 This year I’ve found myself reading a bunch of books about the mind, the brain, and the nature of the self. For some reason I’m reading them all in parallel, picking one or the other depending on how I’m feeling on any given day, which is probably why I haven’t actually finished any of them yet. I’m loving them all, in different ways. I could probably do with spending more time talking to people about all this stuff, as well, which is one reason I’m posting this now rather than waiting till I’ve finished the books to write about them (although I will probably do that, too).
Here are a few words about what’s in the Mind/Brain section of the towering pile on my bedside table right now…Â Â Does anyone else have any thoughts about any of these, or interest in discussing them? - Consciousness Explained, by Daniel Dennett
I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to get round to tackling this book; I’ve known for a long time that Dennett is a very compelling, interesting writer and thinker. I had the feeling that his thoughts about how the mind works have a lot of overlap with my own, but until this year I’d only ever read a few of the essays from his collection ‘Brainstorms’, which is excellent if somewhat repetitious. What surprised me when I finally picked this up was what an entertaining writer he is. - I am a Strange Loop, by Douglas Hofstadter
I first met Hofstadter’s magnum opus, Gödel Escher Bach, when I was a kid – I was probably about twelve years old. I was enchanted, and I it may well have had a more profound influence on my thinking than any other single book, but in spite of that I could never finish it. It’s so much fun to dip into, especially the dialogues; but then its mathematical excursions are so involved, it can be hard to stay with it to the next flight of fancy without feeling like you’re either breaking your head or skimming too much. His later book covers much of the same ground – about the meaning of meaning, and how such a thing could possibly emerge from constituents that seem to obey the mathematical rules of physics – while avoiding most of those pitfalls. It’s dense, but never overwhelmingly so, and it’s just whimsical enough to make you smile without getting waylaid. - The Feeling of What Happens, by Antonio Damasio
Damasio is a medical doctor and neurologist by training, and more than any of the other books I have been reading, this one is grounded in science, particularly the study of the human brain. His approach to thinking rightly takes in the whole body, though – he is very concerned with the importance of looking at the whole organism if we want to understand thought, the nature of the self, and particularly emotions. What I find odd is that he has essentially written a whole book about embodied cognition in a book which doesn’t list that term or embodiment in its index; he does briefly name-check Francesco Varela and Maturana, but rather a lot of the time he seems to be writing as if he hasn’t noticed that anybody has ever had similar ideas. His science is impeccable, but I’m thrown by his lack of engagement with existing philosophy. Then again, this is a short book – much the shortest of these four – and I know that some people switch off the moment they see the word ‘phenomenology’. - Mind in Life, by Evan Thompson
This is probably the least accessible of the books in my stack, but still, the writing is lucid and uses no more jargon than it needs. This book was conceived as a follow-up to Thompson’s book with Varela and Eleanor Rosch, ‘The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience’, which I haven’t read.  Thompson is rounding up relevant thoughts from all over science and philosophy, in order to put together a strong case for thinking about the mind as something arising from life; not something unique to the human brain, but a process naturally arising from and involving any organism – and also, in some sense, extending beyond it. It’s a grand project, and my sense is that it’s a very worthwhile one. This is a pretty fat book, though, written very clearly but without a great deal of levity, so I’m relying on sheer fascination value to carry me through. I think it will.
 I am currently working part-time at Camellia’s Tea House, in Kingly Court, on Carnaby Street. It is the sort of place that immediately feels like a slice of heaven to a tea lover – you enter and there is one wall filled almost to the ceiling with caddies and big glass jars. There are about a hundred and twenty different teas and tisanes here, while the rest of the shop is filled with all kinds of different teapots and tea accessories, and enough tables that it is usually possible sit down and be comfortable.  It’s got a good atmosphere, with chilled out music playing most of the time, at a fairly unobtrusive level.
 Slightly more than half of the teas are herbal, mostly Lubna’s own blends. These are largely named for their proposed health benefits, but by blending different herbs, Lubna also aims to produce infusions with interesting, well-balanced flavours, which is something she does very well. That leaves about fifty tea teas, including a few that aren’t pure tea – Earl Grey or pu erh with orange, rose-infused black tea and so on – along with some very good white, green, oolong and black teas. They currently have three oolongs – a Chinese milky oolong, and two less-peculiar Formosa oolongs, both very good. Part of my job is blending and packing teas, but I am also taking and editing photos, and writing for their blog. Mostly I talk about the different teas – how they taste, what they have in them and why, and so on. Fortunately I really like the teas, so I’m able to enthuse about them completely sincerely. Here are the entries I have posted so far: 
 I’ve been a little slow to start going through my photos from this Summer’s two-month trip around the Iberian peninsula.
I stayed for about two weeks in the town of Carballo, which is 35km from A Coruña, 45km from Santiago de Compostela and 10km from the nearest beach. It’s a small, quiet town full of empty buildings, half-finished or abandoned, slapped together with an obvious disregard for any kind of building code. Most of the bars are mostly empty most of the time, and presumably they couldn’t stay open at all if they had to pay the kind of rent you have to pay for premises in places where people want to live. There is life and music if you know where to look, though, and it’s an easy enough journey to the beautiful beaches. A clear stream runs through Carballo, past the bus station. close to where I was staying, with fish and bats and dragonflies. It leads quickly out of the bricks and concrete, into the woods, like an artery. The air is fresh, and the hazelnuts you can pluck from the trees in late summer are like a taste of heaven. The last night I was there, I was woken by a mighty rainstorm battering against the thin roof of my attic flat. It’s the rain, above all, that makes Galicia so gorgeous, once you get outside of its depressed not-quite-seaside towns – the rain that feeds its lush forests and sustains its wide green fields. The countryside throughout northern Iberia is stunning; you might miss the sunshine, but it’s worth getting wet for.
I spent much of this summer travelling overland around the Iberian Peninsula – the parts of the world commonly known as Spain and Portugal. I was teaching and looking after kids at a summer camp in the Basque Country for two weeks, and then I had about a week and a half travelling in a south-westerly direction before turning north to attend the ‘Bridges‘ conference on maths and art, in Coimbra, Portugal, where I was showing my interactive exhibit known as ‘Kenneth‘ and a large canvas print of one of my generative artworks. Finally I headed further north, to Galicia, and spent about two weeks there before looping around to the East and spending a couple of days in Bilbao before going on into France on the way back to Britain. All of these places warrant proper writing about, but here are the major stops of my journey, in inevitably-misleading bullet-point, key-word form, in any case – if nothing else, this will act as memory aid for me: - London:
Family time - Paris:
Long night - Irun:
Fiesta; oops - Gorozika:
Summercamp, burnout - Las Rozas:
Forest, pool - Madrid:
Heat, galleries - Cordoba:
HEAT, mosque - Cadiz:
Breeze, banyans - Sevilla:
Wall, Macarena - Lisboa:
Tiles, trams - Coimbra:
Conference, hills - Carballo:
Stream, emptiness - Santiago:
Pilgrims, curlicues - Oviedo:
Mists, wandering - Bilbao:
Fiesta, gays
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