoes in here of the truths about humans very poor ability to detect true correlations and causal relationships that also popped up in The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.