SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Neuroscientist and McGill University professor of psychology Daniel J. Levitin had a surprise hit on his hands with 2006’s This Is Your Brain on Music. He returns with The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload (Allen Lane Canada, $30 cl., Aug.), which draws on the “latest brain science” to help people manage their homes, workplaces, and lives. • In The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter (Random House Canada, $32 cl., Aug.), Montreal psychologist Susan Pinker uses findings from the new field of “social neuroscience” to make the argument that human beings thrive on in-the-flesh encounters with the people around them.
Douglas Coupland offers a meditation on the Internet’s impact on our brains and our culture. In Kitten Clone: The History of the Future at Bell Labs (Random House Canada, $25 pa., Sept.), Coupland reports from inside the corporate offices and labs of Alcatel-Lucent (owner of Bell Laboratories), a French multinational specializing in telecommunications technologies. • Beloved science geek Bob McDonald (host of CBC’s Quirks & Quarks) sits down with the only three Canadian astronauts to “don spacesuits and step outside the International Space Station” in Canadian Spacewalkers: Hadfield, Maclean, and Williams Remember the Ultimate High Adventure (Douglas & McIntyre, $29.95 cl., Oct.).
Q&Q’s fall preview covers books published between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2014 • All information (titles, prices, publication dates, etc.) was supplied by publishers and may have been tentative at Q&Q’s press time