New Books in Psychology

Between WWII and the 1970s, prominent researchers from various fields established and defended a view that emotions are integral to the self, and that a mother’s love determines an individual’s emotional development. In Marga Vicedo, The Nature and Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War America (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Marga Vicedo explores the emergence of the science of children’s emotional needs in the twentieth century. Masterfully bringing together approaches from the history and philosophy of the biological sciences, Vicedo’s book focuses on British psychoanalyst and psychiatrist John Bowlby (1907-1990), whose ethological work became one of the most influential and controversial psychological theories of the 20th century. Vicedo uses the story of Bowlby’s science to explore a broader modern history of work on animal and human behavior that includes Konrad Lorenz, Anna Freud, Benjamin Spock, and Niko Tinbergen, among others. Along the way, The Nature & Nurture of Love chronicles the emergence of a kind of anthropomorphic material culture of the human sciences, inhabiting its story with a fascinating cast of robots, dolls, geese, monkeys, and stuffed animals, as well as humans. It is a fascinating and gripping trans-disciplinary story and an absolute pleasure to read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Free will is essential to our understanding of human nature. We are masters of our own fate. We chart our own course. We take our own road. In short, we decide what we are going to do. There seems little doubt that free will is a reality. But how, psychologically and physiologically, does it work? How does free will arise out of what is essentially a biological machine? How do we decide? That’s the question at the center of A. David Redish‘s fascinating The Mind Within the Brain: How We Made Decisions and How Those Decisions Go Wrong (Oxford UP, 2013). His elegant answer is that on the neurological level, we have a number of discrete decision-making mechanisms. They range (though there is no real order or hierarchy) from completely unconscious and mechanical, as when experience a nerve reflex, to completely explicit and flexible, as when we deliberate about options and choose one. Especially interesting is David’s discussion of what happens when one of these decision-making mechanisms breaks and goes into “failure mode,” namely, the manifestation of common psychological problems such as consistent irrationality, addictive behaviors, and PTSD. Listen in to our fascinating discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Social cognition involves a small bundle of cognitive capacities and behaviors that enable us to communicate and get along with one another, a bundle that even our closest primate cousins don’t have, at least not to the same level of sophistication: pervasive collaboration, language, mind-reading and what Tadeusz Zawidzki, Associate Professor of Philosophy at The George Washington University, calls “mindshaping”. Mindshaping includes our capacities and dispositions to imitate, to be natural learners, and to conform to and enforce social norms, and in Mindshaping: A New Framework for Understanding Human Social Cognition (MIT Press, 2013), Zawidzki defends the idea that mind-shaping is the basic capacity from which the rest of social cognition evolves. Most researchers hold that mind-reading – our “theory of mind” – is the linch-pin of the rest: our ability to ascribe to one another mental states with propositional content is necessary for sophisticated language use and for mindshaping. Zawidzki argues, in contrast, that our ability to “homogenize” our minds via mindshaping is what makes sophisticated mind-reading and language possible. On his view, language didn’t evolve so that we could express thought; it evolved so that we could express our commitment to cooperative behavior. Zawidzki’s innovative approach centers on reinterpreting and extending Daniel Dennett’s intentional stance to explain the social-cognitive development of the species and of individuals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

On the day you were born, you arrived with your own unique biology and into your own unique social and cultural context. It would have been impossible to predict on that day how your life would unfold, or exactly the person you would become in the future. Why? Because there are so many complex and interrelated factors in the development of each and every human being. In his new book, The Human Spark: The Science of Human Development (Basic Books, 2013) world-renowned psychology professor Jerome Kagan tackles some of the most fascinating and important questions about what makes a human a human, and how we become who we are over the course of our lives. He draws from his decades of experience in developmental psychology, as well biology, neuroscience, and even literature and biographies, to inform his nuanced and big-picture view. And never one to shy away from critical thinking, Kagan also provides thoughtful remarks on the limitations of psychology as a field of research. If you want to listen to a person with an amazing mind and decades of experience talk about psychology, this is the interview for you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Like it or not, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) has an enormous influence in deciding what qualifies as a mental health disorder in the United States and beyond. The each revision of the DSM directly influences people’s lives, guides treatment, and has important legal and economic consequences. In her book, The Making of DSM-III: A Diagnostic Manual’s Conquest of American Psychiatry (Oxford University Press, 2013), history professor Hannah S. Decker explores the history of the important third revision of DSM. DSM-III was revolutionary at the time because it changed the field of psychiatry from a generally psychoanalytic approach to a more symptom-based, medical model of diagnosis. Through the use of archival sources and interviews with people who were involved in its creation, Dr. Decker paints a picture of the DSM-III in the 1970s. She also explores the landscape of psychiatry before, during, and after the creation of DSM-III. Dr. Decker’s work is important in understanding the context and controversies that surround the DSM, which continue to this day with the recent release of DSM-V. This book will be of interest to people interested in the history of medicine and psychiatry, clinicians and researchers in any mental health discipline, and anyone who is interested in ongoing debates about the field of psychiatry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

The philosophy of time has a variety of subtopics that are of great general as well as philosophical interest, such as the nature of time, the possibility of time travel, and the nature of tensed language. In Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time (Brill, 2012), Carlos Montemayor, assistant professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University, focuses on the question: how do we represent time? That is, how is temporal information represented in biological creatures such as ourselves? Blending empirical research on biological timekeeping mechanisms and psychological measures of simultaneity judgments with philosophical accounts of mental representation and consciousness, Montemayor argues that traditional discussions of the “specious present” confuse two sorts of representations of the present. The empirical evidence points instead to a two-phase model: the sensorial present and the phenomenal present. The first is a non-conscious, multi-modal simultaneity window that is closely tied to our biological clocks and that informs our sensorimotor systems. The second is the rich conscious experience of succession or passage of time that does not obey the same metric constraints. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Get more exercise, clean out the garage, quit smoking, put down the pint of ice cream… Most of us have behaviors wewant to change, projects we keep putting off, and bad habits we should stop. We know what we want to do, but the challenge is actually doing it. Fortunately for those of us who want to make some changes in our lives, psychology research can provide some helpful guidance. A few years ago, Dr. Kelly McGonigal reviewed the scientific literature on self-control and started teaching a course called “The Science of Willpower” for Stanford’s Continuing Studies program. Not surprisingly, it quickly became the most popular course in the program, and her students found the course to be life changing. The course became the foundation of McGonigal’s book, The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It (Avery, 2011). The book provides a research-based and compassionate approach to behavior change. It will help readers be more aware of the choices they make and have a greater understanding of practical ways to achieve their goals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

In October 2007, journalist Eric Simons sat in the stands of Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, Calif., to watch his beloved University of California Bears take on Oregon State University in football. If Cal won, it almost certainly would be ranked No. 1 in the country. Instead, Simons agonized as Cal’s quarterback struggled through the final play. Cal lost. Simons suffered a miserable train ride home to San Francisco. But from crushing defeat sprang an idea for his latest book, The Secret Lives of Sports Fans: The Science of Sports Obsession (The Overlook Press, 2013). A science and nature writer by trade, Simons sought scientific explanations for the physical and emotional reactions experienced by sports fans., “We are not subject to any kind of fan nature; we are more complex than that,” Simons writes. “We sports fan are glorious expressions of all the wondrous quirks and oddities in human nature.” Through the lens of sport and sports fans, Simons has built a unique window into what it means to be human. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

It is common today to treat depression and other mental disorders as concrete illnesses – akin to having pneumonia or the flu. In fact, being prescribed a pill after complaining to your family doctor about feeling depressed is a common occurrence. But are mental disorders really illnesses the way that a sinus infection is? Gary Greenberg, in his fascinating new book The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry (Blue Rider Press, 2013), argues that the answer is no. The DSM, which categorizes and defines mental disorders, is socially constructed, he claims, and changes over time. Homosexuality, for example, was considered an illness until 1973, and Asperger’s, now widely considered by the public to be a real condition (which many identify with), may no longer be in the newest revision of the DSM. Greenberg is not indicting all psychiatry or arguing that people should not take antidepressants, but he is criticizing the assumption that mental suffering is the same as physical suffering, arguing that mental anguish is often a multi-layered problem that cannot be fixed by a pill or explained by brain malfunction (though we are often led to believe that this is the case). Allowing the DSM to dictate reality as if it were a scientifically grounded book is a mistake, and we should be more aware of the haphazard way in which it was assembled. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Identical twins, separated at birth, raised in different families, and reunited in adulthood. In 1979, psychology researchers in Minnesota found some twins who had been reunited after a lifetime of separation, and brought them in to participate in a research study. And so began the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. At the time, psychology leaned heavily toward the nurture side of the nature-nurture debate. The twins provided unique information about the role of genes and environment in human development. Over the twenty years of the study, massive amounts of data about the twin pairs were collected about intelligence, personality, medical traits, and many other aspects of development. The results changed our understanding of how we become who we are in adulthood. In her book, Born Together-Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study (Harvard University Press, 2012), Dr. Nancy Segal describes the history of the controversial Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, as well as the results of the study and case examples of these fascinating twin pairs. Her book recently won the prestigious William James Book Award from The American Psychological Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Before the Second World War, very few Americans visited psychologists or psychiatrists. Today, millions and millions of Americans do. How did seeing a “shrink” become, quite suddenly, a typical part of the “American Experience?” In his fascinating book Shrink: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in America (Nebraska University Press, 2013), Lawrence R. Samuel examines the arrival, remarkable growth, and transformation of psychoanalysis in the United States. As Samuel shows, Americans have a kind of love-hate relationship with their “shrinks”: sometimes they love them and sometimes they loath them. The “shrinks” seem to know that their clients are fickle, and so they “re-brand” their technique with some regularity. Sometimes it’s “analysis,” sometimes it’s “therapy,” sometimes it’s just “counseling.” But, regardless of what it’s called, it’s always some variation on the “talking cure” and it can always be traced to Freud. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

If you have studied neuroscience, memory, or even basic psychology, it is likely that you have heard of the famous amnesic patient Henry Molaison, or “H.M.” as he was known during his lifetime. In 1953, Henry underwent an experimental brain surgery in hopes of finding a cure for his severe epilepsy. As a result, he developed a severe case of amnesia. Unable to encode new memories into long-term storage, Henry lived constantly in the present, unable to recall events that had happened even minutes before. In the 55 years between the surgery and his death in 2008, Henry became the most famous and comprehensively studied patient in neuroscience. Decades of research on Henry’s cognitive abilities provided a lasting contribution to neuroscience, and research on his postmortem brain is continuing into the future. Perhaps no one knew the case of H.M. better than Dr. Suzanne Corkin. In this interview, Dr. Corkin will discuss her new book, Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesic Patient, H.M. (Basic Books, 2013) Her decades of research with Henry provided a major contribution to our understanding of various systems of memory and the brain, and the book tells the incredible tale of Henry the person, “H.M.” the willing research participant, and the complexity of human memory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

It’s not surprising that human language reflects and respects logical relations – logic, in some sense, ‘works’. For linguists, this represents a potentially interesting avenue of approach to the much-debated question of innateness. Is there knowledge about logic that is present in humans prior to any experience? And if so, what does it consist of? In The Emergence of Meaning (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Stephen Crain argues the case for ‘logical nativism’, the idea that some logical concepts are innately given and that these concepts are relevant both to human language and to human reasoning. He illuminates his argument with extensive reference to empirical data, particularly from child language acquisition, where the patterns from typologically distant languages appear to exhibit a surprising degree of underlying unity. In this interview, we discuss the nature of logical nativism and debate the limitations of experience-based accounts as possible explanations of the relevant data. We consider the case of scope relations between quantifiers, and see how shared developmental trajectories emerge between English and Mandarin speakers. And we look at possible lines of attack on this issue from a parametric point of view. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

What explains human behavior? It is standard to consider answers from the perspective of a dichotomy between nature and nurture, with most researchers today in agreement that it is both. For Helen Longino, Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University, the “both” answer misses the fact that the nature/nurture divide is itself problematic. In her groundbreaking book, Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality (University of Chicago Press) Longino looks closely at a variety of scientific approaches to the study of human aggression and sexuality to argue that there is no one right way to divide nature from nurture within the scientific approaches to the study of behavior, and that the nature/nurture dichotomy reinforces and reflects an undue emphasis on explanations that focus on the dispositions of individuals rather than those that look at patterns of frequency and distribution of behavior within populations. She reveals the distinct and incompatible ways these different approaches define the factors that explain behavior, how these different explanatory approaches are related, and how the bias towards particular types of explanation is reflected in the way the scientific findings are publicly disseminated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Human behavior is notoriously complex and difficult to predict. For decades, social psychologists have been exploring situational variables and how they impact our behavior. We might like to think that we behave consistently in various contexts, but that turns out not to be the case. In his book, Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World (Riverhead Books, 2011) social psychology professor Sam Sommers writes about how our actions vary depending on the context. He draws on classic and recent social psychology research, as well as humorous anecdotes, to illustrate his points. He discusses a variety of topics, including altruism, self-perception, gender differences, and conformity. The book might help you understand your own behavior better, and respond with greater flexibility and effectiveness in your daily life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Although there seems to be a trend towards linguistic theories getting more cognitively or neurally plausible, there doesn’t seem to be an imminent prospect of a reconciliation between linguistics and neuroscience. Network models of various aspects of language have often been criticised as theoretically simplistic, custom-made to solve a single problem (such as past tense marking), and/or abandoning their neurally-inspired roots. In The Neural Architecture of Grammar (MIT Press, 2012), Stephen Nadeau proposes an account of language in the brain that goes some way towards answering these objections. He argues that the sometimes-maligned Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) approach can genuinely be seen as a way of modelling the brain. Combining theoretical, experimental and biological perspectives, he proposes a model of language function that is based upon these principles, proceeding concisely all the way from concept meaning to high-level syntactic organisation. He proposes that this model offers a plausible account of a wealth of data from studies of normal language functioning and, at the same time, a convincing perspective on how language breaks down as a consequence of brain injury. Within an hour, it’s hard to do justice to the full complexity of the model. However, we do get to discuss much of the background and motivation for this approach. In particular, we talk about the emergence of PDP models of concept meaning and of phonological linear order. We consider the relations between this concept of meaning and the increasingly well-studied notion of ’embodied cognition’. And we look at the aphasia literature, which, Nadeau argues, provides compelling support for a view of language that is fundamentally stochastic and susceptible to graceful degradation – two automatic consequences of adopting a PDP perspective. We conclude by touching on the potential relevance of this type of account for treatments for aphasia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

For decades now, philosophers, linguists, psychologists and neuroscientists have been working to understand the nature of the hard-to-describe but very familiar conscious experiences we have while awake. Some have thought consciousness can’t be explained scientifically, and others have argued that it will always remain a mystery. But most consider some sort of explanation in physical, specifically neural, terms to be possible. In The Conscious Brain: How Attention Engenders Experience (Oxford University Press, 2012), Jesse J. Prinz — Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center — synthesizes scientific data and hypothesis with philosophical theory and insight to argue for the AIR theory of consciousness. On his view, consciousness is Attention to Intermediate-level Representations, attention is availability to working memory, and availability to working memory is realized by synchronized neural activity in the gamma frequency range. In this deftly written book, Prinz also provides novel arguments against competitor theories, argues against the idea that there is a phenomenal self, and proposes a mind-body metaphysics that draws on insights from both non-reductive and reductive physicalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

In his book Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life (Basic Books, 2013), Peter Gray proposes the following big idea: we shouldn’t force children to learn, rather we should allow them to play and learn by themselves. This, of course, is a radical proposal. But Peter points out that the play-and-learn-along-the-way style of education was practiced by humans for over 99% our history: hunter-gatherers did not have schools, but children in them somehow managed to learn everything they needed to be good members of their bands. Peter says we should take a page out of their book and points to a school that has done just that: The Sudbury Valley School. (BTW: Peter has some very thoughtful things to say about the way standard schools actually promote bullying and are powerless to prevent it or remedy it once it’s happened. Listen in.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

The only disappointment with A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan Era (Oxford UP, 2012) is that, as the subtitle says, the story it tells stops at the cognitive revolution, before Pim Levelt is himself a major player in psycholinguistics. He says that telling the story of the last few decades is a task for someone else. The task he’s taken on here is to describe the progress made in the psychology of language between its actual foundation – around 1800 – and the point at which it’s widely and erroneously believed to have been founded – around 1951. The story that the book tells is remarkable in many ways: not only for its vast breadth and depth of scholarship, but also for the number of misconceptions that it corrects. Levelt uncovers how many modern theories in psycholinguistics are in fact independent rediscoveries of proposals made in the 19th century, and charts the significant positive contributions made to the science by figures who are often overlooked or even derided now (we discuss a couple of such cases in this interview). He vividly depicts how the rapid march of progress was catastrophically disrupted in the early 20th century, by a combination of political strife and scientific wrong turns, before being restored in the 1950s. In this interview we talk about some of the recurring themes of the book – forgetting and rediscovery, the remarkably prescient nature of much 19th century theoretical and experimental work, and the collective misunderstanding of the history of the discipline. And we touch upon the intentional misunderstandings that allowed research in psycholinguistics to be exploited for financial gain or more sinister purposes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

In these days of increasing automation, the prospect of obsolescence is an alarming one for those of us who make a living by stringing words together instead of doing something demonstrably useful. From this perspective, it’s tempting to think of “computers”, “language” and “creativity” as the constituents of a literary behemoth that writes that brilliant novel, and a million others besides, only in seconds and for no money, while human authors starve in their garrets. The future as envisaged by Tony Veale in Exploding the Creativity Myth: The Computational Foundations of Linguistic Creativity (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012) is rather more benign. He sees the technology as assistive to human creativity, but able to inject a level of complexity and originality that cannot be achieved in static works of reference. In particular, by extracting patterns from large corpora – most obviously the World Wide Web – software can already, for instance, suggest expressions to achieve a certain effect, leaving it up to the human author to choose from the options available. In this interview, we talk about some of the insights into human language use offered by the computational approach, and how it may lead us to renegotiate our concepts of what constitutes creativity. We discuss how existing forms, including idioms, cliches and metaphors, can be re-used and re-purposed, and what goes into making a new variant truly original. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Many parents are interested in learning about how their children develop, and pretty much all parents want to do a good job with their kids. So, often they turn to parenting books. Unfortunately, many books for parents do not present the developmental research accurately, probably because the authors of those books are trying to find a way to sell more books. Parents can be left feeling confused and anxious that they aren’t doing things the “right” way, and often the more books they read the more confused and anxious they feel! That is why the book Welcome to Your Child’s Brain: How the Mind Grows from Conception to College (Bloomsbury, 2011), by Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang, is refreshing. Aamodt and Wang present child development in an accessible, balanced, and reassuring way that is true to the current research about child development. The book covers everything from infant learning, to language development, to sleep, to social development, all the way from the prenatal phase through adolescence. This work is will interest those who want to know more about the neuroscience of child development, as well as parents who just want to understand their children better and learn a few reasonable tips. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

What is the relationship between language and the emotions? Where ought we look for evidence of emotion in historical and literary texts? Is it possible to talk about the emotional states of entire cultures or groups of peoples, and if so, how should that level be reconciled with that of the emotional experience of the individual? Are there categories of emotions that are shared across cultures? Embracing a multidisciplinary approach to these questions and others, Concepts and Categories of Emotion in East Asia (Carocci editore, 2012) collects essays that range over time and space, each investigating some aspect of the discourse and experience of emotion in East Asian history. When taken together, the contributions explore several major thematics in the history of emotion. Some investigate the ways that collective emotions are expressed in documents, or the ways that a document’s genre might shape the way emotions are expressed by it. Some look at the ways that sources can manipulate a reader’s emotions. Some propose or work within a schema for classifying and organizing the language of emotions across a wide range of materials within a particular cultural context. In our conversation about the volume and the major issues it raises and engages with, editor Giusi Tamburello spoke about the genesis of the project and of her own contributions to and interests in it. I very much enjoyed talking with her, and I hope you enjoy the interview! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

The ability to figure out the mental lives of others – what they want, what they believe, what they know — is basic to our relationships. Sherlock Holmes exemplified this ability by accurately simulating the thought processes of suspects in order to solve mysterious crimes. But folk psychology is not restricted to genius detectives. We all use it: to predict what a friend will feel when we cancel a date, to explain why a child in a playground is crying, to deceive someone else by saying less than the whole story. Its very ubiquity explains why it is called folk psychology. But how in fact does folk psychology work? On standard views in philosophy and psychology, folk psychology just is the practice of ascribing or attributing beliefs and desires to people for explaining and predicting their behavior. A folk psychologist is someone who has this “theory of mind”. In her new book, Do Apes Read Minds?: Toward a New Folk Psychology (MIT Press, 2012), Kristin Andrews, associate professor of philosophy at York University in Toronto, argues that the standard view is far too narrow a construal of what’s going on. It leaves out a wide variety of other mechanisms we use to understand the mental lives of others, and a wide variety of other reasons we have for engaging in this social competence. Moreover, what’s necessary to be a folk psychologist is not a sophisticated metacognitive ability for ascribing beliefs, but an ability to sort the world into agents and non-agents – an ability that greatly expands the class of creatures that can be folk psychologists. Andrews draws on empirical work in psychology and ethology, including her own field work observing wild primates, to critique the standard view and ground her alternative pluralistic view. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

When a mother listens to the beats of her own heart, where angst, fear and fortitude compete, and then beautifully weaves emotion into a story about her ongoing journey to support a bipolar son, then you know something significant has happened in African American literature. At least I did, when I read Charlotte Pierce-Baker‘s insightful memoir, This Fragile Life: A Mother’s Story of a Bipolar Son (Lawrence Hill Books, 2012). But what I didn’t know is why Pierce-Baker would “go there” again. I mean, she has already, once before, “gone there,” when she mined personal pain to write about trauma and black women’s narratives of rape. Yet, when I reflect on a line from her son’s poetry, which is what knits the narrative together, I understand. Her son Mark writes: “When mom is gone nothing is right and everything is wrong/A joke is not a joke, and the birds don’t sing their song.” The power of this book for me is that a mother has created a literary space for her son, a black man living with mental illness, to sing about being a father, a husband, a solid citizen, and yet struggling. Mark’s wrangles with his struggles are revealed in poetic opening lines like these: “In the padded room of my heart/ A madman suffers.” “Street vendors here do not sell soft pretzels/They trade toxic pebbles for pocket change until there is just lint left.” “I will love you until God dies.” This book is as much about a black man in America, as it is about a black man dealing with bipolar disorder, as it is about a mother, a family, learning to cope and ultimately to understand. This Fragile Life is a must read. Listen to the interview, and you’ll see why? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Is there such a thing as too much choice? In The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less – How the Culture of Abundance Robs Us of Satisfaction (Harper Perennial, 2005), author Barry Schwartz answers with a resounding yes. Though some choice is healthy and necessary, Barry argues that in modern society, we are overwhelmed with them, leading us to feel dissatisfied and sometimes even unable to make a decision at all. The dominant view that the market will provide and enable people to get that they want in life is illusory, as human beings are not as rational as we think we are, and our subjective experience of an event does not always correlate with how objectively “good” it is. In this podcast, Barry also talks about how some people, who he calls maximizers, end up suffering more from the overabundance of choices in our society, for these people always strive to make the very best decision in order to have the very best. This leads to paralysis, overanalyzing, and ultimately, to overall dissatisfaction. What makes us happy, he argues, is not to strive for the very best, but to be content with the good enough. As Barry states, “I think that in modern America, we have far too many options for breakfast cereal and not enough options of president.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

What happens in our brains when we do things that feel good, such as drinking a glass of wine, exercising, or gambling? How and why do we become addicted to certain foods, chemicals and behaviors? David Linden, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins, explains these phenomena in his latest book, The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good (Viking, 2011). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

We’ve all heard about scientific revolutions, such as the change from the Ptolemaic geocentric universe to the Copernican heliocentric one. Such drastic changes are the meat-and-potatoes of historians of science and philosophers of science. But another perspective on them is from the point of view of cognition. For example, how do scientists come up with breakthroughs? What happens when a scientist confronts a new theory that conflicts with an established one? In what ways does her belief system change, and what factors can impede her acceptance of the new theory? In his latest book, The Cognitive Science of Science (MIT Press, 2012), Paul Thagard considers the nature of science from this cognitive scientific perspective. Thagard, who is a professor of philosophy at the University of Waterloo, presents a comprehensive view of such aspects of scientific thinking as the process of discovery and creativity, the nature of change in scientific beliefs, and the role of emotions and values in these processes. He defends an explanatory coherence model of belief revision, proposes a model for explaining resistance to new scientific ideas, and even suggests why so much creative thinking goes on in the shower. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

Chris Mole‘s book, Attention is Cognitive Unison: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2011) provides a wonderfully elegant answer to a deceptively simple question: What does it mean to pay attention? What is “attention,” and why does it matter to science studies? In addition to offering a beautifully worked-out answer to the question of attention, Mole offers a way to think about how philosophy and science can fruitfully speak to each other in ways that can benefit both fields. Our conversation about the book ranged from considering the non-spooky nature of metaphysics, to the distinction between events and objects, to Mole’s musical metaphor for thinking about cognitive processes. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

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 we think it does? Dr. Carson has spent many years exploring these and other fascinating questions about creativity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

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 explanation of all mental phenomena. In this erudite, stylish and provocative volume, Kriegel weighs the relative virtues of higher-order tracking and adverbial theories of experiential intentionality, and defends an interpretivist account of non-experiential intentionality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

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 more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

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 decoration, and so on. This predictably attractive book serves not only to trace the history of colour meaning (a particularly interesting summary), but also to explore the technological and intellectual drivers of its change, and to suggest a system for analysing colour meaning. We talk about this history, the tension between perceptual and conceptual approaches to colour, the dangers of ethnocentrism in the study of colour, and the status of some modern artists as researchers into colour meaning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

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 couldn’t explain key features and kinds of reasoning, like making plans for the future or making decisions quickly. And he has also argued against the idea that neuroscience had anything critical to do with understanding the mind. In short, Fodor himself helped undermine the dominance of the classical computational model that he played such an important role in founding. Professor Susan Schneider, a doctoral student of Fodor’s who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, hopes to revitalize the LOT model in her new book, The Language of Thought: A New Philosophical Direction (MIT Press, 2011). Professor Schneider argues that LOT has suffered because it was underdeveloped in critical ways; in this interview, she talks about how the classical computational model can be modified to remain a vital contender in contemporary cognitive science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

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-begging, and how reports of conscious experiences may be grounded in analogies to familiar media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

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 metaphors for schizophrenia–Metzl shows how schizophrenia and blackness evolved in ways that directly reflected the white status quo’s anxiety and uneasiness with growing racial tensions and upheaval. Schizophrenia, Metzl explains, went from being a mostly white, middle-class mental illness in the 1950s to one identified with blackness, madness, and civil strife in the decades that followed. Jonathan Metzl is a contributor to Public Books. As you listen to the interview take a look at some the pharmaceutical advertisements that Metzl cites in his research, and how schizophrenia went from being code for white and docile, to later black and threatening… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology