A Slog Through Marital Muck Hadley, Tessa (2011). The London Train. New York: Harper Collins. Nothing happens in this family drama about strained marriages and estranged children, unless you think those kind of events count as “something happening.” Seems like … Continue reading
Disgusting Morals Adams, W. A. (2012). True or False: Incest is Disgusting, Therefore Immoral. [Review of the book, Yuck! The Nature of Disgust and its Moral Significance]. PsycCRITIQUES – Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, January 18, 2012 (57) Release … Continue reading
Literary Mind Games Borges, Jorge Luis (1962). Ficciones. New York: Grove.This collection of seventeen stories in English is a good introduction to the involuted mind of Borges. The stories revel in paradox and self-reference; they dwell on infinities and recursions, … Continue reading
What Is Western Writing? Jaffe, Marc (Ed.) (2007). Best Stories of the American West: Volume I. New York: Tom Doherty Associates. These twenty stories are set in the western U.S. and usually involve horses, cows, or Indians. The writers include … Continue reading
What Does It All Mean? A Humanistic Account of Human Experience. Exeter, U.K.: Imprint Academic. This is an analysis of psychological experience, based on what we can know, not what we wish we knew, about the meaning of life, mind, … Continue reading
Mental experience occurs inside the physical body, does it not? You’ve never had an experience that happened on the other side of the room while you were on this side. No. Mental activity is always “in here.” What does that … Continue reading
We think of the mind as a unitary process. Each person has one mind. But what if the mind was not a single mental process but a concert of three concurrent channels of activity? That’s an unusual thought. Yet the … Continue reading
I just read a book review in The Economist of Daniel Dennett’s recent book, “Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking” (http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21579427-tools-pondering-imponderables-pump-primer). I haven’t read the book, but I know Dennett’s philosophy of mind from reading several other of his … Continue reading
Scientific Introspection calls for psychologists to use introspection to investigate the mind. What researchers do now is study the brain, and behavior, then from that, try to guess what the mind must be like. But why guess? Remarkably, we happen … Continue reading
Six Short Stories of Crime and Suspense These six stories deal with topics from mass murder to sci-fi. Most involve a crime, usually murder, but all are suspenseful. Most are about 3,000 words, about 10 pages each. 1. I wrote … Continue reading