When my kids were toddlers, there was a Burger King in the neighborhood with an indoor playground. It was glorious. A random guy walked up to me while we were there. “How do you do it, you know, the whole Dad thing” he asked. "Well… you don’t necessarily need to do a whole lot. Mostly just show up. Stick around." Never mentioned that by this time, I’d written and/or illustrated at least a couple dozen children’s books. I asked my nine-year-old daughter how she’d describe me as a Dad. “Most people think you’re creative, but I think you’re pretty average.” That’s good enough for me.
I read this book a few years ago. Some of its essays really stuck with me. This is a popular science book, largely having to do with the limitations of popular science. I like to read anything that challenges my assumptions. Spending so much time in Dad mode, your brain can really atrophy.
My Dad was always interested in science. He never finished high school. In the pre-internet days, he subscribed to science magazines. He read instruction manuals cover to cover. I think he would’ve really enjoyed this book.
There is so much we don’t know. We tend to misinterpret what we do. Too often, we have good ideas and abandon them. This book serves as a reminder that creativity requires diligence and reflection alongside imagination.
At its core, I think these essays speak with indomitable optimism. Things could be better. My kids will grow up to be much more…
Over 150 of the world's leading scientists and thinkers offer their choice of the ideas, strategies and arguments that will help all of us understand our world, and its future, better. This title includes contributions from: Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Clay Shirky, Daniel Goleman, Sam Harris, Lee Smolin, Matt Ridley, Mark Henderson, David Rowan, Sir Martin Rees, Craig Venter, Brian Eno, Jaron Lanier and David Brooks ...among others. With his organisation Edge.org, the literary agent and all-purpose intellectual impresario John Brockman has brought together the most influential thinkers of our age. Every year he sets them a question,…
I’m a science and technology journalist who has reported on neurotech and bioelectricity for over 15 years, for publications includingNew Scientist, IEEE Spectrum and Quartz. After a formative experience in a DARPA brain-stimulation experiment, I began to dig into the history and science of bioelectricity, trying to understand both the science at the level of membrane biophysics, and the history and psychology of how biology lost custody of electricity. My resulting book is an effort to create a repository of the real, rigorous studies that have advanced our understanding of this fascinating science at an accelerating rate in the past 20 to 40 years - and what the new science means about the future.
This book tells the story of how bioelectricity was finally accepted in modern neuroscience, how it interacts with biochemical elements of the nervous signal, and how its manipulation led to great medica and scientific advances in the late 20th century.
The author knew several of the leading figures who made these discoveries and provides personal anecdotes about them, as well as illuminating episodes from the history of neuroscience.
What happens during a heart attack? Can someone really die of fright? What is death, anyway? How does electroshock treatment affect the brain? What is consciousness? The answers to these questions lie in the electrical signals constantly traveling through our bodies, driving our thoughts, our movements, and even the beating of our hearts.
The history of how scientists discovered the role of electricity in the human body is a colorful one, filled with extraordinary personalities, fierce debates, and brilliant experiments. Moreover, present-day research on electricity and ion channels has created one of the most exciting fields in science, shedding light…
Alongside writing, I’ve been running workshops, teaching and mentoring writers for nearly twenty years, helping people get unstuck and keep going. So I spend most of my working life thinking about creativity and writing—then suddenly I, too, couldn’t write the book I needed to write. Every book in this list is about not-writing for different reasons, in different circumstances, but between them they tell us so much about how we write, why we write, how we get writing to happen—and what’s happening when we can’t. These very different stories resonate with each other, and I hope some of them resonate with you.
“What’s wrong with fiction, my best, most precious thing? What’s wrong with me?” asks novelist Jenn Ashworth. She set out on writing her fifth novel, then abruptly, excruciatingly, extendedly, found she couldn’t. Instead, in a broken and braided narrative which I found un-putdownable, she digs into the nightmares and strange waking states that PTSD and psychosis left her in, the stuffs and dreams of reading, writing and watching movies, and the painfully live legacies of a childhood caught between a violent father and an embattled religion. Writing is my best, most precious thing too: this is a disturbing, often bleakly comic and heartbreaking account of how illness and madness can be both the ruin and the making of art and an artist.
A genre-bending meditation on sickness, spirituality, creativity, and the redemptive powers of writing.
Notes Made While Falling is both a genre-bending memoir and a cultural study of traumatized and sickened selves in fiction and film. It offers a fresh, visceral, and idiosyncratic perspective on creativity, spirituality, illness, and the limits of fiction itself. At its heart is a story of a disastrously traumatic childbirth, its long aftermath, and the out-of-time roots of both trauma and creativity in an extraordinary childhood.
Moving from fairgrounds to Agatha Christie, from literary festivals to neuroscience and the Bible, from Chernobyl to King Lear, Ashworth…
I have spent my entire professional life quietly patrolling the frontiers of understanding human consciousness. I was an early adopter in the burgeoning field of biofeedback, then neurofeedback and neuroscience, plus theory and practices of humanistic and transpersonal psychology, plus steeping myself in systems theory as a context for all these other fields of focus. I hold a MS in psychology from San Francisco State University and a PhD from Saybrook Institute. I live in Mount Shasta CA with Molly, my life partner for over 60 years. We have two sons and two grandchildren.
In this thoroughly researched and exquisitely crafted treatise, Jim Brown synthesizes the newest understandings in neuroscience, developmental psychology, and dynamical systems theory for educators and others committed to nurturing human development.
He explains complex concepts in down-to-earth terms, suggesting how these understandings can transform education to engender optimal learning and intelligence. He explores the nature of consciousness, intelligence, and mind.
Brown then offers a model of optimal human learning through lifelong brain development within a supportive culture--drawing on the work of Piaget, Erickson, Maslow, Kohlberg, and Steiner--and how that work is being vastly expanded by neuroscience and dynamical systems thinking.
Mindleap: A Fresh View of Education Empowered by Neuroscience and Systems Thinking
In this thoroughly-researched and exquisitely crafted treatise, Jim Brown synthesizes the newest understandings in neuroscience, developmental psychology, and dynamical systems theory for educators and others committed to nurturing human development. He explains complex concepts in down-to-earth terms, suggesting how these understandings can transform education to truly engender optimal learning and intelligence. He explores the nature of consciousness, intelligence, and mind. Brown then offers a model of optimal human learning through life-long brain development within a supportive culture--drawing on the work of Piaget, Erickson, Maslow, Kohlberg, and Steiner--and how that work is being vastly expanded by neuroscience and dynamical systems thinking.
I’m a family therapist and author with a lot of experience in psychopathic behavior. Psychopathy falls on a spectrum – from a few traits to the extreme (serial killer) and everything in-between. Studies have shown that strong psychopathic behavior is common in our leaders – political, religious, business, and cultural. There’s also the psychopath “next door” – people we work, play, and live with. As an author, therapist, and researcher, I’m passionate about the subject – constantly examining psychopathic behaviors. I hope you enjoy my Broken Books Series which features different types of psychopaths in both the present and past, and my booklist that explores this fascinating subject.
Can you imagine being a neuroscientist who specializes in identifying psychiatric disorders from brain scans, finds a scan of a psychopath, and it’s his? That’s what happened to Dr. James Fallon, leading to this book that discusses the inner workings – psychological and physiological – of a psychopath. Merging genetic, structural, and environmental factors, Fallon brings you “into the dark side of the brain,” explaining the science and his personal experience as a non-violent psychopath. He examines psychopathy at all levels, helping you understand the true nature from “functional” to criminal. I could not put this down – it’s a story not to be missed!
“Compelling, essential reading for understanding the underpinnings of psychopathy.” — M. E. Thomas, author of Confessions of a Sociopath
For his first fifty-eight years, James Fallon was by all appearances a normal guy. A successful neuroscientist and professor, he’d been raised in a loving family, married his high school sweetheart, and had three kids and lots of friends. Then he learned a shocking truth that would not only disrupt his personal and professional life, but would lead him to question the very nature of his own identity.
While researching serial killers, he uncovered a pattern in their brain scans that…
Up-and-coming science writer Ed Yong explains how animals sense the world. We all know about the five senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching). An Immense World examines these plus other fascinating examples, such as sensing electric and magnetic fields.
I love how Yong considers all sorts of quirky, oddball animals. Evolution creates so much diversity, and Yong seems to know how to find just the right organism to illustrate his point.
Whether interested in animals that can hear ultrasonic frequencies or see ultraviolet light, this is the book for you. It is wonderfully written, accessible to all, and a delight to read. I hope Ed Yong is busy on his next one. I can’t wait.
'Wonderful, mind-broadening... a journey to alternative realities as extraordinary as any you'll find in science fiction' The Times, Book of the Week
'Magnificent' Guardian
Enter a new dimension - the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.
The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving only a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes us into previously unfathomable dimensions - the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.
I am an integrative child psychiatrist with a special focus on how screen-time detunes the nervous system, causing issues with sleep, mood, focus, and behavior. In fact, technology use is the most underestimated influence of our time; it causes problems whose connections aren’t always obvious, leads to misdiagnosis and overmedication, and wastes resources. I am passionate about helping children and families methodically reverse these changes using screen fast protocols that provide dramatic improvements in functioning and well-being. I speak regularly to parents’ groups, schools, and health providers, and my work has been featured on such outlets as NPR, CNN, NBC Nightly News, Psychology Today, and Good Morning America.
I found myself wanting to stand up and applaud while reading this book. The description of what a kid really does on a typical day at school is alone worth the purchase (and will make you laugh... and then heave a deep sigh.) But more importantly, these two teachers outline the pitfalls our digitally-driven world has created in terms of education, deep thinking, social responsibility, and ability to problem solve. As someone who has done a lot of research into the “screens in school” topic, I found this book to be thorough and clear, and written with enough humor to make a tough topic palatable.
Over the past decade, educational instruction has become increasingly digitized as districts rush to dole out laptops and iPads to every student. Yet the most important question, “Is this what is best for students?” is glossed over. Veteran teachers Joe Clement and Matt Miles have seen firsthand how damaging technology overuse and misuse has been to our kids. On a mission to educate and empower parents, they show how screen saturation at home and school has created a wide range of cognitive and social deficits in our young people. They lift the veil on what’s really going on in schools:…
I have been writing books about France and the French for two decades. The adventure began when I moved to Quebec in my early 20s and married a Quebecker. He became my life partner and co-author. I learned his language, immersed myself in Canada’s French-language culture and began writing articles in French. In 1999 we moved to France for three years to study the French. Three books later, we returned to Paris with our daughters to try to demystify French conversation. The result is The Bonjour Effect. I am grateful to the authors on my list for helping me refine my understanding of France, the French and their language.
Alexander’s book is a sort of memoir that recounts how, at a quite advanced age, he set out to become fluent in French. It’s funny, insightful, peppered with great observations, and has quite an amazing twist in the plot. His determination to master French – but also the research he explores about language learning in the process – will be inspiring for readers of all ages. A fun and motivating read.
William Alexander is not just a Francophile, he wants to be French. It's not enough to explore the country, to enjoy the food and revel in the ambiance, he wants to feel French from the inside. Among the things that stand in his way is the fact that he can't actually speak the language. Setting out to conquer the language he loves (but which, amusingly, does not seem to love him back), Alexander devotes himself to learning French, going beyond grammar lessons and memory techniques to delve into the history of the language, the science of linguistics, and the art…
Kevin Davis is the author of three non-fiction books about the criminal
justice system, The Wrong Man,Defending the Damned and The Brain Defense. Davis has also authored eight
nonfiction children’s books. He’s an award-winning journalist and magazine
writer based in Chicago.
Adriane Raine has been studying the brains of convicted murderers for
decades and his fascinating and accessible book uses neuroscience to help
explain, though not excuse, their behavior due to anomalies and injuries to
their brains. Raine makes a strong case that various impairments to the brain
can inhibit the ability to put the brakes on impulsive, antisocial, and harmful
behavior.
Adrian Raine is one of the world's leading authorities on the minds of the violent, the criminal, the dangerous, the unstable. An Anatomy of Violence is the culmination of his life's work so far, offering the latest answers to some of the most difficult questions: what are the causes of violence? Can it be treated? And might it one day be stopped?
Are some criminals born, not made? What causes violence and how can we treat it? An Anatomy of Violence introduces readers to new ways of looking at these age-old questions. Drawing on the latest scientific research, Adrian Raine…
I’m a law professor who has been teaching and writing in the area of intellectual property for 20 years. As my career went along, I came to realize how important it is to not just mechanically apply the legal rules but to think about why they are there. Intellectual property law—a 7 trillion-dollar legal regime governing one-third of the U.S. economy—continually guesses as to how the minds of artists and audiences work. The more I read about neuroscientific advances, the more I realized that these guesses are often wrong and need to be updated for a new technological age.
This book does a great job of describing what is possible and what is not when it comes to neuroscience. Poldrack, a professor of psychology at Stanford, makes sure we don’t lose the forest for the trees, boiling down the basics of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a way that anyone can understand. He is particularly strong on describing about how this technology might be used outside of university laboratories, discussing potential applications in law, advertising, and treatment of mental illness.
A revealing insider's account of the power-and limitations-of functional MRI
The ability to read minds has long been a fascination of science fiction, but revolutionary new brain-imaging methods are bringing it closer to scientific reality. The New Mind Readers provides a compelling look at the origins, development, and future of these extraordinary tools, revealing how they are increasingly being used to decode our thoughts and experiences-and how this raises sometimes troubling questions about their application in domains such as marketing, politics, and the law.
Russell Poldrack takes readers on a journey of scientific discovery, telling the stories of the visionaries…
I am trained in physics but moved over to psychology and neuroscience partway through graduate school at Cornell University because I became fascinated with the stupefying complexity of brains. I found that a lot of the main ideas and approaches in these fields seemed flawed and limited—things like defining something to study such as “emotion” or “perception” without specifying what measurable quantities are necessary and sufficient to understand those things. Luckily, I was (and continue to be) mentored by independent thinkers like neuroanatomist Barbara Finlay and computational neuroscientist David Field, who instilled in me their spirit of free and deeply informed inquiry. Today, more and more brain researchers are rethinking established ideas.
Thanks to Freud, one of the most cherished ideas in psychology is that we have an unconscious. Yet because it is by definition inaccessible, our unconscious is almost impossible to study scientifically. Freud himself certainly didn’t provide much reliable evidence for its existence. Nick Chater, a respected researcher of language and perception, argues that little if any evidence for an unconscious drive exists even now, almost a century after Freud. With lively and pugnacious arguments drawn from fascinating and diverse discoveries about language and perception, Chater deconstructs the unconscious and argues instead for a human mind that is inherently dynamic and in-the-moment. When I have assigned this book to my undergraduate students studying perception it has provoked some of the most heated debates, which is how I know it is a great book!
A radical reinterpretation of how your mind works - and why it could change your life
'An astonishing achievement. Nick Chater has blown my mind' Tim Harford
'A total assault on all lingering psychiatric and psychoanalytic notions of mental depths ... Light the touchpaper and stand well back' New Scientist
We all like to think we have a hidden inner life. Most of us assume that our beliefs and desires arise from the murky depths of our minds, and, if only we could work out how to access this mysterious world, we could truly understand ourselves. For more than a…
