50 books like The Mind's Eye

I loved this book because it offers a refreshing view of what neuroscience can and should be. Unlike different, highly credentialed neuroscientists who routinely offer vastly incompatible views of consciousness and who we ultimately are, this book instead focuses on the extraordinary theme of how the brain organizes the engineering of consciousness rather than on the more elusive and controversial deeper questions. 

As an illustration of the many mind-broadening themes broached in this superb book, instinct is often used as the be-all and end-all explanation of certain animal and human behaviors. Of the two hundred or so books I have read on the subject of consciousness and the brain, I have never before come across a more cogent explanation of how instinct arises and sets over many generations. 

This seventeenth-century offering is where the famous Molyneux Man first appears in the form of a question: If a man born blind and capable of distinguishing a cube from a sphere by touch, was suddenly made to see, would he be able to distinguish the two objects by sight alone? The answer was a resounding “no!” Just as we must learn to read, we must learn to see, gradually building up connections between our sense of touch and our sense of sight. This was a revelation to me when I encountered it as a person going blind and learning to not-see. If humans are not exactly born blank slates, we are certainly unfinished ones, whose environments and education supply us with knowledge and brain power to perceive the world.

Perceptual psychologist Lawrence Rosenblum’s book changed the way I thought about my brain on blindness and gave me hope about its ability to adapt. I was astonished by blind painters and mountain bikers, but more importantly, I learned that what often strike us as superpowers, are actually the result of practice and the cross-modal plasticity of the brain. The sighted brains that change after only five days of blindfold and intensive braille training, the experiments that demonstrate how humans can follow a scent trail, and the ways blind people (and sighted people) use echolocation to learn about their micro and macro environments (even if they are not always conscious of it), are just some of Rosenblum’s many examples that are as fun as they are fascinating.

If the word “echolocation” pricked up your ears in my previous recommendation, I think you’ll love this book which is both a biography and a deep dive into how one blind person used the senses he had to become the first person to go around the world. James Holman (1786-1857) lost his sight at the age of 25 while he was an officer in the British Royal Navy. His career was cut short and he refashioned himself as an author and adventurer known as the “blind traveler.” Roberts explains how Holman used his gentleman’s walking stick not only to detect obstacles and level changes in his immediate environment, but also used the sound of the metal tip bouncing off objects to guide him through far-flung regions of the world.

Magical realism is accepting the impossible as a premise. José Saramago creates an inexplicable epidemic of "white blindness" which spares few in a single city. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, where they are victimized by criminals who hold everyone captive, steal food rations, and rape women. One eyewitness to this nightmare guides seven strangers through barren city streets in an uncanny procession through fearsome surroundings. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, this powerful novel of man's will to survive against all odds. José Saramago was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature.

I hoped to like this book, but I didn’t expect to. I don’t usually read YA novels. No matter your normal reading preferences, though, there’s something special here for every reader.

Abbie captures elements of the human condition with artistic and poetic fluency that make it a joy to read her prose. But there’s more to love about this story. Tessa and Weston are two characters I immediately identified with and connected to, because of their authentic feelings and flawed selves.

Finding yourself amid chaos becomes easier when you have someone to share that experience with. Tessa and Weston prove this in a way that’s emotionally moving and authentic. Part coming of age and love story, 100 Days of Sunlight will shine bright long beyond that span of time.

Many thousands of adults have learned to draw better by following Betty Edwards’ course. I am one of them.

In the book, she also explains why so many people (including me) believe they cannot draw. Why, she asks, do children spend so many hours at school learning to write? What if schools devoted that much time to drawing? Why don’t they?

Letting go of thinking in words and starting to use our senses to perceive the world helps us see the world more like it is and less as we believe it is. Betty Edwards provides great methods for getting ‘out of the words’ into the senses. I see more detail around me after having spent some time drawing something around me attentively.

This is a classic book by German-born psychologist Rudolf Arnheim, in which he lays out the principles underlying our perception and understanding of works of visual art.  One of the major principles discussed is the human tendency to see the simplest form possible in any visual array. This ‘simplicity principle’ is also used to explain the intelligence and inventiveness of children’s art. In a brilliant chapter called Growth, Arnheim shows us that children are not striving towards realism; rather they are trying to create the simplest possible recognizable structural equivalent for the object they are representing.  The inventiveness with which children reduce complex forms to simple structural equivalents requires far more intelligence than mindless copying.  

Our daily routine and the full of distractions life of the 21st-century human often draft us away and divert us from the fact that we live in a completely weird and bizarre reality. Steve Hagan digs deeper into this concept and presents amusing and mind-blowing notions about our perception and the things that we made out of it (philosophy and science). 

Are philosophers like detectives, in that they chase their culprit over any terrain, and follow any clue? What can count as a clue?

Given the right context, pretty much anything, a pencil placed here rather than there, a picture of a car, something someone said, a fingerprint. Or are we more like technicians, like the fingerprint expert who only lifts and analyzes prints? The problem with being the fingerprint expert is that it can completely remove philosophers from their originating problems and turn them into mere technicians.

Ned Block is a detective, who has followed clues about the nature of consciousness deep into psychology and neuroscience. Here Block argues that there is a genuine distinction between seeing and thinking, and draws out the consequences of that for our theories of consciousness.