Read Books This will provide a list of the books I've read with a brief review. Users are blocked, contact me for access. I welcome discussions, but I'm tired of spam.

This book is on the neuroscience of creativity. The author is researching creativity, what makes people creative, how to recognize it, and how to enhance it.

There wasn’t enough information for this book. Although interesting, the author spends a lot of time talking about people in the past who are considered creative. This content is available in many other books, I felt there was too much and it just didn’t add to the intended content. She finished the book with advice about helping children.

A lot of the content in the middle was very interesting, but there was too little of it. The book is short and a pretty quick read, but doesn’t have much to offer.

This is a story of the creation of the universe through imperfections in the early universe. The story is told in five parts through three main themes. the themes are the history of our understanding of the universe, the imperfections in time and space and matter, and the history of our understanding of the evolution of life.

Through the first two themes, he seems to be building a case for there not being a unified theory for the universe. Our expectations of a unified theory are solely human, the same drive that lead us to belief in a single god, our desire to have a single understanding for events. However, when he starts the third theme, this goal is lost. The section on life seemed out of place and it felt as if it should have been in a different book.

Overall, the book was interesting. But the history sections seem to appear in all science books these days. If you’re interested in science writing, you’ve probably read it dozens of times before. For this reason, I cannot recommend it, there just isn’t enough meat to warrant the time and there are lots of other good science books to be read.

This book is mostly a study of three cases of vision disorders. The book explores the effects of the degenerative disease in terms of brain function and vision loss, and the coping strategies of the people suffering the loss. One of the studies follows a person who actually feels he benefited from his vision loss.

I had hoped it would explore the neuroscience side of the issues more. The details are still interesting, although the studies seemed to get long and repetitive. The final chapter of the book does discuss the neuroscience more.

Generally, I didn’t think this book was as good as some of his previous works. This isn’t one I’d recommend to the average person.

The book discusses the acceleration of man’s culture, society, and technology. He explores many aspects of these, their relation to history and trends for the future. He tends to back up his ideas with a lot of data. He addresses many problems current society faces and extrapolates his philosophies for their future prospects.

He breaks his ideas into six forces that forge society: animal learning, externalized learning, social connections, knowledge platforms, scientific problem-solving, and global diffusion.

Too much of the book was devoted to setup. The first part of the book is long and tedious. The majority of the book is interesting and provides good food for thought.

Although the ideas seemed well researched, I felt he was overly optimistic and even dismissive of many ideas. For instance, he dismisses global warming with the statement “If the current trend in public opinion holds [we] will soon take steps to reduce emissions.” I several topics he seem either naive or to have a poor understanding of the issue.

Even with the shortcomings, the book was interesting and presents some interesting ideas.

Mark Changizi is proposing a new origin of vision and how we see. It moves the emphasis from food to socializing. He proposes that vision provides us with six super powers: telepathy, x-ray vision, future vision, and spirit reading. Cool, huh? Ok, they are really a bit more mundane than that, especially since we use them on a regular basis.

In more ordinary terms, we have telepathy from our ability to read each other. Our color vision has its greatest response range around the areas of our skin involving blood flow. We can tell the oxygenation levels and blood volume by subtle changes in skin color. These changes correspond to health and basic brain activity.

We have x-ray vision by virtue of our binocular vision. When we have a leafy environment close to us, our brain combines two images from our eyes and is able to remove the leaves from our view. He argues that animals from leavy environments are more likely to have forward-facing eyes, and that animals larger than the size of leaves and grasses are also more likely to have forward-facing eyes.

In a similar vein he explains future vision and spirit reading. In all cases, you understand why this ability is special, and why it is also ordinary. He backs his theory up well with data and interesting trivial.

He also uses his theory to explain a variety of visual illusions. These are primarily related to our future vision. He makes very good arguments and demonstrates a number of different classes of illusion.

The book is fascinating and a very good read for anyone interested in vision, physiology, or psychology.

Laurence Krauss is a theoretical physicist doing work in cosmology and teaching at the Arizona State University. He is doing research into the nature of General Relativity, dark matter, and nuclear physics. In this book, he discusses the beginning and end of the universe, bringing to light the current theories as to why there is anything, why the physical laws are as they are, and what will come of it all.

He does a good job of discussing complex physics in terms that anyone can understand. The book goes into details about how empty space has energy and its consequences, touching on string theory, extra dimensions. Dr. Krauss walks us through his argument on why nothing is unstable, so there must be something. Its enough to warp the mind!

The book is entertaining and enlightening. You will walk away with a better understanding of our universe, even if it doesn’t have practical applications.

Jonah Lehrer delves into creativity, the neuroscience, individual aspects, and social aspects of creativity. He looks at its source and at society’s reaction to creativity. Throughout the book, he inserts lots of anecdotes to make various points. Unfortunately, it often feels like the stories are selected a bit too much to make his points, and that he tells the stories too much using his own narrative leading the reader to conclusions he wants you to reach.

The first part of the book was very interesting, discussing recent learnings from neuroscience. He throws in some interesting anecdotes about strong creative moments building a case for how little we really understand creativity and how it appears unexpectedly. He then discusses how we can help it along and enhance it.

The middle of the book was the part I had the most difficulty with. He builds on the social aspects of creativity and imagination, concluding that cities are an important breeding ground for creativity. I don’t have an issue with that as much as how he gets there, using weak arguments and trying to build a case for cause and affect relationships where there is really only a case for weakly-related events. One instance of that is showing a relationship between walking speed and creativity. Then concludes that a high walking speed increases inter-personal interactions, leading to the exchange of ideas and thus spawning creative moments.

The book does end more strongly, looking at how we treat creative moments, and how we (don’t) nurture them in children. He does make a good case that our education system as it is implemented discourages children from being creative, we make them to be alike and assume they all learn in the same manners. It isn’t better as adults, where work environments can also discourage creative moments.

He does make several good points and has some interesting information. But his repeated jumping to conclusions and is poor arguments make me disappointed in the book that could have been so much more.