The crack in the cosmic egg

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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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Angela Hicks

Our natural state is to be healthy and happy. This includes having a calm mind, a healthy body and emotional resourcefulness. This book reveals the profound, yet simple health maintenance secrets that Chinese medicine has developed over many centuries. These secrets enable you to deal with stress and return to your natural balance.

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James V. Schall

In The Life of the Mind, Georgetown University’s James V. Schall takes up the task of reminding us that, as human beings, we naturally take a special delight and pleasure in simply knowing. Because we have not only bodies but also minds, we are built to know what is. In this volume, Schall, author of On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs (ISI Books), among many other volumes of philosophical and political reflection, discusses the various ways of approaching the delight of thinking and the way that this delight begins in seeing and hearing and even in making and walking. We must be attentive to and cultivate the needs of the mind, argues Schall, for it is through our intellect that all that is not ourselves is finally returned to us, allowing us to live in the light of truth.

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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?