The best books on what makes humans so smart

Why this book?

How have human groups been able to adapt themselves to almost every kind of ecology on the planet – from rain forests, to savannah, to deserts, to high altitudes, and even to the frozen arctic itself?

Henrich shows how our capacity for cultural learning is the key, enabling knowledge and skills to accumulate across generations. And that capacity, in turn, depends on a suite of cognitive adaptations (for mentalizing, for language, for moral thinking) that likely evolved through forms of gene-culture co-evolution from simpler versions previously present in other animals.

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Why this book?

What is it for a thought to be conscious? Dehaene reviews evidence (much of it from his own lab) supporting the global workspace theory of consciousness. Entry into that workspace enables a wide range of cognitive systems (for affective responding, for reasoning, and for decision making) to consume and respond to signals generated elsewhere within specialized subsystems of the mind. And the “gatekeeper” of entry into the workspace is directed attention.

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Why this book?

This is an earlier incarnation of the global workspace theory of consciousness (which in turn follows up on Baars’ book from nearly a decade earlier, titled A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness). Although some of the evidence Baars draws on is a little bit dated today, the theory is still valid, and the book is a great read.

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Why this book?

Is intelligence innate, or is it a product of upbringing and circumstances? Of course, it is both. Nisbett reviews the nature-nurture debate with an emphasis on nurture, showing how cultural practices (even as simple as how frequently young children get spoken to by adults) and later schooling collectively make an immense difference.

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Why this book?

Wrangham makes a powerful case that the critical cultural innovation underlying the evolution of distinctively human intelligence was the capacity to harness fire and cook food. Since cooking makes food more digestible, the practice enabled our ancestors to swap out the large guts that are characteristic of the other great apes like chimpanzees, replacing them with much larger brains instead.

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