books
Currently reading: Wise. Finding Purpose, Meaning and Wisdom Beyond the Midpoint of Life by Frank Tallis 📚
One reason I write:
“We remember only a tiny fraction of existence. We have forgotten most of what it is like to be alive, long before we die. Oblivion starts seeping into our heads as soon as we are self-aware.” (p.44)
Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk’s flight
On the empty sky. – Ursula K. LeGuin
You might care to check out the shortlist for the 2026 Ursula K. LeGuin Prize for Fiction.
Odysseus: A name that spells trouble
Since we’re currently lost somewhere in the middle of wars that seemingly have no end-point, and arguably no point, I wonder just what film director Christopher Nolan will make of The Odyssey, his blockbuster movie of which comes out mid-2026.
After I watched another recent movie version of the story, The Return, I found out about the work of psychologist Jonathan Shay with Vietnem veterans. He wrote two books linking the works of Homer – The Iliad and The Odyssey – with the modern experience of warfare and with the travails of homecoming.
Two quotes from Jonathan Shay’s work stood out particularly. First, this one about war-induced PTSD:
📚 Spotted in a charity store, the most ambitious book title I can remember. Can anyone beat it?
How to learn deliberate practice
Have you heard of ‘deliberate practice’?
You might well have, because Swedish psychologist Anders Ericsson’s work on what makes an expert has been hugely influential over the years. His co-authored original paper from 1993 [^1] has been cited more than 3,000 times and it has spawned more than a few popular books, including Geoff Covin’s Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, Malcom Gadwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success, and Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How.
Oh, those titles.
The key message of ‘deliberate practice’ is simple but not obvious. If you want to become an expert you have to do the right kind of practice. This was stated very clearly in Ericsson’s widely-read book, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (2016):
“If you are not improving, it’s not because you lack innate talent; it’s because you’re not practicing the right way. Once you understand this, improvement becomes a matter of figuring out what the ‘right way’ is.”
This is an attractive message because it’s very optimistic. It encourages people to overcome the fatalistic worry that somehow, maybe due to their genes or their upbringing, ’they’re just not cut out for it’.
Instead of being resigned to your fate, you can change it. And the key? Deliberate practice!
Unfortunately, the strong popular interest has warped some of Ericsson’s key ideas about how to gain expertise. Two concepts in particular have made it hard to move forward productively.
Why must sci-fi author Ted Chiang state in The Atlantic that AI is not conscious? I call this La Stilla Syndrome: my Jules Verne-inspired name for the delusion our technology is alive. Chiang doesn’t buy it and nor should we.
#SciFi
#ArtificialIntelligence
#TedChiang
#JulesVerne
#TechPhilosophy
Currently reading: Eight Million Ways to Happiness by Hiroko Yoda 📚
Japan is a deeply secular country full of shrines, temples, festivals and ceremonies. This book unpacks the paradox by exploring spiritual life in Japan as it’s actually lived, not the rather warped Western fantasy version.
Memory isn’t a static recording but a constant act of reconstruction. Every time we revisit a note or a book, we are weaving together the original content with our current environment and past self.
“We construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them.”
So how do we decide what’s worth preserving and what we must allow ourselves to forget? Explore the “differential allocation of attentional resources” in this look at the fallibility of memory.
Link: writingslowly.com/2026/05/1…
#CognitiveScience #Philosophy #Memory
There’s a unique magic in the physical bookshelf. It acts as a spatial memory palace where a spine or a colour can trigger a flood of recollection. ‘Remembering What you Read’ looks at why reorganising a library feels like reorganising a mind, and what it really means to be “well-read” in this time of digital summaries and ephemeral content.
“The book shelves are a kind of ‘memory palace’ for the books themselves. In fact this realisation is quite important to me.”
#Bookstodon #HomeLibrary #ReadingLife
Remembering what you read
One of the chief uses of note-making is to help you to remember what you read.
But it’s not as simple as imagining your notes are just an ‘aide memoire’.
When you make notes you forget your reading and replace it with the future opportunity to read again not the original book but your own notes on it. So making notes is inevitably a process of interpretation, which involves the occlusion of the original work, albeit in the name of preserving it.
Psychologists, including Ciara Greene and Gillian Murphy, authors of Memory Lane: The perfectly imperfect ways we remember (Princeton UP, 2025) believe “we construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them”.
So when we re-read our notes, does that mean we’re reconstructing our memories of the book, or just the memories of our notes?