Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist

Christof Koch

“Without consciousness there is nothing… Consciousness is the central fact of your life.”

Neuroscientist Christof Koch on how the “qualia” of our experience illuminate the central mystery of consciousness:

Advice for a Young Investigator

Santiago Ramón y Cajal

“Oh comforting solitude, how favorable thou art to original thought!”

The founding father of neuroscience on solitude, the importance of science in a nation’s greatness, and the ideal social environment for intellectual achievement:

Advice for a Young Investigator

Santiago Ramón y Cajal

“Our neurons must be used … not only to know but also to transform knowledge; not only to experience but also to construct.”

The founding father of neuroscience on the 6 “diseases of the will” that keep the talented from achieving greatness:

Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramon y Cajal

Larry W. Swanson

“A graphic representation of the object observed guarantees the exactness of the observation itself.”

The stunning drawings of neuroscience founding father Santiago Ramón y Cajal:

Free Will

Sam Harris

“The question of free will touches nearly everything we care about. Morality, law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, feelings of guilt and personal accomplishment — most of what is distinctly human about our lives seems to depend upon our viewing one another as autonomous persons, capable of free choice.”

Neuroscientist Sam Harris on our misconceptions about free will and how accepting its illusoriness liberates us:

The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions

Esther M. Sternberg

The science of stress and how our emotions affect our susceptibility to burnout and disease – absolutely fascinating, revelatory read:

Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect

Matthew D. Lieberman

“The self is more of a superhighway for social influence than it is the impenetrable private fortress we believe it to be.”

Neuroscientist Matthew D. Lieberman, head of UCLA’s Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, on why our brains are wired to connect

Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist

Christof Koch

“There is no reason why this web of hypertrophied consciousness cannot spread to the planets and, ultimately, beyond the stellar night to the galaxy.”

Neuroscientist Christof Koch explores how subjective feelings, or consciousness, come into being, and why we should expect the Internet to become sentient.

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust

John Coates

An ambitious look at how body chemistry affects high-stakes financial trading, in which Coates sets out to construct — and deconstruct — a “universal biology of risk-taking.

Boredom: A Lively History

Peter Toohey

“Boredom is, in the Darwinian sense, an adaptive emotion. Its purpose, that is, may be designed to help one flourish.”

A fascinating history and anthropology of boredom from classics scholar Peter Toohey. From Madame Bovary to fMRI, he explores the roots, symptoms, and symbolism of boredom across art history, psychology, and neurochemistry to examine what it reveals about us both as individuals and as a culture.

The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity

Bruce Hood

“The daily experience of the self is so familiar, and yet the brain science shows that this sense of the self is an illusion. Psychologist Susan Blackmore makes the point that the word ‘illusion’ does not mean that it does not exist — rather, an illusion is not what it seems. We all certainly experience some form of self, but what we experience is a powerful depiction generated by our brains for our own benefit.”

Brain Bugs: How the Brain’s Flaws Shape Our Lives

Dean Buonomano

“It has been just so in all my inventions. The first step is an intuition — and come with a burst, then difficulties arise. This thing gives out and then that — ‘Bugs’ — as such little faults and difficulties are called.” ~ Thomas Edison

In Brain Bugs, Dean Buonomano argues that who we are as individuals and as a society is defined not only by the astonishing capabilities of the brain, but also by its flaws and limitations.

Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are

Sebastian Seung

MIT Professor of Computational Neuroscience Sebastian Seung proposes a new model for understanding the totality of selfhood, one based the emerging science of connectomics — a kind of neuroscience of the future that seeks to map and understand the brain much like genomics has mapped the genome

Imagine: How Creativity Works

Jonah Lehrer

“Creativity shouldn’t be seen as something otherworldly. It shouldn’t be thought of as a process reserved for artists and inventors and other ‘creative types.’ The human mind, after all, has the creative impulse built into its operating system, hard-wired into its most essential programming code. At any given moment, the brain is automatically forming new associations, continually connecting an everyday x to an unexpected y.”

Jonah Lehrer on how creativity really works and why most of the assumptions we hold about it aren’t just wrong but also detrimental to our own capacity to create.

Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Jonah Lehrer

Jonah Lehrer tells the story of how a handful of iconic creators each discovered an essential truth about the mind long before modern science was able to label and pinpoint it — for instance, George Eliot detected neuroplasticity, Gertrude Stein uncovered the deep structure of language, Cézanne fathomed how vision works, and Proust demonstrated the imperfections of memory.

At the heart of the message is what Lehrer calls a “fourth culture” that empowers us to “freely transplant knowledge between the sciences and the humanities, and focus on connecting the reductionist fact to our actual experience.”