Books like In Search of Memory

01

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.

A kindred memoir read.

02

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.

A kindred memoir read.

03

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

V. S. Ramachandran · Science

The Tell-Tale Brain is V.

A kindred memoir read.

04

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

V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee · Psychology

V.

A kindred memoir read.

05

Chaos: Making a New Science

James Gleick · Science

Chaos: Making a New Science, published in 1987, tells the story of how a loose network of scientists working across meteorology, mathematics, biology, and physics in the 1960s and 1970s developed chaos theory — the study of systems that are deterministic but unpredictable because tiny differences in initial conditions produce wildly different outcomes.

Both dig into scientific discovery.

06

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

Suzanne Simard · Science

Suzanne Simard is the forest ecologist who discovered that trees communicate and share resources through underground mycorrhizal fungal networks — the research that gave rise to the concept of the "mother tree" and, at several removes, Peter Wohlleben's popular writing on the subject.

Both dig into scientific discovery.

07

Project Hail Mary

Andy Weir · Science fiction

Ryland Grace wakes up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of who he is, where he is, or why he's there.

Both dig into scientific discovery.

08

The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science

Richard Holmes · History

Richard Holmes is a British literary biographer best known for his two-volume life of Shelley, and The Age of Wonder brings that literary sensibility to the history of science during the Romantic period — roughly 1769 to 1832.

Both dig into scientific discovery.

09

The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table

Sam Kean · Science

The Disappearing Spoon is Sam Kean's account of how the periodic table of elements came to be — not as a dry exercise in classroom science, but as a record of obsession, accident, rivalry, and the occasional poisoning.

Both dig into scientific discovery.

10

The Dispossessed

Ursula K. Le Guin · Science fiction

The Dispossessed follows Shevek, a physicist from the anarchist moon Anarres, who travels to the wealthy capitalist planet Urras — the world his society broke away from 170 years earlier.

Both dig into scientific discovery.

11

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Richard Rhodes · History

Richard Rhodes spent years researching the scientific and political story behind the Manhattan Project, and the result is a work of narrative history that refuses to treat the bomb as either a triumph or a horror to be judged from a comfortable distance.

Both dig into scientific discovery.

12

The Song of the Cell

Siddhartha Mukherjee · Science

The Song of the Cell is Siddhartha Mukherjee's account of how the cell — the basic unit of life — was discovered, decoded, and eventually harnessed to rebuild and repair the human body.

Both dig into scientific discovery.