100 books like We Are Our Brains

Awakenings is the novel-length true story of the patients comatose for decades from sleeping-sickness, a disease that reared its head in the 1920s and then died out.

I consider Oliver Sacks the master storyteller of medical mysteries, and he kept me completely riveted with his descriptions of watching these patients wake up when given the drug L-Dopa, re-entering the world after many decades. The story gives me chills every time I think about it.

I read Darkness Visible in the midst of my worst depressive episode around 2008. I remember relating completely to his vivid descriptions of highly abstract psychological sensations, impending doom, for example, in which one feels askew to her or his surroundings, like death is imminent but you don’t know from where or how. Styron describes depression as being not unlike physical pain, and that moment in which you simply and utterly succumb to a kind of unprecedented existential suffering, if you will. It is a moment of agony, tender, fierce and absolute. Without a hint of self-indulgence, his rendering of depression is immaculate, a reckoning of the self, a crucible.

It just blows my mind any time I read it, the same way it did the first time. Huxley was way ahead of his time when he wrote this influential book, and he was one of the first prophets of the New Age and the Age of Consciousness.

I was deeply touched by his intimate descriptions of his own experiences with LSD and Mescaline and the way it opened his mind to understanding the complexities of our consciousness beyond our regular and daily way of perceiving the world.

One of my favorite rock bands, The Doors, is named after this book, and it gives me ultimate pleasure to listen to Jim Morrison while reading it. What an experience! 

Veronica is a professor of psychiatry with a special interest in psychosis such as schizophrenia and especially those that are seen in women after childbirth. These states of altered consciousness and the memories they produce give us insights into the nature of mental illness and the making of memories. The book develops as a series of case studies that are gently described in relation to the different brain regions that are involved in the experiences with a simple-to-understand diagram. Bringing together her clinical insights with beautiful perspectives from prose and poetry as well as from philosophers especially Henri Bergson, she makes a compelling case for memories being the core of what we as humans are.

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 loved this book because it offers a refreshing view of what neuroscience can and should be. Unlike different, highly credentialed neuroscientists who routinely offer vastly incompatible views of consciousness and who we ultimately are, this book instead focuses on the extraordinary theme of how the brain organizes the engineering of consciousness rather than on the more elusive and controversial deeper questions. 

As an illustration of the many mind-broadening themes broached in this superb book, instinct is often used as the be-all and end-all explanation of certain animal and human behaviors. Of the two hundred or so books I have read on the subject of consciousness and the brain, I have never before come across a more cogent explanation of how instinct arises and sets over many generations. 

Helen Thomson’s Unthinkable follows her around the world as she travels to meet individuals with some of the strangest neurological conditions imaginable.

Thomson is a respected journalist, and her writing talent really shines in describing these cases and how they are tied back to abnormalities in brain function. Unthinkable will teach you some neuroscience, but most of all it’s just a really fun read.

I came across this “comic” book while researching my own book, The Brain Defense, and was immediately seduced by the terrific graphics and simple storytelling that takes readers on a journey through the brain via dreamy neuro landscapes including forests and caves populated by various creatures, beasts, and a giant squid. I enjoyed reading this and marveling over the images with my young son.

This was a much-needed cautionary examination of the increasing hype about neuroscience. Following a period in which neuroscience suddenly became a pop culture phenomenon, Brainwashed aims to tamp things down. The book takes issue with how mainstream media trumpeted studies that supposedly show how the brain “lights up” when we kiss, listen to music or engage in other activities. Satel and Lilienfied explain what brain scans and neuroscientific reports really reveal and don’t reveal.

V. S. Ramachandran is a gifted experimentalist and writer who does not hesitate to pursue deep and important questions about our minds. Rather than employing expensive imaging or large sample sizes, he is more likely to use a cardboard box, an old stereopticon, or a rubber hand in his experiments. 

His creativity in finding concrete ways to test seemingly vague but interesting claims about our minds has led to several breakthroughs, in our understanding of phantom limbs and our ability to treat phantom pain, and also in our study or synesthesia—cases in which people see numbers as having colors, for example.

As I can attest, he is able to transmit to his students the idea that pursuing scientific questions can thrilling, fulfilling, and so much fun that you can’t wait to get to work in the morning.