The new books for today are all about the mind in one way or another.
The Three Faces of Mind: developing your mental, emotional and behavioral intelligence seeks to increase our self awareness and knowledge of our brains work. This is one I would like to read when there is someone to discuss it with. I'm not sure I could stick with it on my own. Too abstract.
Shyness: how Normal behavior became a Disease addresses the increasing number of people diagnosed with anxiety and show that some of it is just normal emotions. This reminds me of another book we got recently called The loss of sadness, with a similar theme. I doubt I will agree with either of these authors completely, as I know of people for whom drugs helped them through times of shyness or sadness. But I do tend to think that is too easy to diagnose someone when all the evaluations occur in their own mind. Sometimes we all feel shy and sometimes we are all sad.
Concentration by Ernst Wood is an approach to meditation. Everyone needs an approach to that.
The last book for today is Alternative Cures that Really Work. I included this with books on the mind because when it comes right down to it, so many cures depend on the mind as much as on the medicine. This is evidnet in the placebo effect as well as other instances where things that shouldn't work do and things that should work don't.
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3 comments:
The Shyness book sounds interesting. Inventing disorders or conditions and coming up with cures for them has a very long history in medicine. Take a look at Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, for instance. (OK, that one was about 40% ethanol.) OTOH, being shy is a complete pain.
I can't remember where I heard about it first, but The Sociopath Next Door might be interesting. The author of that one says that more people than you might think (1%?) are totally amoral, self-interested, and don't feel guilt. PickyWeedia's entry on psychopathy says that sociopaths are overrepresented in the prison system and in the media. I don't know, it seems a bit over-the-top and hysterical to me, but there is always a subset of the population that doesn't behave and refuses to listen.
I wonder if there's an approach to meditation that would work when there's a meowing, needy half-Siamese cat in the same room as I am.
Not for me. Having a small creature need me is the most distracting thing for me. Not even meditation helps that one.
Children are far worse than domestic animals at distracting you. Fuzzball really only has 4 wants: food, water, playtime, and being petted. Children have hundreds of wants, and they don't sleep 16 hours per day. If anyone ever achieved inner peace and clarity while surrounded by rambunctious small children, that person could give Siddhartha Gautama a few tips.
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