BOOKS THREAD

Just finished Dick Winters' Beyond Band of Brothers. If you liked Ambrose's book and if you liked the miniseries, then I would definitely check out Winters' book. It was a very interesting read and had a lot of new information about Easy Company.

Now, I am on to No Country For Old Men.

 

I just finished Michael Craig's 'The Professor, the Banker and the Suicide King,' which was really intresting if you like poker.
I'm halfway through 'The Tender Bar,' and I'm happy to say that it has lived up to the hype. Fantastic.

 

This book will knock you flat on your ass.

THE ultimate toilet book offering descriptions of the complex workings of the brain and glimpses into precise meanings of self, consciousness and belief. It also contains several visual experiments that you can perform on yourself.

A few select passages:

A piece of your brain the size of a grain of sand would contain one hundred thousand neurons, two million axons and one billion synapses, all "talking to" each other.

Pain is an opinion on the organism's state of health rather than a mere reflective response to an injury. There is no direct hotline from pain receptors to "pain centers" in the brain.

Your own body is a phantom, one that your brain has temporarily constructed purely for convenience.

Every medical student is taught that patients with epileptic seizures originating in this part of the brain (temporal lobes) can have intense, spiritual experiences during the seizures and sometimes become preoccupied with religion and moral issues even during the seizure-free or interictal periods.

But most remarkable of all are those patients who have deeply moving spiritual experiences, including a feeling of divine presence and the sense that they are in direct communion with God. Everything around them is imbued with cosmic significance. They may say, "I finally understand what it's all about. This is the moment I've been waiting for all my life. Suddenly it all makes sense." Or, "Finally have insight into the true nature of the cosmos." I find it ironic that this sense of enlightenment, this absolute conviction that Truth is revealed at last, should derive from limbic structures concerned with emotions rather than from the thinking, rational parts of the brain that take so much pride in their ability to discern truth and falsehood.

Could it be that human beings have actually evolved specialized neural circuitry for the sole purpose of mediating religious experience? The human belief in the supernatural is so widespread in all societies all over the world that it's tempting to ask whether the propensity for such beliefs might have a biological basis.

The one clear conclusion that emerges from all this is that there are circuits in the human brain that are involved in religious experience and these become hyperactive in some epileptics.

It's probably not coincidence that many of the most creative scientists have a great sense of humor.

I submit that we are dealing here with two mutually unintelligible languages. One is the language of nerve impulses -- the spatial and temporal patterns of neuronal activity that allow us to see red, for example. The second language, the one that allows us to communicate what we are seeing to others, is a natural spoken tongue like English or German or Japanese -- rarefied, compressed waves of air traveling between you and the listener. Both are languages in the strict technical sense, that is, they are information-rich messages that are intended to convey meaning, across synapses between different brain parts in one case and across the air between two people in the other.

If one enumerates all of the attributes that we usually associate with the words "consciousness" and "awareness," each of them, you will notice, has a correlate in temporal lobe seizures, including vivid visual and auditory hallucinations, "out of body" experiences and an absolute sense of omnipotence or omniscience.

--

Pass the bong.

 

LJB --
There's a lot of work going on with the notion that we're hard-wired for god. A lot of it is damned fascinating.

 

FB, been kicking it around since the holidays, trying to find some blocks that will fit with my other Legos, but the shit's way, way over my head.

This is one of the articles that tossed a national glare on the subject. From Newsweek, 2001.

http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/neuro/neuronewswk.htm

 

Klosterman's like young Jesus teaching the pharisees.

 

I just got done reading Jere Longman's "The Girls of Summer."

Good stuff, especially for women and doubly so for soccer enthusiasts. That was Longman's first book, and while it wasn't Earth-shattering, it was engaging.

 

I just finished Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. In some ways it was disappointing because I had just watched the movie - in the sense I wasn't as freaked out as I would have been because I knew what happened.
At the same time, the book was masterful and it was a much better story than the movie. I really liked the parts where the reader was inside Bell's head and we saw a lot more about why he is the way he is and why he is retiring and whatnot. The WWII story was very interesting and I thought it was a good part of the book that I guess they just couldn't get into with the movie.

Next up is a random book I got for Christmas: Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. Then Blood Meridian by McCarthy.

 

Currently reading "Listening Is An Act of Love," a compilation of personal narratives from the StoryCorps project, which has a station in NYC's Grand Central Terminal and two RVs that go across the country, collecting the stories. Very touching read, especially from such a cross-section of people.

 

Just finished Zadie Smith's "White Teeth." I know, few years old now, but I really enjoyed her funny, somewhat rambling, almost irreverent writing style. And sure, perhaps its cliche now to write about those that "don't belong" anywhere, but her characters were always on the mark. Her emigrants to England certainly felt they didn't belong there, and thus some of them tried to belong everywhere.

On to Chabon's Kav & Clay (I know, another one I should have read by now) next.