Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things
Dr. Randy Frost
Despite not watching tv, I have managed to become addicted to A&E’s show Hoarders. Being a popular reality show, the surface of this bizarre illness is barely scratched. Dr. Frost goes much deeper into the overwhelming desire some people have to save and hoard things, often to the point of limiting their mobility and damaging their health. Dr. Frost tells of his research, includes bits of interviews with patients and explains how he tries to help hoarders. If anything, this book and the tv show, may finally give you the oomph to clean out your basement and closet. It sure worked for me. Yick.
The Harvard Psychedelic Club
Don Lattin
What we now associate with Timothy Leary – LSD, Grateful Dead concerts, hippies, tuning in and dropping out, first started out as psychological experiments at Harvard University. Leary, a charismatic and well-liked professor, hoped to help inmates rehabilitate by giving them mystical experiences via LSD. His early partners, lab assistants and fellow researchers soon became sucked into the LSD world. Leary looses his job and home, gets kicked out of one country after another and finally ends up being broken out of prison by the Black Panthers. Lattin follows the path of Leary’s life as it spins out of control, along with the stories of Richard...
Stumbling on Happiness
Daniel Gilbert
As long as your brain’s guess about the next word turns out to be right, turning black squiggles into ideas, scenes, characters, and concepts, blissfully unaware that your nexting brain is predicting the future of the sentence at a fantastic rate. It is only when your brain predicts badly that you suddenly feel avocado.
That is, surprised. See?
Human minds are weird. Half of what we perceive is fictionalized by our mind for us. Even the most logical of minds makes strange errors and creates story lines. Gilbert does an excellent job of pointing out the ways our minds fool, confuse and console us. He points to studies on happiness that...