Here are 100 books that The Meaning of the Body fans have personally recommended if you like
The Meaning of the Body.
Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.
I'm a designer, a teacher, a father, a husband, and a friend. I love beautiful things and personally want to know why I find certain things more beautiful than others. I love learning about the world and finding connections between everyday experience and art. When I say “art” I really am blending art, design, architecture, landscape architecture, product design, etc. I believe everything is connected in some way. If I were to pigeonhole myself in any way I would call myself a generalist design thinker. I draw, I write, I make little objects, I make big objects – I see very little difference in any of these things.
This book is essential to anyone who wants to come into the meaning of art, design, and architecture.
Give it time and it will undoubtedly change your life. Dewey’s central argument is that experience itself is aesthetic, that we need to pay deep attention to the quality inherent in every experience.
Based on John Dewey's lectures on esthetics, delivered as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard in 1932, Art as Experience has grown to be considered internationally as the most distinguished work ever written by an American on the formal structure and characteristic effects of all the arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature.
I'm a designer, a teacher, a father, a husband, and a friend. I love beautiful things and personally want to know why I find certain things more beautiful than others. I love learning about the world and finding connections between everyday experience and art. When I say “art” I really am blending art, design, architecture, landscape architecture, product design, etc. I believe everything is connected in some way. If I were to pigeonhole myself in any way I would call myself a generalist design thinker. I draw, I write, I make little objects, I make big objects – I see very little difference in any of these things.
This book outlines how the visual field operates at a psychological level.
I am an architect and cannot believe that we don’t teach straight from this and other Arnheim books more often. If you want to know what is happening to you, why you get chills up your spine when looking at art, read this book.
Arnheim is a psychologist, not a designer, so he breaks art down from this perspective.
For thirty-five years Visual Thinking has been the gold standard for art educators, psychologists, and general readers alike. In this seminal work, Arnheim, author of "The Dynamics of Architectural Form", "Film as Art", "Toward a Psychology of Art", and "Art and Visual Perception", asserts that all thinking (not just thinking related to art) is basically perceptual in nature, and that the ancient dichotomy between seeing and thinking, between perceiving and reasoning, is false and misleading. This is an indispensable tool for students and for those interested in the arts.
I'm a designer, a teacher, a father, a husband, and a friend. I love beautiful things and personally want to know why I find certain things more beautiful than others. I love learning about the world and finding connections between everyday experience and art. When I say “art” I really am blending art, design, architecture, landscape architecture, product design, etc. I believe everything is connected in some way. If I were to pigeonhole myself in any way I would call myself a generalist design thinker. I draw, I write, I make little objects, I make big objects – I see very little difference in any of these things.
Where Arnheim provides a psychological foundation for art as experience, Kepes deconstructs the visual field graphically and shows us how all of its elements operate.
This is another book that doesn’t get enough attention anymore. Kepes shows many diagrams as examples but also shows work produced by artists and graphic designers and discusses how the visual field is operating in each case.
My two copies of this book are so littered with underlines and marginalia that I may have to buy a third!
I'm a designer, a teacher, a father, a husband, and a friend. I love beautiful things and personally want to know why I find certain things more beautiful than others. I love learning about the world and finding connections between everyday experience and art. When I say “art” I really am blending art, design, architecture, landscape architecture, product design, etc. I believe everything is connected in some way. If I were to pigeonhole myself in any way I would call myself a generalist design thinker. I draw, I write, I make little objects, I make big objects – I see very little difference in any of these things.
This is outside the box a little for design-related books but there is an important reason why I list it.
I began with Johnson’s The Meaning of the Body and end with The Strange Order of Things because they are both body-based studies. Ultimately, we feel the way we do about art and design because of our bodies, our sensing, and our interaction with the world.
It is important to know as a designer, but also simply as a human, that the foundation of our feeling about art and design is the same as our feeling about the taste of a good soup (Dewey reference) or the feeling of a nice breeze.
We do a bit of damage to art and design when we attempt to separate it from everyday living.
'Damasio undertakes nothing less than a reconstruction of the natural history of the universe ... [A] brave and honest book' The New York Times Book Review
The Strange Order of Things is a pathbreaking investigation into homeostasis, the condition of that regulates human physiology within the range that makes possible not only survival but also the flourishing of life.
Antonio Damasio makes clear that we descend biologically, psychologically and even socially from a long lineage that begins with single living cells; that our minds and cultures are linked by an invisible thread to the ways and means of ancient unicellular…
I'm a professor of cognitive and forensic cognitive science. I have consulted on hundreds of criminal cases, most involving violent crime, and have published a body of research on the cognitive dynamics involved in eyewitness memory, officer-involved shootings, and training for IED detection in counterterrorism environments. The dynamics I've studied in the law-enforcement/forensic realm have proven to be important in the realm of firefighting and other first-response emergency services, as I also discuss in my book Thinking Under Pressure. This is an important field of study across the emergency and first response services, and will probably become more important in the future.
We know from the work of Bartlett and Loftus that memory is malleable, changing in the directions of gist, brevity, and personal belief.
This book provides a more modern academic view of these phenomena, demonstrating why eyewitness memory, and other aspects of memory such as those involved in combat situations and officer-involved shootings, may be entirely inaccurate without any ill will or prevarication on the part of the given witness.
Not an easy read, but an important one for those who wish to have a full understanding of memory in the criminal justice system.
A decade or so of intensive research on false memory has revealed much that is not well understood outside the circles of scientists who specialize in such research. However, this research has produced findings that have major implications for a number of fields that are central to human welfare, such as medicine and the law. This book has been written to make those findings accessible to a much wider audience than research specialists including child protective services workers, clinical psychologists, defense attorneys, elementary and secondary teachers, general medical practitioners, journalists, judges, nurses, police investigators, prosecutors, and psychiatrists. For that reason,…
My interest in how music makes sense was first piqued when, as a music student at the Royal Academy of Music in London, I met a blind child who, despite having learning difficulties, could reproduce the most complex music on the piano just by listening. Put simply, he had a better musical ear than I did, as a prize-winning student at a top conservatoire. Since that early experience, I have devoted my life to exploring just how music works (without the need for conceptual understanding) and how teachers can use the universality of music to promote social inclusion.
This is one of those rare textbooks that will make you smile with its delightful anecdotes that lighten what could so easily have become a dense academic treatise.
Huron writes in a warm, engaging way, producing an eminently readable book. He effortlessly shows how academic research findings affect the musical experience of ordinary listeners.
Sweet Anticipation serves as a great introduction to this important topic of how music makes sense and continues to move us, even after many repeated hearings of the same piece.
The psychological theory of expectation that David Huron proposes in Sweet Anticipation grew out of the author's experimental efforts to understand how music evokes emotions. These efforts evolved into a general theory of expectation that will prove informative to readers interested in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology as well as those interested in music. The book describes a set of psychological mechanisms and illustrates how these mechanisms work in the case of music. All examples of notated music can be heard on the Web.
Huron proposes that emotions evoked by expectation involve five functionally distinct response systems: reaction responses (which…
I'm a lifelong dog lover and the author of four nonfiction books. I currently live with two rescue dogs, Marlowe and Nuka (the unofficial co-authors of my book). I decided to write a self-help book after noticing two trends during the recent pandemic: people were struggling to feel happy and optimistic, and people were adding a dog to their household, many for the first time. We all marvel at how our dogs find it so easy to enjoy life, and I was determined to find out what we could learn from them! During my research, I learned so much about how dogs think and feel, and I love sharing this information with other dog lovers.
Alexandra Horowitz is a rare person: a leading expert in her field who writes in a friendly and fascinating way. Her books are a mixture of personal insights and solid research that explores dog behavior and biology to help us understand what our dogs are thinking, feeling, and wanting.
Inside of a Dog will give you a new perspective on your furry friends and improve your dog parenting skills. You’ll also get to know Horowitz’s dog Pumpernickel (who has since passed away) in short blurbs about his daily life and little quirks.
I really enjoyed reading this book and I learned so much about how dogs experience the world. It should be required reading for anyone welcoming a dog into their home.
As an unabashed dog lover, Alexandra Horowitz is naturally curious about what her dog thinks and what she knows. As a cognitive scientist she is intent on understanding the minds of animals who cannot say what they know or feel.
This is a fresh look at the world of dogs -- from the dog's point of view. The book introduces the reader to the science of the dog -- their perceptual and cognitive abilities -- and uses that introduction to draw a picture of what it might be like to bea dog. It answers questions no other dog book can…
I'm a professor of cognitive and forensic cognitive science. I have consulted on hundreds of criminal cases, most involving violent crime, and have published a body of research on the cognitive dynamics involved in eyewitness memory, officer-involved shootings, and training for IED detection in counterterrorism environments. The dynamics I've studied in the law-enforcement/forensic realm have proven to be important in the realm of firefighting and other first-response emergency services, as I also discuss in my book Thinking Under Pressure. This is an important field of study across the emergency and first response services, and will probably become more important in the future.
This 1932 work by Bartlett demonstrates many of the dynamics that Loftus would later use to conceptualize eyewitness memory, and that many scholars in law enforcement psychology, including myself, use on an everyday basis.
Bartlett showed that memories are not static representations of reality, admittedly with occasional lapses into forgetting.
Rather, in both the visual and verbal realms, Bartlett demonstrated that memories become abbreviated, operate in the direction of core or gist, and may be completely reconfigured in the direction of personal belief.
This work demonstrates strongly the fragility of human perception, memory, and the thought which derives from these more basic processes, and shows us how difficult it may be to develop vertical accounts of actual crimes in investigative and courtroom settings.
In 1932, Cambridge University Press published Remembering, by psychologist, Frederic Bartlett. The landmark book described fascinating studies of memory and presented the theory of schema which informs much of cognitive science and psychology today. In Bartlett's most famous experiment, he had subjects read a Native American story about ghosts and had them retell the tale later. Because their background was so different from the cultural context of the story, the subjects changed details in the story that they could not understand. Based on observations like these, Bartlett developed his claim that memory is a process of reconstruction, and that this…
A philosophy professor, my central interest has always been something historical: what is going on in this strange modern world we live in? Addressing this required forty years of background work in the natural sciences, history, social sciences, and the variety of contemporary philosophical theories that try to put them all together. In the process, I taught philosophy courses on philosophical topics, social theory, and the sciences, wrote books, and produced video courses, mostly focused on that central interest. The books listed are some of my favorites to read and to teach. They are crucial steps on the journey to understand who we are in this unprecedented modern world.
This is the best single book summarizing contemporary scientific knowledge on what makes humans different from other animals. It strikes a middle path between “romantics” who want to believe dolphins and primates can do everything we can and “killjoys” who try to maintain more traditional notions of human superiority.
But if there is a “gap” between us and other animals, exactly what is it? Suddendorf tracks the question from one field of possible answers to the next, from linguistics to anthropology to archaeology to primatology to cognitive science.
The book reads like a detective story – I couldn’t put it down.
There exists an undeniable chasm between the capacities of humans and those of animals. Our minds have spawned civilizations and technologies that have changed the face of the Earth, whereas even our closest animal relatives sit unobtrusively in their dwindling habitats. Yet despite longstanding debates, the nature of this apparent gap has remained unclear. What exactly is the difference between our minds and theirs?In The Gap , psychologist Thomas Suddendorf provides a definitive account of the mental qualities that separate humans from other animals, as well as how these differences arose. Drawing on two decades of research on apes, children,…
I'm a writer, programmer, traveler and avid reader of interesting things. For the last ten years I've been experimenting to find out how to learn and think better. I don't promise I have all the answers, just a place to start.
Harvard-educated cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham is one of the foremost experts in educational psychology. While the title of this book may not sound so appealing, it’s really a tight summary of some of the most important principles of psychology to learning more effectively. Willingham’s blog and other books are also excellent resources for someone who wants to understand how to learn well.
Easy-to-apply, scientifically-based approaches for engaging students in the classroomCognitive scientist Dan Willingham focuses his acclaimed research on the biological and cognitive basis of learning. His book will help teachers improve their practice by explaining how they and their students think and learn. It reveals-the importance of story, emotion, memory, context, and routine in building knowledge and creating lasting learning experiences. * Nine, easy-to-understand principles with clear applications for the classroom * Includes surprising findings, such as that intelligence is malleable, and that you cannot develop "thinking skills" without facts * How an understanding of the brain's workings can help teachers…
