Love How the Brain Lost Its Mind? Readers share 100 books like How the Brain Lost Its Mind...

This book, which went viral in the 1960s just when I was looking for an academic position as a philosopher of science, saved me professionally. Kuhn’s book upended the prevailing view, which I opposed, that the key to understanding how science works is exposing the logic of scientific reasoning.

His book makes a compelling case that the history of science decisively undermines the prevailing view. I admire how Kuhn here uses the history of science—from Galileo and Newton to Einstein and quantum theory—to expose the role that unproven assumptions play in formulating scientific theories and to show that it is changing assumptions that are the primary driver of theory change. I also admire the clarity of his writing.

This book explains the tight connection between Alzheimer’s disease and education, health, income, and environment, and why the rate of Alzheimer’s disease in the population actually decreased in the decades following the most important societal changes enacted after World War II. Social safety, environmental protections, and income inequality have had far greater impact than any of the pharmacological approaches ever attempted. The authors make the compelling case that brain health is intimately connected to societal health.

Stan Prusiner received the Nobel Prize of Medicine in 1997 for identifying what at the time was considered a novel mechanism of neurodegeneration: the prions. These “infectious proteins” were responsible for ravaging the brains of animals suffering from scrapie and mad cow disease, and of humans with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Although I have come to doubt that prions are a cause of rapidly progressive dementia and may instead represent a consequence, Prusiner’s memoir is filled with moments of skepticism, self-doubt, adversity, and intellectual rivalries –the ingredients for a gripping drama in neurosciences. 

This collection of essays blew my mind. Researchers in a range of disciplines were asked to elaborate on why a given idea in their field should be put to rest. There is a chapter dedicated to big data, nature versus nurture, cause and effect, race, Linnaean classification, etc. The book’s essays inspired me to shape a section on “Reductionism and related ideas that will die” as part of a solicited article I wrote with Tony Lang in 2018 aiming to predict the future of Parkinson’s disease research in the 2020s (Ben Stecher credited it as his reason to relocate to Cincinnati to work with us in our CCBP study). This book is also a reminder that progress requires new ideas, and most cannot emerge without first abandoning outdated ones (as Kuhn articulated).  

An idea that must die in neurology is the clinico-pathologic model of classifying neurodegenerative diseases: abnormalities on brain… show more.

I truly loved this book because Dr. Daniel Amen is the best in his class. He is a dedicated brain scientist, author, and life changer. I’ve read all of his books because they teach us all how to benefit our brains to change our lives forever.

This book has helped me personally, and so has his research. He's a personal friend and one hell of a game-changer when it comes to recognizing the importance of altering the conversation from mental health to brain health.

He is an important figure of this or any time; the world is lucky he's here to make us all better, one brain at a time. 

This fascinating book is essentially the story of prefrontal lobotomies and the surgery that was developed to carry out the procedure. Although it did help certain violent patients, it had serious side effects not recognized initially and was used inappropriately on too many patients (including President Kennedy’s sister).

The book recounts the history of why the procedure was developed and many of the scientists and surgeons involved. It provides a perfect case study of the caution needed when a new, thought to be miraculous, treatment for any disease is first tried.

We neuroscientists know a lot about how brains are, but not how they come to be. This book fills that huge hole: it explains how genetics and development shape the growing brain, and the consequences this has for our personalities and our mental disorders. Mitchell’s thesis is that the stochastic nature of development is key to understanding much of the variation between brains, and it has changed the way I think about the wiring of brains.

This book picks up brilliantly from where Zero to Birth leaves off. It’s the story of how the brain encodes the reality of the world outside the womb, how our experiences change the brain, and how we acquire knowledge, skills, and sociability.

I found this book to be extremely readable. It’s full of fascinating and illustrative examples of how the human brain continues to change to function effectively in the real world. 

I love this book because it reveals that we are all creatures of neuronal habit, which brainwashers exploit to their own benefit. The neurons that trigger most frequently tend to dominate our thoughts. I see how the brain science revealed in Taylor’s book helps to account for our current Age of Misinformation.

With advertiser-click business models, social media allows would-be brainwashers to repeat and spread their messages beyond their former wildest imaginations. They need only plant a misinformation seed to see it spread virally by users whose neurons have been preconditioned to accept and like the message. I feel that social media regulations are needed to mitigate the creation of echo chambers in which brainwashed messages sow political polarization that threatens to make nations ungovernable.

I was fascinated while reading this book because it taught me so much about how the brain works, why we are the way we are, and how our brains differ. I enjoyed how the author debunked that if we’re more “right-brained,” we’re more creative, and if we’re more “left-brained,” we’re more creative.

The concept is a whole lot more nuanced than that. I also appreciated her take on nature vs. nurture and how that impacts the way our brains work. It took me a long time to read this because there was so much information to digest, but I felt like the education I received from this book was invaluable.