Books like Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

01

Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

Leonard Mlodinow · Psychology

Leonard Mlodinow is a theoretical physicist who writes accessible science for general audiences.

Shares unconscious mind and decision-making with Incognito: The Secret Lives of the 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

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.

04

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.

05

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.

Shares neuroscience and consciousness with Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.

06

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

V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee · Psychology

V.

Shares neuroscience and consciousness with Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.

07

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 Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.

08

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 Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.

09

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 Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.

10

Blindsight

Peter Watts · Science fiction

Blindsight follows a crew of post-human specialists sent to intercept an alien object at the edge of the solar system in 2082.

Shares free will and consciousness with Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.

11

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 Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.

12

How to Change Your Mind

Michael Pollan · Science

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

Shares neuroscience and consciousness with Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.