Books like Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain

01

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.

Shares neuroscience and brain science with Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

02

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.

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03

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Robert M. Sapolsky · Science

Behave is Robert Sapolsky's attempt to explain why humans do what they do — the violence, the altruism, the tribalism, the heroism — by working through every layer of biology that contributes to a single act.

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04

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

V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee · Psychology

V.

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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.

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06

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

V. S. Ramachandran · Science

The Tell-Tale Brain is V.

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07

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.

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08

From Bacteria to Bach and Back

Daniel C. Dennett · Science

Daniel Dennett's 2017 book is his most comprehensive attempt to explain how minds — conscious, intentional, creative minds — could have evolved from mindless matter without any homunculus, soul, or top-down designer.

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09

How to Change Your Mind

Michael Pollan · Science

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

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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.

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11

Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking

Daniel Dennett · Philosophy

Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking is Daniel Dennett's handbook for thinking well — a collection of seventy-odd conceptual tools assembled across a long career in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and evolutionary theory.

Shares evolution and consciousness with Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

12

Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human

Matt Ridley · Science

Matt Ridley's central argument is that the nature versus nurture debate has been framed wrong for over a century.

Shares evolution and human nature with Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.