In Connectome (2012), Sebastian Seung describes our audacious effort to map the brain — to understand what makes us unique, from our personalities to mental afflictions. Inside every one of our skulls lies an organ so vast in its complexity [100 billion neurons] that it might as well be infinite. (x) A connectome is theKeep reading

In The Moral Circle (2025), philosopher Jeff Sebo calls for a revolution in ethics, arguing that we should expand our “moral circle” to include insects, AI systems, and microbes. Many legal systems divide the world into “persons,” who have the capacity for legal rights, and “things,” which lack this capacity. (1) [We] classify humans (andKeep reading

Creativity (2023) by Mark Runco is an academic textbook that summarizes research on the development, expression, and enhancement of creativity and divergent thinking. Book Notes I’m interested in everyday creative problem solving. For instance — “what to do, when and how, why and with whom” — is a universal problem. We redefine and reorder tasksKeep reading

Ecopsychology (1995) is a collection of essays, edited by Roszak, Gomes, and Kanner, focused on ecopsychology, a new field at the crossroads of ecology and psychology. A Psychological Foreword by James Hillman [psychology is] the study or order (logos) of the soul (psyche) (xviii) The cut between self and natural world is arbitrary. (xix) TheKeep reading

In Information Anxiety (1989), Richard Saul Wurman explains (on the front cover to reduce the reader’s anxiety) that “information anxiety is produced by the ever-widening gap between what we understand and what we think we should understand.” My father would ask us questions [at dinner]. If we answered one incorrectly, we had to leave theKeep reading