Brain
Locked in the silence and darkness of your skull, your brain fashions the rich narratives of your reality and your identity. Join renowned neuroscientist David Eagleman for a journey into the questions at the mysterious heart of our existence. What is reality? Who are “you”? How do you make decisions? Why does your brain need other people? How is technology poised to change what it means to be human? In the course of his investigations, Eagleman guides us through the world of extreme sports, criminal justice, facial expressions, genocide, brain surgery, gut feelings, robotics, and the search for immortality. Strap in for a whistle-stop tour into the inner cosmos. In the infinitely dense tangle of billions of brain cells and their trillions of connections, something emerges that you might not have expected to see in there: you. This is the story of how your life shapes your brain, and how your brain shapes your life.
Stats for nerds
7recommend
10mentions
9people
2011–2025years
80% recommend20% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Studies of split brain patients play a good part in illustrating how little our consciousness is in control in "Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain" by David Eagleman, a book I highly recommend.
- Pfffff you really asked the impossible question here. Best I can do is scan through the books on the shelves next to me:
* Beyond good and evil: Nietzsche
* The Temple of the Golden Pavilion: Yukio Mishima
* Steppenwolf: Hermann Hese
* Library of babel: Borges
* The Brain: David Eagleman
* The Magical Mountain: Thomas Mann
* The Dark Tower: Stephen King(actually tons of King books - I am a bit of a fanboy)
* Factfulness: Hans Rosling
* William Blake: selected poetry
* Dostoevsky: The idiot
* Captain Nemo: Jules Verne
* The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Adams
- I have quite enjoyed a couple of books by David Eagleman: The Brain, and Sum.
- * The Brain by David Eagleman
* Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse
* A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence Krauss
- My own personal theory of mind is heavily inspired by David Eagleman's Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. There he describes a model of mind in which a multitude of independent "agents" propose "ideas", which bubble up to our consciousness (the top-level agents), which pick some of these ideas according to some (to us) opaque key.
In this model, I imagine that many of these low-level ideas start in a non-language form, and as they bubble up to the higher levels of the mind, they get wrapped in language, as they are processed by consciousness. But since things are not simple, the higher-level agents can modulate the lower-level ones, and that's how the language parts of our minds can influence the non-language (emotional?) parts. I have experienced several instances of purely rational cognition imprinting into my emotional perception of reality.
- For me:
* Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
* The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
* Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman
* Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation by Mitch Horowitz
* Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
* Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
* The Culture novels by Ian M. Banks
* Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
* Not a book, but Gene Roddenberry's vision in Star Trek shaped who I want to be and the world in which I prefer to live.
Although, I would say that it's hard to choose because just about everything I read changes me in some way. Here I've tried to stick to the ones that changed me for the better, rather than sending me off on an amusing if useless rabbit trail, e.g. Real Magic by Isaac Bonewitz, Illusions by Richard Bach, The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson, H.P. Lovecraft's works.
