Book Readings

Ok, so I have been doing some reading since my last post... Of what I read, two books stand out.  First, a book by David Eagleman, called Incognito.  A very well written and enjoyable book about the subconscious brain and how it plays a role in your actions and feelings.  I especially like his take on the brain as a competition of brain systems.  He reiterates some of the observations about people who change personalities due to tumors or other brain damage.

The book I just completed, by Oliver Sacks, called The Mind's Eye is very compelling.  The book is both a collection of case studies of his patients and a self study of his own ailments which makes it very personal and engaging. In the first part of the book, he talks about his and others who have face blindness.  Hearing testimony from someone who has this condition  really drives home the point that there are conditions that some of our fellow humans deal with that we don't understand and may not even realize they have.  I don't have this condition but I do have a real problem remembering most names of people I have just met.  It takes me several meetings to start remembering someone's name.

In the second part of the book, he talks about blindness and his ordeal with loosing the sight in one of his eyes due a tumor.  Again, very compelling as he details his thoughts and shares his diary.

Both the above books are well worth the read.

Currently I am reading "Magnificent Mind at Any Age" by Danial G. Amen.  His is a pragmatic view of how to improve your brain function and slow down the aging of your brain.  He notes that many minor personality disorders can improve greatly just by changing a few bad brain habits.  A couple things hit home with me here.  First he talks about nutrition and how Artificial sweetener and caffiene are bad for you.  A few years ago I started drinking diet pop instead of regular.  Honestly I thought it would help me loose weight.  It did not but I kept drinking it.  I am thinking about changing that.  Caffeine might be a hard one as I do tend to drink a fair bit of that.  The other thing that really made me think about how I live is that sleep is really important for the brain. Less than 6 hours a sleep a night is bad for your brain.  In the summer this is not  problem as I get about 7 hours a sleep, but in the winter it is more like 6 to 6.5.  I think this drives my caffeine consumption.

I am only 50 pages through this book, so I will update you when I am done.

Facebook Changes

I have heard much noise about how the changes on facebook are hated.  Honestly, I did not even notice.  Do you know the reason?  It is because I rarely am on facebook for any real length of time.  I think the people who are most up-in-arms about it are the ones that are addicted to it.   You may say that you cannot be addicted to facebook, but I disagree.  I think the definition of addiction is spending more valuable resources(e.g. time or money) on an activity or pursuit that is useless or debilitating than on useful activities.  Well you say, I only spend 60% of my free time and my free time is only 8% of my day, so I am only spending ~6% of my time.  I would argue that, the non-free time is already spoken for and therefore is out from under your control.  That makes 60% of your free time, 60% of the time you control.  Not that facebook is entirely useless, I use it to keep track of family, friends and acquaintances too, but I do not spend the majority of my free time in it.  

My First Thought

Well, Hello World :)  I am starting this blog after playing with twitter and finding the character limit very, well, limiting.  You can follow my twitter account "StevePlate".

My Interests... I enjoy reading books about humans.  That is, I like reading Psychology/self-help, Philosophy, sociology, but my main fascination is with the inner workings of the brain.  I have been studying artificial intelligence(AI) and books on brain structure.  Some study AI for the purpose of using AI to solve complex problems.  Those that study AI for this reason, use AI because, by definition, AI's purpose is to simulate human thought patterns and, since we are the smartest form of life on the planet, they assume that a simulation would be good at solving problems.  I do not believe that using crude simulations of our brain function will be able to do anything but solve crude problems that would likely have much simpler solutions.  I will discuss that in more detail in a future post (i.e. you will have to come back :) )

My Current Book reading is: The Ethics of Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah.  An interesting read that examines the philosophies around identity and culture focusing on the paradoxes involved in governing it.  I am about half way through and I will say that he could use a better editor.  Watch for future post regarding this book.  While reading this book I paused to read another short book(Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates) that I found entertaining but was disappointed in the wishy-washy conclusion.

My background is in computers and engineering, currently working as a Business Intelligence Engineer.

Thanks for reading this far, I hope you come back for my next post!

Steve