Heartless by Casey KelleherMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
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Good Books Lift You!
Wednesday, December 29, 2021
Wednesday, December 22, 2021
Review: 2021 on Goodreads
2021 on Goodreads by VariousMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I read far more books this year than I thought I would. Initially, I thought of being more selective in reading this year, especially reducing ARCs, but it did not quite work that way and the ARC proportion was far higher than last year. The reason was twofold – I was discovering some good authors as a result (Suzanne Kelman, Emma Tallon, Casey Kelleher, Caz Finlay, Claire Allan, Teresa Driscoll, K L Slater, Liz Lawler, to name a few) and wanted to continue, and I also felt it probably helped lesser-known authors to get early reviews out and that is a good thing.
My top reads of 2021 are as below (most recent first).
• The Nurse by Claire Allan
• Simply Schrödinger (Great Lives Book 30) by John Gribbin
• To Speak for the Trees: My Life's Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest by Diana Beresford-Kroeger
• The Institute by Stephen King
• The Old Man’s War Series (first 2 so far) by John Scalzi
• I’ll Never Tell by Casey Kelleher
• #Tatastories: 40 Timeless Tales to Inspire You by Harish Bhat
• The Room in the Attic by Louise Douglas
• Helgoland: The World of Quantum Theory by Carlo Rovelli
• Two and a Half Rainbows: A Collection of Short Stories by Siddhartha Krishnan
• The Zen of Therapy: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life by Mark Epstein
• Her Rival (second book in the series) by Emma Tallon
• Beartown, Us Against You by Fredrik Backman
• Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David Sinclair
• The Principal Upanishads by S Radhakrishnan
• No Going Back by Casey Kelleher
• A Search In Secret India: The classic work on seeking a guru by Paul Brunton
• Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein
• The Nothing Man by Catherine Ryan Howard
• Lab Rats: Why Modern Work Makes People Miserable by Dan Lyons
• Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker
There were many other good reads as well (most recent first):
Bleak & Bleaker, Chimpanzee Memoirs, Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?, The Mind-Gut Connection, The House of Justice, Murder on the Pier, The 3AM Series, When the Nightingale Sings, The Widow, The Brain under Seige, The Crucifix Killer, The Silent Mother, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, Bhang Milkha Bhang, Misery, The Red Planet, Help Me!, Dara Shukoh: The Man who would be king, Her Ocean Grave, The Necklace, The Psychopath - The Cannibal - The Lover.
For 2022, hope to read more science-fiction, some fantasy, some crime, fewer psychological thrillers, more biographies, some horror, some mythology, some philosophy, some authors I left off this year (Lee Child, Patricia Cornwell, John Grisham, Louise Bagshawe, Lars Kepler, Henrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell etc). I keenly await new books of Susan Cain, Blake Crouch, Fredrick Backman & just maybe Dan Brown in 2022. Hopefully, also, will be less clumsy with audiobooks next year.
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays & Happy Reading!
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Monday, December 20, 2021
Thursday, October 15, 2020
Sunday, October 11, 2020
Review: How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain
How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman BarrettMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I am fascinated by the advances in neuroscience and what it tells us about our brains, behaviours and who we are. It is even more interesting to combine that with the wisdom of mindfulness theory & practice. This is a book with a lot of very interesting material which we do not often come across, and is intellectually very stimulating.
In what Lisa describes as the most prevalent classical view, we think we are all very similar in how we display our emotions. If shown a picture, based on the person’s expression, we believe we can recognise the emotion he/she is going through. This has in fact led to a number of technology companies making investments in this area, juries basing judgements on how defendants conduct themselves etc. Lisa forcefully argues, and very successfully, that there are no specific standards for emotion & variation is the norm. There is no specific common brain pathway for emotions and attempts to decipher emotions such as anger from body measurements & brain scans have shown no patterns and have failed. She goes on to discuss that the concept of the 'truine brain' where parts of our human brain were inherited from other species and govern rudimentary survival behaviours has been largely discredited by neuroscience.
Our brain is constantly anticipating and preparing our body for what is to come (balancing the body budget) and dealing with prediction errors (deviation between the expected & actual). Right since our birth, our brain is building concepts for us based on what we are told and what we experience. Our emotions have roots in these concepts, and are hence very individualised. Similarities are more explained by the fact that we go through many similar experiences in similar environments, and hence build adjacent concepts. This makes perfect sense and also explains the growing inability of people to change their world views in later stages in life.
The parallels with mindfulness theory can provide great insights. Lisa does discuss eastern philosophy (largely around Buddhist thought) and the alignment with the latest of what neuroscience is telling us.
There is only one mistake you are making: you take the inner for the outer and the outer for the inner. What is in you, you take to be outside you and what is outside, you take to be in you. The mind and feelings are external, but you take them to be intimate. You believe the world to be objective, while it is entirely a projection of your psyche. That is the basic confusion and no new explosion will set it right! You have to think yourself out of it. There is no other way.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
In quite a few cases though she just skims the surface and the treatment lacks depth. The impact of words & language is written about in great detail and yet misses some obvious negative implications. When concepts are fortified, egos grow bigger, resistance to change becomes greater and de-sensitization develops, largely robbing us of the newness of the experience.
“Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, `That is an oak tree', or `that is a banyan tree', the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? To come in contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known
“The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again.”
― Krishnamurti
The implications of all this knowledge for the law is important and there is a fairly detailed discussion on that (eg: there is almost no basis for segregating ‘crimes of passion’ vs ‘conscious crimes’). Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky was another fascinating book based on neuroscience and there are quite a few common themes (such as the impact of past experiences, implications for law etc). This book is also as interesting but is far more speculative & less organized in parts. The chapter on animal emotions is in fact very poorly written, makes lots of assumptions and comes across as rambling. While the broad contours of the book are very logical, a number of the similarities across species cannot be explained by only the theories in this book, which considerably downplays the impact of genes.
If this subject interests you, I would also urge you to read ‘Behave’ and The Ape that Understood the Universe.
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