A while after the Artistic NKS panel, I was having a conversation with several of the presenters about the synethetic aspects of Luke Dubois's presentation. I asked Luke whether he had read Richard Cytowic's book on synethesia, which I quite like. We got onto the subject of other pop neurology books, and I said I recommended a group of three books that should be read in order, because they had had a significant impact on my thinking, but what I got out of them is an argument that emerges partly from the sequence. They said I should write this down and post it to the blog, so here I am.
These are the books:
Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (2001) by George Lakoff & Raphael Nunez which discusses the mathaphorical substructure of how the brain does math. It refers frequently to The Number Sense : How the Mind Creates Mathematics by Stanislas Dehaene. In The Number Sense, Dehaene is very dismissive of mathematical prodigies and argues that pretty much everything they can do is explainable through the techniques of the Classical Art of Memory. So I read Frances Yates's book The Art of Memory which discusses in detail what is known about the techniques for using memory palances and other pneumonics.
And then Hurricane Katrina happened, and looking at the news coverage I instantly understood that the news media were covering it wrong, because those interested in knowing about it have their own individual; idiosycharatic maps of New Orleans in their head, and so that it was inadequate to show that someone's house somewhere was beging destroyed. People wanted to know where the images came from specifically. Where exactly were the levee breaks. And they wanted some mechanism for understanding the depth of the flooding in areas important to them.
This has led me down a long path having to do with developing approaches to disasters and other wildcaught problems. I've had a pretty wild last 9 months because of where these books lead me.
(Others wishing to make reading recommendations can submit them to me at kathryn dot cramer at gmail dot com.)
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