Here are 100 books that The XX Brain fans have personally recommended if you like
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As a techno-optimist, I believe that technology can make us better! Technology should make us stronger and healthier, technology should enable us to do things we couldn’t do without it, and technology should create an equitable future. In 25 years, I want superhuman eyesight, joints, and memory. I want to travel with family and friends both physically and virtually through the metaverse. And I want to make sure that all of our data is used responsibly and ethically to optimize our home and community. All of the books I selected (including mine!) build on these themes painting a picture of a future that is optimistic, and show us how we can be active participants in creating the future we want to see.
Science journalist Sally Adee brings alive the fact that yes, we are electric.
If we could truly understand the way our bodies work electrically and not just chemically, it could open the doors to a revolution in medicine. We would look at the brain and the nervous system in a whole different light; pharmaceuticals would be replaced by electroceuticals; and we might sleep better and live longer.
I recommend this book because I enjoyed going on this journey through history to the future!
Science journalist Sally Adee breaks open the field of bioelectricity—the electric currents that run through our bodies and every living thing—its misunderstood history, and why new discoveries will lead to new ways around antibiotic resistance, cleared arteries, and new ways to combat cancer.
You may be familiar with the idea of our body's biome: the bacterial fauna that populate our gut and can so profoundly affect our health. In We Are Electric we cross into new scientific understanding: discovering your body's electrome.
Every cell in our bodies—bones, skin, nerves, muscle—has a voltage, like a tiny battery. It is the reason…
As a techno-optimist, I believe that technology can make us better! Technology should make us stronger and healthier, technology should enable us to do things we couldn’t do without it, and technology should create an equitable future. In 25 years, I want superhuman eyesight, joints, and memory. I want to travel with family and friends both physically and virtually through the metaverse. And I want to make sure that all of our data is used responsibly and ethically to optimize our home and community. All of the books I selected (including mine!) build on these themes painting a picture of a future that is optimistic, and show us how we can be active participants in creating the future we want to see.
Tan Le is a good friend and kickass tech entrepreneur who founded the neurotech company Emotiv.
She talks with the top neuroscientists and technologists in the area of brain-computer interfaces. But what makes it relatable is how Tan weaves in her own story. Tan is a Vietnamese-born Australian and talks about her own journey creating and developing an EEG headset and growing a tech company.
I recommend this book because I absolutely believe that technology can improve our brain and brain-computer interfaces are our future!
'A highly engaging guided tour through the frontiers of what science knows about how the brain works, how to extend its power and how to fix it when it's broken.' - David Gillespie, author of Sweet Poison and Teen Brain
'Tan Le writes with optimism and compassion about the extraordinary evolution of brain technology. Totally inspiring!' - Wendy McCarthy AO
Technology now allows us to unlock the amazing potential of the human brain in ways we never dreamt were possible. Join award-winning inventor and entrepreneur Tan Le as she criss-crosses the globe, introducing the brilliant neurotech innovators and neuroscientists at…
As a techno-optimist, I believe that technology can make us better! Technology should make us stronger and healthier, technology should enable us to do things we couldn’t do without it, and technology should create an equitable future. In 25 years, I want superhuman eyesight, joints, and memory. I want to travel with family and friends both physically and virtually through the metaverse. And I want to make sure that all of our data is used responsibly and ethically to optimize our home and community. All of the books I selected (including mine!) build on these themes painting a picture of a future that is optimistic, and show us how we can be active participants in creating the future we want to see.
Dr. Rana el Kaliouby is an Egyptian-born computer scientist and tech entrepreneur who co-founded the company Affectiva based on her pioneering work on Emotion AI, a subfield of Artificial Intelligence.
Emotion AI is designed to understand, respond to, and simulate human emotions. Rana believes this technology has profound implications across various sectors, including mental health, education, transportation, and robotics. It can enhance our digital interactions, create empathetic robots, improve road safety by monitoring driver attention, and aid in mental health diagnosis and treatment.
I recommend this book because what’s not to love about building empathy and emotion into technology!
'Rana el Kaliouby's vision for how technology should work in parallel with empathy is bold, inspired and hopeful' Arianna Huffington, founder and CEO of Thrive Global
'This lucid and captivating book by a renowned pioneer of emotion-AI tackles one of the most pressing issues of our time: How can we ensure a future where this technology empowers rather than surveils and manipulates us?' Max Tegmark, professor of physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of Life 3.0
We are entering an empathy crisis. Most of our communication is conveyed through non-verbal cues - facial expressions, tone of voice, body…
Green sketching opened my eyes to the beauty and joy in my life that I’d never noticed before, beauty and joy that cost nothing to me or the planet. It quietened my busy brain, reduced my anxiety, and made me much more resilient. I’m now trying to help others put down their phones and pick up a pencil. Because when we change what we look at, we can change how we feel. And I’m convinced that once we see and appreciate nature’s beauty with fresh eyes, we’ll start to love and take care of it again.
As someone who straddles the sciences and the arts, I devoured this book and loved learning more about why participating in the arts, whether as a creator or a beholder, brings me so much joy.
I had no idea the cells in my heart actively respond to aesthetic stimuli!
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A life-altering journey through the science of neuroaesthetics, which offers proof for how our brains and bodies transform when we participate in the arts—and how this knowledge can improve our health, enable us to flourish, and build stronger communities.
“This book blew my mind!”—Angela Duckworth, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Grit
Many of us think of the arts as entertainment—a luxury of some kind. In Your Brain on Art, authors Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross show how activities from painting and dancing to expressive writing, architecture, and more are essential to our lives.…
I’m a physician and a writer. Together, they create a matrix of practice, research, and writing. I care for patients at the Penn Memory Center and am a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach and study topics at the intersections of bioethics, aging, and the neurosciences. I wrote The Problem of Alzheimer’s: How Science, Culture, and Politics Turned a Rare Disease into a Crisis and What We Can Do About It and the novel Open Wound: The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont and essays for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, The Hill, STAT, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. I raise whippets, and I’m a passionate reader of the physician and poet John Keats.
This first-person account of living with a biomarker-defined diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease is a clearly written story of two very distinct, even antagonistic experiences. There’s the highly subjective experience of being a patient and the highly objective experience of being a physician who has diagnosed and cared for persons with the same disease. In one book is one narrative of two perspectives embodied in one person. The result is an unadorned account of what it’s like to lose one’s mind just a little bit at a time. Case in point is his account of apathy. I’m routinely prescribing this book to my patients.
Dr Daniel Gibbs is one of 50 million people worldwide with an Alzheimer's disease diagnosis. Unlike most patients with Alzheimer's, however, Dr Gibbs worked as a neurologist for twenty-five years, caring for patients with the very disease now affecting him. Also unusual is that Dr Gibbs had begun to suspect he had Alzheimer's several years before any official diagnosis could be made. Forewarned by genetic testing showing he carried alleles that increased the risk of developing the disease, he noticed symptoms of mild cognitive impairment long before any tests would have alerted him. In this highly personal account, Dr Gibbs…
By Andrew E. Budson and Maureen K. O'Connor
Author
Why are we passionate about this?
As a neurologist and neuropsychologist team who have spent their entire clinical, teaching, and research careers focused on individuals and their families experiencing memory loss, Alzheimer’s disease, and dementia, our goal is simple. We want to empower individuals and their families with the tools they need to manage memory loss, Alzheimer’s disease, and dementia. We work to balance pharmacological and nonpharmacological management, as well as the needs of the individual with those of their family. Reading books like the ones in our list plus articles in medical journals keeps us current with the progress in the science of dementia and the humanity of individuals and families living with the disease.
First, this book provides a wonderful history of the important discoveries of the different aspects of the disease. You also learn the stories behind many aspects of the disease that are now taken for granted—even with our 25+ years of treating people with this disease and conducting research to understand it better, we learned a lot. Dr. Karlawish also explains why research into dementia languished for more than 50 years. Finally, he raises many thought-provoking ethical issues that people with dementia, doctors, and society will need to wrestle with if we are going to solve “The Problem of Alzheimer’s.”
A definitive and compelling book on one of today's most prevalent illnesses.
In 2020, an estimated 5.8 million Americans had Alzheimer’s, and more than half a million died because of the disease and its devastating complications. 16 million caregivers are responsible for paying as much as half of the $226 billion annual costs of their care. As more people live beyond their seventies and eighties, the number of patients will rise to an estimated 13.8 million by 2050.
Part case studies, part meditation on the past, present and future of the disease, The Problem of Alzheimer's traces Alzheimer’s from its…
I’m a physician and a writer. Together, they create a matrix of practice, research, and writing. I care for patients at the Penn Memory Center and am a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach and study topics at the intersections of bioethics, aging, and the neurosciences. I wrote The Problem of Alzheimer’s: How Science, Culture, and Politics Turned a Rare Disease into a Crisis and What We Can Do About It and the novel Open Wound: The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont and essays for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, The Hill, STAT, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. I raise whippets, and I’m a passionate reader of the physician and poet John Keats.
This book is a kind of detective story. It returns to the scene of a long-ago committed crime, namely the incomplete diagnosis and substandard care Jerry Weinstein received in an indifferent health care system and a culture haunted by stigmas. The authors are a masterful team. Bruce Miller is a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco’s Memory and Aging Center. He’s a widely-recognized expert in the diagnosis and classification of neurodegenerative diseases. Cindy Weinstein is a professor of English literature who focuses on the 19th century American novel. Weinstein’s expertise is Herman Melville, the master of narratives of dissection.
Jerry, Cindy’s father, died in 1997 after a years-long struggle with an inadequately diagnosed and neglected dementia. Together, physicians and literary scholars reconstruct what happened. By putting words to the problem, they make sense of what was painful nonsense. This is the book to understand the value of…
The moving story of an English professor studying neurology in order to understand and come to terms with her father's death from Alzheimer's.
In 1985, when Cindy Weinstein was a graduate student at UC Berkeley, her beloved father, Jerry, was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease. He was fifty-eight years old. Twelve years later, at age seventy, he died having lost all of his memories-along with his ability to read, write, and speak.
Finding the Right Words follows Weinstein's decades-long journey to come to terms with her father's dementia as both a daughter and an English professor. Although her lifelong love…
With more than 6-million Americans living with Alzheimer’s, my story is a shared narrative. Because reading creates empathy, I work to widen the perspective of my writing and include voices different from my own. Thanks to neuroplasticity, healthy brains have the ability to keep changing and learning. Each one of these books offers a helpful nudge in a new direction. My essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications including the Washington Post, Luxe, and Variable West, and are listed as notable in the 2019 Best American Science and Nature Writing. I’m currently at work on a second memoir about motherhood and the way travel cultivates a willing acceptance of uncertainty.
I was a new mother when I read this Alzheimer’s memoir and immediately felt that I’d found a friend. Elizabeth Cohen is funny, lyrical, and sometimes (understandably) frustrated as she takes on the bruising balance of managing a career while simultaneously caring for her aging father and her young daughter. The book is a testimony to the healing power of story and provided a valuable model to me as I sought to make sense of my own family experience by committing my memories to the page.
'Daddy walks around, dropping pieces of language behind him, the baby following, picking them up. He asks for 'the liquid substance from the spigot'. She asks for 'wawa'. He wants a tissue to wipe his 'blowing device'. She says 'Wipe, Mummy' and points to her runny nose. The brain of my father and the brain of my daughter have crossed. On their ways to opposite sides of life, they have made an X-On his way out of life, Daddy has passed her the keys.' Soon after her daughter's first birthday, her husband walked out of their rambling old house in…
I am a professor of neurology at the University of Cincinnati, interested in the many ways in which we acquire impairments in movements, in cognition, or in both. I have sought to measure these behaviors, quantify their responses to different pharmacological treatments, and determine how they inform the biology of the aging brain. In publications along the way, I have increasingly questioned how we classify neurological diseases and treat those affected.
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.
Have the social safety nets, environmental protections, and policies to redress wealth and income inequality enacted after World War II contributed to declining rates of dementia today-and how do we improve brain health in the future?
For decades, researchers have chased a pharmaceutical cure for memory loss. But despite the fact that no disease-modifying biotech treatments have emerged, new research suggests that dementia rates have actually declined in the United States and Western Europe over the last decade. Why is this happening? And what does it mean for brain health in the future?
Children’s stories about memory loss, Alzheimer’s, and dementia resonate with me because I know firsthand how difficult it is to care for someone with this disease. My Aunt Luella had Alzheimer’s, and I cared for her in my home. When my aunt no longer remembered me, my heart ached. I felt hopeless, afraid. I can only imagine how difficult it is for a child to watch as a beloved grandparent forgets them. I found these five books to be helpful and inspiring. They offer hope. They embrace the love that still exists.
Granny Can’t Remember Me is told through the child’s eyes. Six-year-old Joey talks about having two grandmas, one who lives in Florida, and one who lives a few blocks away.
His nearby Granny doesn’t remember him, but she does remember stories of when she was young, and when his mother was a child. Joey loves hearing her stories, and playing cards with her. He loves Granny and knows deep down that she loves him, too.
This story was written by a doctor whose mother and father-in-law both had Alzheimer’s. As I read it, I was reminded of my aunt who also had Alzheimer’s. She regaled me with tales of her youth but had no memories of her present. Children will relate to this story as it’s told from a child’s point of view.
Granny Can’t Remember Me is a lighthearted picture book about Alzheimer’s disease and dementia told from the perspective of a six-year-old boy, appropriate for children in preschool through early elementary school (ages 3 – 8). Granny can’t remember that Joey likes soccer and rockets and dogs. Granny can’t remember much of anything. But with Granny’s stories of her Three Best Days, Joey knows she loves him just the same.Alzheimer’s disease is more and more common, and many young children experience this sometimes scary and sad family situation. Granny Can’t Remember Me shows a boy’s acceptance and love for his grandmother…
