100 books like Remember

This book is a brilliant ethnography and one of the first books I read as a young anthropology student, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman.

It is about a Hmong family, living in California, that has an epileptic child and their interactions at a children’s hospital. The book came back into my life when my second daughter started having seizures and we were admitted into the same children’s hospital where the book was researched.

One of the doctors knew I was an anthropologist and reminded me of the book. Despite the cultural difference between myself and the Hmong family, I could see myself in their fear, their hope, and their desire to make sense of having a very ill child.

Neuroscientist György Buzsáki believes that focusing on human mental constructs (imagination, attention, instinct) gets in the way of seeing things from the brain’s perspective. Rather than being a blank slate waiting for experiences to etch new pictures onto it, the brain comes equipped with a huge reserve of built-in patterns, each one created by connected groups of neurons. In his view, memory formation is a game of matching those patterns with meaningful experiences so that your brain can better predict the future and the consequences of your actions. I walked away from this book with my brain very much changed. 

What if addiction isn’t a chronic relapsing disease, as described by the National Institute on Drug Abuse? What if a better way to think about it is as a type of learning disorder? Neuroscientist and author Marc Lewis, himself a recovering addict, makes his compelling argument through the stories of five people suffering from substance use disorders. This insightful book left me believing that the attempt to fit addiction into rigid categories does a disservice to the complexity of this condition.

I loaned this pocket-sized gem to a neurologist friend who never gave it back, so I bought myself another copy. Author A.J. Lees is a leading Parkinson’s disease expert who has a bone to pick with the establishment and how medical science is practiced today. This soulful, lyrical, novella-length book explores the inspiration Lees took from the prolific writer William Burroughs, whose book The Naked Lunch is one of the best-known works of the beatnik generation. Lees follows Burroughs’ path into the Amazon, where Lees tries the medicinal plant yage, a drug he hopes could help Parkinson’s sufferers. 

Marjorie Woollacott is a top-tier neuroscientist who started her scientific career believing that our minds, the brain, was a purely physical entity controlled by chemicals and electrical pulses. That all changed one day when she experimented with meditation for the first time - her world changed.

Over the years, as she continued with her meditation practice, she was faced with changing her belief about the mind, about what human consciousness really is. Her book pairs her research as a neuroscientist with her self-revelations about the mind’s spiritual power. Between the scientific and spiritual worlds, Dr. Woollacott investigates the existence of a non-physical and infinitely powerful mind.

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.

A concise introduction to the beating heart of the ancient mind-body problem – consciousness and free will. Searle, famous for his Chinese Room argument that is featured in the book, engages with contemporary scientific theories of consciousness, which is uncommon for philosophers. What is even rarer is that Searle professes himself perplexed when it comes to reconciling his feelings of acting freely with the laws of physics that appear to rule out free will.

An extraordinary gem of a booklet that considers the many ways that four lines of a single poem, composed by an 8th century Chinese Buddhist, have been translated into modern idiom. It is amazing how a mere twenty ideograms, depicting a mountain and forest scene devoid of people, can illuminate the variety and subtlety of consciousness. I recommend the 2016 edition with additional translations.

I love books that see ways to bridge domains of experience and understanding normally kept apart, and this book does that brilliantly. I was so touched by the author’s personal story of grief and its relationship to her experience of art in the rural community in which she was raised.

But I also learned immensely about how this talented neuropsychologist channeled that experience into studies that helped me understand the neurological components of grief, including how to diminish their amplitude through thoughtful practice.

For me, it provided a new conceptual framework for “learning to die,” a new sense of the ancient maxim of philosophy. 

No, this book is not by John Coates the corporate law professor. It's by another John Coates, who was a Wall Street trader and became a neuroscientist (!).

The descriptions of the physiology of risk-taking are not only fascinating in their own right but also deeply intuitive, and should be of enormous help to regulators trying to address banker misbehavior. They give the lie to the idea that simple stories—people are good or bad! It’s all about incentives!—can do a good job in explaining what happened.

This book makes clear that we have to understand the role of biology as well. People can’t just turn their risk-taking tendencies and reactions on and off at will. We’ve seen what happens when banks and regulators don’t take that into account.