My favorite books for understanding the human mind

This book captures what is so exciting about psychology - that our own minds are at once so familiar yet so deeply weird. There’s so much to be explored!

Warren is a perfect guide, sharing his learning but not getting bogged down with it, as he visits different states of consciousness, some of which we visit every day, like the daydream or the feeling of falling asleep, others, like the lucid dream, might be less familiar.

It’s profound but never loses its sense of fun.

Broks draws upon his experience as a neuropsychologist to tell illuminating case studies of those with brain injury and other anomalies of experience. Woven through are reflections on the philosophy of what it means to have a mind which is based on the meat of the brain and what it means for our sense of selves to have damage to that brain.

Humane and moving, with flashes of dark humour, Broks brings back from the outlying lands of human experiences lessons that are relevant for all of us.

A brilliant and accessible explanation for one of the central mysteries: how and why do we feel like we decide to act? Sometimes, we think we cause events when we don’t; other times, we act without knowing it. What gives?!

Through the story of his research programme, Wegner shows how each experiment fits together to build a satisfying explanation for how the mind fabricates for us a feeling of agency. As well as experiments, the book covers a set of fascinating phenomena, Ouija boards, hypnosis, and possession, and tries to show how they can be made sense of.

The whole thing is a window into how experimental psychologists do their work, as well as a compelling account of the nature of conscious will.

Ong was a Jesuit priest and a professor of English literature with a profound knowledge of ancient cultures. He also had a bold thesis: the invention of written language performs a kind of “software rewrite” (NOT his phrase!) on human experience.

This book is his explanation of the differences between cultures dominated by the oral tradition and modern cultures dominated by the written word. Writing makes a whole set of things possible, like lists of arbitrary items, communication without seeing your audience, freeing ideas from reliance on fallible memory, and so serving abstract, analytic thought.

As well as making us appreciate that our thinking style has been profoundly influenced by the technology of writing, Ong’s book also helps us respect the thinking style of oral cultures. The view from across 10,000 years of human history is dizzying and like the best science fiction, enhances your appreciation of what is possible for the human experience.

The evolution of the mind is not over yet!

Clark is a philosopher and shows with wit and many great examples how our minds evolved to be a tight meshing between our brains, bodies, and the environment. In this account, our human endowment is to naturally absorb technologies, whether as simple as a stick or as complex as the internet, into our thinking and so warp and expand our consciousness and our capacity for thought.

So much discussion of artificial intelligence is about what computers will do better than humans or instead of humans. This book explodes the whole notion: intelligence has always been artificial, and the most interesting questions are about how we’re going to use technology to think. Onwards!