Consciousness and self-consciousness

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John Brockman

This Will Make You Smarter presents brilliant but accessible ideas to expand every mind. What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? This is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, posed to the world's most influential thinkers. Their visionary answers flow from the frontiers of psychology, philosophy, economics, physics, sociology, and more. Surprising and enlightening, these insights will revolutionize the way you think about yourself and the world.

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Clive Gifford

Trick your senses and baffle your brain with this crazy book of mind tricks and neuroscience information. You can find out how magicians make use of inattentional blindness when doing magic tricks, and why you miss details that are hidden in plain sight. You can discover why your memory isn't as good as you think, and how it is possible to remember things that never actually happened. This astonishing science book presents a wide range of brain games and mind tricks, and explains how these reveal the working processes of the brain. It will engage and entertain, and leave you wondering: do you really know your own mind?

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Anna Sfard

"This book is an attempt to change our thinking about thinking. Anna Sfard undertakes this task convinced that many long-standing, seemingly irresolvable quandaries regarding human development originate in ambiguities of the existing discourses on thinking. Standing on the shoulders of Vygotsky and Wittgenstein, the author defines thinking as a form of communication. The disappearance of the time-honored thinking-communicating dichotomy is epitomized by Sfard's term, commognition, which combines communication with cognition. The commognitive tenet implies that verbal communication with its distinctive property of recursive self-reference may be the primary source of humans' unique ability to accumulate the complexity of their action from one generation to another."--Jacket.

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David Perkins

The past twenty years have seen breakthroughs from cognitive scientists investigating thinking and learning as well as school anthropologists probing the culture of classrooms, schools, and their community contexts; but these insights have yet to be applied to public education on a broad scale. Smart Schools shows how these findings can be effectively used within the classroom. Although there has been much debate over the state of American education today, and a variety of solutions have been offered ranging from school choice to national testing, little attention has been paid to how children actually learn to think. As Perking demonstrates, we cannot solve our education problems by simply redistributing power or by asking children to regurgitate facts on a multiple choice exam; rather we must look at the kinds of knowledge students typically acquire in school. As his own and others' research indicates, students from first grade on through college often have only the most fragile and superficial kind of knowledge even after considerable instruction in a subject. He shows where students typically make mistakes by examining the kinds of misguided strategies they use in trying to understand a topic. He also shows why traditional teaching approaches often result in the students' limited grasp of a subject. Perking then introduces an impressive array of methods that have been shown to dramatically increase a student's understanding.