Books like How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the 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 brain science with How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.

02

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

Antonio Damasio · Psychology

Antonio Damasio is a neurologist at USC whose work challenges the centuries-old idea that reason and emotion are separate faculties, with reason the reliable guide and emotion the unreliable interference.

Both dig into neuroscience.

03

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.

Both dig into neuroscience.

04

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

V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee · Psychology

V.

Shares neuroscience and perception with How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.

05

Stumbling on Happiness

Daniel Gilbert · Psychology

Daniel Gilbert is a Harvard psychologist whose central finding, after decades of studying affective forecasting, is that humans are systematically wrong about what will make them happy.

A kindred psychology read.

06

The Brain That Changes Itself

Norman Doidge · Psychology

Norman Doidge is a Canadian psychiatrist who traveled to interview the scientists and patients at the frontier of neuroplasticity research in the mid-2000s.

Shares perception and brain science with How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.

07

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Oliver Sacks · Psychology

Oliver Sacks was a neurologist who thought in stories.

Shares neuroscience and perception with How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.

08

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 perception with How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.

09

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

Daniel J. Levitin · Science

Daniel Levitin came to neuroscience from the music industry — he was a record producer who worked with Stevie Wonder, the Grateful Dead, and Blue Öyster Cult before getting a PhD in psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

Shares neuroscience and perception with How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.

10

A General Theory of Love

Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon · Psychology

A General Theory of Love is a 2000 book by three psychiatrists at the University of California, San Francisco — Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon — who set out to explain love scientifically without stripping it of its significance.

Both dig into neuroscience.

11

Atlas of the Heart

Brené Brown · Psychology

Atlas of the Heart is Brené Brown's attempt to map eighty-seven distinct human emotions and experiences — not as a clinical taxonomy but as a practical vocabulary for people who want to communicate more precisely about what they feel.

Both dig into emotions.

12

Emotional Intelligence

Daniel Goleman · Psychology

Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence, published in 1995, made a widely influential argument: that the cluster of abilities involved in managing emotions — self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and social skill — predicts life outcomes at least as well as IQ, and possibly better in many domains.

Both dig into brain science.