Books like Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

01

Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain

Lisa Feldman Barrett · Psychology

Lisa Feldman Barrett wrote this short book — genuinely short at under thirty thousand words — as an accessible introduction to seven core findings of modern neuroscience, each presented as a lesson that overturns something most people believe.

Shares neuroscience and consciousness with Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.

02

How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

Lisa Feldman Barrett · Psychology

Lisa Feldman Barrett is a neuroscientist and psychologist at Northeastern University who has spent thirty years studying emotion, and her conclusion challenges the most widely held view of what emotions are.

Both dig into neuroscience.

03

Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind

V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee · Psychology

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Shares neuroscience and consciousness with Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.

04

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

David Eagleman · Psychology

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford who argues that the conscious self is a late, small, and largely uninformed participant in the brain's activity.

Shares neuroscience and consciousness with Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.

05

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Oliver Sacks · Psychology

Oliver Sacks was a neurologist who thought in stories.

Both dig into neuroscience.

06

The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others

Tali Sharot · Psychology

Tali Sharot's second book turns from how our own brains distort perception to how we can change what other people think and do.

Shares neuroscience and decision-making with Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.

07

The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain

Tali Sharot · Psychology

Tali Sharot is a neuroscientist at University College London, and The Optimism Bias is her account of a finding that surprised researchers: most humans systematically overestimate the likelihood of good things happening to them and underestimate the likelihood of bad ones.

Shares neuroscience and decision-making with Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.

08

Consciousness Explained

Daniel C. Dennett · Philosophy

Consciousness Explained is Daniel Dennett's attempt to replace what he calls the Cartesian Theater — the intuitive picture of consciousness as a single unified stream of experience observed by a self — with a model he calls Multiple Drafts.

Shares neuroscience and consciousness with Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.

09

How to Change Your Mind

Michael Pollan · Science

Michael Pollan came to psychedelics late in life, as a skeptic.

Shares neuroscience and consciousness with Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.

10

How to Create a Mind

Ray Kurzweil · Science

Ray Kurzweil's central claim in How to Create a Mind is that the neocortex — the part of the brain responsible for higher thought — operates on a single repeating algorithm called the pattern recognition theory of mind.

Shares neuroscience and consciousness with Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.

11

The Organized Mind

Daniel J. Levitin · Science

Daniel Levitin's argument is that the human brain's organizational architecture was built for a very different world — one with far fewer decisions, far less information, and far lower cognitive demand than the environment most people now navigate daily.

Shares neuroscience and decision-making with Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.

12

The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

V. S. Ramachandran · Science

The Tell-Tale Brain is V.

Shares neuroscience and consciousness with Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.