Archives de catégorie : Popular Science

THE WORLD BEHIND THE WORLD d’Erik Hoel

In a sweeping intellectual narrative, award-winning neuroscientist and author Erik Hoel argues there are two fundamental perspectives on reality: the intrinsic and the extrinsic. The intrinsic perspective is that of consciousness and experience, the feelings and sensations that make up your waking world. The extrinsic perspective is that of science, which views the universe as a set of mechanisms and relations.

THE WORLD BEHIND THE WORLD:
Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science
by Erik Hoel
Avid Reader, Fall 2023
(via Writers House)

The two perspectives have had an uneasy, sometimes troubled relationship. Throughout history some cultures have emphasized one perspective more than the other, which has radically changed how humans think about and conceptualize our own selves. Technologies and media often implicitly enforce one perspective: for instance, television and movies take the extrinsic perspective, exploring the world of relations and images, while literature and novels take the intrinsic perspective, exploring the world of consciousness.
Hoel offers a whirlwind tour of the two perspectives across the ages, like how the intrinsic perspective is absent from Homeric epics and earlier eras, its historical development and ultimate culmination in the invention of the novel, the separation of the two perspectives by Galileo Galilei when he recommended science remove the observer to focus solely on the extrinsic, and the reintroduction of the intrinsic perspective to science by Francis Crick, the discoverer of DNA, who proposed a search for the neural correlates of consciousness that continues to this day.
Hoel shows how our picture of reality is incomplete following Galileo’s separation and emphasis on the extrinsic. The ignored intrinsic perspective sheds light on fundamental scientific questions like causation, emergence, how the brain functions, the biological purpose of dreaming, artificial intelligence, and even why humans create art. He reveals how our own culture is becoming more based in the extrinsic perspective over time, neglecting the intrinsic and forgetting the importance of human consciousness, all to its cultural, scientific, and artistic detriment.
Ultimately, the two perspectives have stood apart for too long and must be reunited. To this end Hoel proposes a way to merge the intrinsic and the extrinsic in a radical new theory of consciousness.

Erik Hoel received his PhD in neuroscience from the University of Madison-Wisconsin. He is a research assistant professor at Tufts University and was previously a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University in the NeuroTechnology Lab, and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Hoel is a 2018 Forbes “30 under 30” for his neuroscientific research on consciousness. His first novel, The Revelations, was published in April 2021 by The Overlook Press. He lives in Massachusetts.

THE MYTH OF NORMAL de Gabor Maté & Daniel Maté

By the acclaimed author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness, a bracing critique of how our society breeds disease, and a pathway to health and healing.

THE MYTH OF NORMAL:
Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
by Dr. Gabor Maté & Daniel Maté
Knopf Canada (Canada) / Avery (US), May 2022
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

In this revolutionary book, renowned physician Gabor Maté eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, every fifth person has high blood pressure. In Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And everywhere, adolescent mental illness is on the rise. So what is really “normal” when it comes to health?
Over four decades of clinical experience, Maté has come to recognize the prevailing understanding of “normal” as false, neglecting the roles that trauma and stress, and the pressures of modern-day living, exert on our bodies and our minds at the expense of good health. For all our expertise and technological sophistication, Western medicine often fails to treat the whole person, ignoring how today’s culture stresses the body, burdens the immune system, and undermines emotional balance. Now Maté brings his perspective to the great untangling of common myths about what makes us sick, connects the dots between the maladies of individuals and the declining soundness of society—and offers a compassionate guide for health and healing. Cowritten with his son Daniel, THE MYTH OF NORMAL is Maté’s most ambitious and urgent book yet.

A renowned speaker and bestselling author, Dr. Gabor Maté is highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics including addiction, stress, and childhood development. Dr. Maté has written several bestselling books, including the award-winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection, and Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It, and has coauthored Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers. His works have been published internationally in nearly thirty languages.
Daniel Maté is a musical theater lyricist and composer whose work has been honored with the Edward Kleban Prize, a Jonathan Larson Foundation Grant, and the Cole Porter Award for Music and Lyrics. He is the producer and host of the YouTube program Lyrics to Go. With his father, Gabor, Daniel regularly co-leads the popular workshop Hello Again: A Fresh Start for Parents and Their Adult Children. He also runs a “mental chiropractic” service called Take a Walk with Daniel (walkwithdaniel.com).

IMAGINABLE de Jane McGonigal

A dynamic, optimistic, science-driven work by a New York Times bestselling writer and designer of alternate reality games that trains us to see the future as a futurist does―and prepares us to thrive in that future when it arrives (sooner than we think).

IMAGINABLE:
How to Pick Ourselves Up, Heal from the Pandemic, and Prepare for a Decade of Unthinkable Change
by Jane McGonigal
Spiegel & Grau, March 2022
(via The Gernert Company)

After living through the massive global shock and trauma of Covid-19, one of the most disruptive events in human history, we need to find a way to face the future with optimism. But how can we plan for a better future when it feels impossible to predict what the world will be like next week, let alone next year or in the next decade? What we need are new tools to help us recover our confidence, creativity, and hope in the face of an uncertain future. In Imaginable, world-renowned future forecaster and game designer Jane McGonigal draws on the latest scientific research in psychology and neuroscience to show us how to train our brains to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable. Using gaming strategies and fun, thought-provoking challenges that she designed specifically for this book, she helps us build our collective imagination to dive into the future before we live it and envision, in surprising detail, what our lives will look like ten years out.
In IMAGINABLE, McGonigal teaches us to identify the challenges that lie ahead in the next decade―big and small, personal and global; shape a better future that solves for those challenges; and access “urgent optimism,” an unstoppable motivational force that inspires us to be fearless, resilient, and bold in realizing a world we can only imagine.

Jane McGonigal, PhD, is a senior researcher at the Institute for the Future and the author of The New York Times bestseller Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Her work has been featured in The Economist, Wired, and The New York Times and on MTV, CNN, and NPR. Her TED talks on games have been viewed more than ten million times.

FILTERWORLD de Kyle Chayka

Author of The Longing For Less and a contributor to The New Yorker and NYT Magazine, Kyle Chayka’s FILTERWORLD focuses on the history and investigation of living in a world ruled by algorithms, which profoundly determine and shape culture in both digital and physical spaces, leading to flat and frictionless experiences that are remaking human identity.

FILTERWORLD:
How Algorithms Flattened Culture
by Kyle Chayka
Doubleday, Fall 2023
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

You’ve seen the smooth, uncanny artifacts: a blank, white café that looks like it could be located anywhere in the world; TikTok dance videos repeating in a dull echo; restaurant design and food plating which begs to be posted on Instagram; endlessly bingeable streaming television; influencers’ faces made up and surgically altered towards a certain photogenic ideal. While appearing in different mediums, these pieces of culture are characterized by a slick sameness. Rather than provoking us, they’re pleasing, ambient, frictionless.
In this new book, Kyle Chayka argues that these seemingly disparate cultural phenomena all have been shaped by a similar force: the algorithms governing and filtering the content that appears on digital platforms. We increasingly live in a world where the culture we encounter is not simply curated by these algorithms, but in which algorithms profoundly determine and shape culture itself in both digital and physical spaces. Chayka names this new reality, of a world both inescapably mediated and changed by algorithmic filtration, “Filterworld”.
In FILTERWORLD, Chayka traces a brief history of how we arrived in this place—from the rise of the algorithm through the corresponding erosion of human curation and taste—before launching a penetrating exploration of the flat hallmarks of Filterworld byproducts and the way that algorithmically determined taste is fundamentally reshaping human identity. Ultimately a pointed critique of the frictionless culture of Filterworld, the book turns towards what we might do to escape and dismantle this numbing cycle.
Building on the popular criticism Kyle Chayka has published for both The New Yorker online and elsewhere, FILTERWORLD is the product of a career spent as one of our keenest observers of the intersection of technology and modern culture. While much has been written about the way that algorithms impact everything from news to policy, there has been no major book published on the impact of algorithms on culture.
FILTERWORLD will appeal strongly to readers of Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror and Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing: a book that not only seeks to give language to the slippery ways that technology is reshaping our lived experience, but also gives readers tools to imagine a world in which things could be otherwise.

Kyle Chayka is a freelance writer and critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, the New Republic, Rolling Stone, n+1, Vox, the Paris Review, and other publications. He has contributed chapters to Reading Pop Culture: A Portable Anthology and A Companion to Digital Art. Chayka is cofounder of Study Hall, a newsletter and digital community for journalists. He began his career as a visual art critic for Hyperallergic in Brooklyn, and now lives in Washington, D.C.

OUTRAGE MACHINE de Tobias Rose-Stockwell

An invaluable guide to the underlying machinery and technology that controls modern society – and a roadmap to navigate it. Foreword by social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind.

OUTRAGE MACHINE:
How Tech Amplifies Discontent and Disrupts Democracy―And What We Can Do About It
by Tobias Rose-Stockwell
Legacy Lit/Hachette US, July 2023
(via Park & Fine)

Throughout history, new technologies have disrupted our capacity to make sense of the world, from the printing press to the telegraph, from radio to television. OUTRAGE MACHINE explores the serious recent disruption caused by social media, and how it has triggered an urgent society-wide crisis of trust. Drawing from deep historical context, as well as cutting-edge research, author, designer, and media researcher Tobias Rose-Stockwell shows how social media has bound us to an unprecedented outrage machine, training us to react rather than reflect, and attack rather than debate.
Rose-Stockwell expertly illustrates how social media platforms were unintentionally designed to reward outrage and penalize tolerance, leading to distorted public conversations that live at the extremes and deepen political divisions. Pulling from extensive personal experience in tech and media, he exposes the triggers and tactics used to exploit our anger, unpacking how these technologies hack our deep tribal instincts and cognitive biases. These tools have now become opportunistic platforms for authoritarians and a threat to democratic norms everywhere.
But this book is not just about the problem. OUTRAGE MACHINE situates social media within a historical cycle of intense conflict and emerging tolerance. Using clear language and powerful illustrations, this book reveals the magnitude of the challenges we face, while offering realistic solutions and a promising pathway out.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell is a renowned media researcher and strategic advisor to Jonathan Haidt’s organization, OpenMind. Tobias’s work has been featured in major outlets such as The Atlantic, FastCompany, Quartz, Medium, NPR, the BBC, and many others. In his role as a media researcher, he has advised the directors of Gannett, one of the largest news organizations in the country, and was also a guest lecturer at Stanford University. He has been honored with the Unsung Hero Award by the 14th Dalai Lama for his work helping to rebuild essential infrastructure in Cambodia. Tobias lives in New York.
Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. He lives in New York City.