10 books like Primary Perception

This book made me see life on Earth in a new way.

Fungi live mostly underground, much less visible than plants or animals. When Merlin Sheldrake started studying fungi at Cambridge, he did this in the Department of Plant Sciences. There is no Department of Fungi Sciences, which helps explain why scientists know so little about them and why society keeps regarding them as less important than plants or animals.

Merlin explains fungi are closer to animals than plants. They are crucial, fascinating, and intelligent beyond ways Western man has words for. He uses language in a sensitive and creative new way to describe and visualize the fungi world. This book is not for fungi lovers (I’m not one); it is for anyone who wants to expand his view of life.

I laughed at Kahneman’s straightforward explanation of how my brain works without making me feel stupid. Apparently, humanness is normal, thank goodness.

He explains the complexities of System 1 and 2 thinking through storytelling, demonstrating what he is teaching about how our brains work. Even though I’d learned about these concepts through academic reading, I now feel like I “get it,” although even that statement is a product of both System 1 and 2 thinking and availability bias. Key takeaways: Intelligence and rationality are not the same, and the research is so substantial in how Systems 1 and 2 work that disbelief is not an option!

It took millennia for the wolf to become “man’s best friend.” At least that was accepted scientific wisdom until a brave Russian scientist and World War II hero decided to replicate the domestication process with foxes. Under the disguise of making fox breeding in fur farms easier, he recruited a team of biologists at a location in Siberia, where foxes were selected for breeding based on their tameness in interaction with humans. To the experimenters’ great surprise, it only took a few decades until the foxes became as tame and human-centered as dogs. A great story of scientific curiosity and courage, and a must-read for anybody interested in evolutionary zoology.

While we think of humans as the pinnacle of evolution, plants are far more successful than humans and other animals, both in terms of biomass, and in their capabilities of interacting with the environment. Mancuso heads the institute of plant neurobiology at the University of Florence, where he studies the neural patterns of plants, continuing where Cleve Backster stopped fifteen years ago in his research on “primary perception” of plants. After having read this fascinating book, you will never interact the same way with your houseplants as before, starting to see them not as a piece of furniture, but as a sentient creature sharing your dwelling, capable of solving complex tasks impossible to humans.

Plants feel things. Cleve Backster, an American detective who used lie detectors when interviewing suspects, discovered that plants made his detector needle swing wildly in response to thoughts he was having. Especially bad ones like that he might put boiling water on their leaves. He ran many experiments and found that plants also have memory, and react if people are lying about something in their presence!

Plants grow better for us when we treat them with love and respect. In return, they grow a warm and healthy look to their leaves which looks pleasing. We then appreciate each other in a loop of positive feedback. This book opened my eyes to what is possible when working with clients, and the fun we can have in helping them to express themselves.

Easy Travel to Other Planets by Ted Mooney, is a fictionalised story of an attempt at another Moon shot idea; the building of an interspecies communication bridge between humans and dolphins. This was a real experiment attempted in the 1960s, by neuroscientist John Lilly – which I made a film about, for the BBC, called The Girl who talked to Dolphins. Like God’s Debris, Mooney’s book challenges our perceptions of reality, and like Varieties of Scientific Experience, it tries to shed light on what it is to be human. Not only does it cover these grand ideas, but it also touches on some very prescient themes – such as our current epidemic of information overload and our existential environmental crisis.

Is it possible to detect deception? Can you really tell if someone’s lying just by looking at their body language? If so, what are the cues? When I was writing Duped, I decided to take a class with the authors, who were former CIA agents. I learned a ton. 

Adler demonstrates that the lie detector is a rather simple machine, "a banal assemblage of medical technologies" (as he calls it) to measure blood pressure and perspiration, that has been widely used in America since its appearance between the wars. It was purported to sort out lies from the truth but the science behind it ranged from junk to speculative, and its evidence has never been accepted in courts of law.  It has not been used anywhere else in the world, and Adler concludes that it “belonged to [the]…American strain of the Enlightenment project to replace personal discretion with science.” As he shows however, personal discretion, in practice, lay at the very heart of its use and popularity. It was no doubt more humane than the “third degree” so commonly used by police to obtain confessions, but it was a machine that manufactured something less than the Truth.

This is a sci-fi thriller with amazing concepts and a page-turning story! Meet Hap Thompson – his job is to take on other people’s memories. He carries bad memories for a few hours and gets paid for the privilege. When he gets landed with a bad memory by someone who won’t take it back, he finds himself on the run. Then, people start disappearing… This is a fab read – refreshing different with some sci-fi elements, but still a thriller by nature. Michael Marshall Smith’s writing is both dark, humorous, and inventive. I wouldn’t say it’s a perfect novel but for the ideas about memory and forgetting, it delivers a lot.

A magnificent synthesis of Bialek and colleagues’ research into how spikes from neurons send information. A strong contender for the most readable serious science book ever published. Even if you only understand a quarter of it (as I did on first reading as a math-shy grad student), the sheer quantity of ideas and the flow of the prose is mind-blowing. As essential a read now as it was in 1997, these ideas have not dated one bit.