New Books In Psychology

You might think that if you were watching a basketball game and a person in a gorilla suit walked through the game, you would notice. Or that if you were talking to someone and turned away for a second, and that person became a completely different person, you would notice that. Well, don’t be so sure! In their cognitive psychology book The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us (Broadway Paperbacks, 2009), Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons describe some fascinating cognitive psychology experiments that suggest that our cognitive abilities may be far more limited than we realize. In this interview, Dr. Chabris explains some common illusions of the mind, and how these illusions impact us in our daily lives.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The creative ability of human beings is remarkable. Evidence of this can be seen in beautiful and unique works of art and music, innovations in architecture and technology, and daring new scientific theories and business practices. Even navigating the complex world we live in demands some degree of creativity. We are all creative, even if we may not think of ourselves that way, and we all have potential to become even more creative. In her new book, Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life (Harvard Health and Jossey-Bass, 2011), Shelley Carson writes about the mysteries of creativity. In the book, she explores why humans are highly creative as a species, and which parts of our brains are most involved in creativity. She describes a variety of creative processes, offering practical suggestions for ways to train our brains to become even more creative. Is there a connection between creativity and mental illness? Does group brainstorming work as well as

It’s standard in philosophy of mind to distinguish between two basic kinds of mental phenomena: intentional states, which are about or represent other items or themselves, such as beliefs about your mother’s new hairdo, and phenomenal states, such as feelings of pain or visual experiences of seeing red. It’s also hotly debated how to explain how both kinds of mental phenomena are part of a purely physical world. The dominant approach in recent decades is to explain the phenomenal in terms of the intentional and the intentional in terms of the physical causal – that is, to explain conscious experience in terms of intentionality and to explain intentionality in terms of causal relations between thinkers and what they are thinking about. In his new book, The Sources of Intentionality (Oxford University Press), Uriah Kriegel, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona, argues for a reversal of this order of explanation. On his view, conscious experience is basic to the

Parenting books touting new philosophies are widely available. Raelynn Maloney’s book, Waking Up: A Parent’s Guide to Mindful Awareness and Connection (Companion Press, 2011) is not that kind of book. Rather, her message to parents is simple. Using mindfulness is not meant to replace existing parenting philosophies. It is meant to augment what parents are currently doing. Dr. Maloney first encourages and helps parents understand problematic behavior before guiding them through daily activities that are meant to increase moment-to-moment awareness of parent-child interactions. This awareness is meant to help parents be in the moment with their children, rather than 10 steps ahead of the moment. How does being in the moment with your child help you as a parent? Dr. Maloney walks the audience through the importance of mindfulness and how it can be used to improve your relationship with your child, thus tackling problematic child behavior in a different way than most other books on parenting.Learn mor

Theo van Leeuwen comes to the academic discipline of social semiotics – the study of how meanings are conveyed – from his previous career as a film and TV producer. His interest in the makings of visual communication is hardly surprising. More surprising was his realisation that, after 10 years teaching and research in the field, he had little to say about the role of colour; a realisation that spurred the research presented in this book, The Language of Colour: An Introduction (Routledge, 2011). The use and meaning of colour has been debated by philosophers, artists and scientists for millennia, with distinct aspects being considered focal at different times: its symbolism, its role in yielding naturalism of representation, and its emotional force. Now, as van Leeuwen puts it, “colour has made a comeback”. Not only are all these different aspects of colour being exploited in communication, but they are being exploited over a wide range of contexts: fashion, web design, interior decora

In 1975, Jerry Fodor published a book entitled The Language of Thought, which is aptly considered one of the most important books in philosophy of mind and cognitive science of the last 50 years or so. This book helped launch what became known as the classical computational theory of the mind, in which thinking was theorized as the manipulation of symbols according to rules. Fodor argued that certain features of human thought required that any human-like computational cognitive system had to have a structured format analogous to the structure that sentences have in natural languages. That is, according to Fodor, we must think in a Language of Thought, sometimes also called Mentalese. Classical computationalism has always had its critics – most notably connectionist or neural-network models, which involve a more brain-like computing system consisting just of simple nodes and their connections, without any obvious internal structure at all. But since 1975 Fodor has argued that the computational model coul

How much do we know about our stream of conscious experience? Not much, if Eric Schwitzgebel is right. In his new book Perplexities of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2011), Schwitzgebel argues for skepticism regarding our knowledge of the phenomenology of conscious experience. We don’t know if we dream in color or black and white, we don’t know whether tilted coins look elliptical or round, and we don’t know whether conscious experience is confined to what we are paying attention to or more abundant. Schwitzgebel’s position is based on close examination of historical philosophical texts and current psychological experiments that show radical variability in reports of experience that seem unlikely to reflect radical differences in the experiences themselves. In this wide-ranging interview, Schwitzgebel considers whether psychologist Edward Titchener was on to something with his training of expert introspectors, why current theories of the neural correlates of consciousness are question-beggi

Schizophrenia is a real, frightening, debilitating disease. But what are we to make of the fact that several studies show that African Americans are two to three times more likely than white Americans to be diagnosed with this malady, and that black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean are six to nine times more likely to be judged schizophrenic than other residents of the United States. Is there a racist–or, at the very least, racialized–element in diagnoses of schizophrenia? According to psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan Metzl, the answer is “yes.” In The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia became a Black Disease (Beacon Press, 2010), Metzl argues that psychiatrists at the height of the Civil Rights movement used the example of supposedly ‘volatile,’ ‘belligerent’ and ‘unstable’ African American men to define schizophrenia. Drawing on a variety of sources–patient records, psychiatric studies, racialized drug advertisements, and m