Broca's Brain

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1. jschveibinzSep 2026
   For those interested in brain evolution and practical neuroscience/human behavior:

   Carl Sagan's books "Broca's Brain" and "The Dragons of Eden" from the 70's-80's are good initial reads on brain composition and evolution. The Sapolsky lectures and books are also great resources.

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2. evanbJul 2017
   I broke up my list into cultural (that is, about the people, history, etc), popular (that is, not aimed at a student or an expert), and texts.

   CULTURAL

   Einstein - Essays in Humanism

   Frayn - Copenhagen

   Feynman - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

   Feynman - What Do You Care What Other People Think?

   de Grasse Tyson - Death by Black Hole

   Hoffman - The Man Who Loved Only Numbers

   Kaiser - Drawing Theories Apart

   Kaiser - How the Hippied Saved Physics

   Macaulay - The Way Things Work

   Paulos - Innumeracy

   Sagan - Cosmos

   Sagan - Broca's Brain

   Sagan - The Demon-Haunted World

   Salam - Science in the Third World

   Seife - Zero

   Weisskopf - The Joy of Insight

   POPULAR

   Deutsch - The Beginning of Infinity (especially his explanation about fungibility in quantum mechanics)

   Feynman - The Meaning of It All

   Feynman - Lectures on Physics

   Feynman and Weinberg - Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics

   Galison - Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps

   Gamow - One, Two, Three... Infinity

   Hadamard - Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field

   Hawking - A Brief History of Time

   Hofstadter - Gödel Escher Bach

   Heisenberg - Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science

   Polya - How to Solve It

   Schrödinger - What is Life?

   Susskind - The Theoretical Minimum

   Susskind - Quantum Mechanics

   Wallace - Everything And More

   Weinberg - The First Three Minutes

   Wiener - God & Golem, Inc.

   TEXTS

   Aaronson - Quantum Computing with Democritus (but I don't have a version with me in the acknowledgements https://books.google.com/books?id=jRGfhSoFx0oC&lpg=PR31&ots=... )

   Abelson and Sussman - SICP

   Abrikosov, Gorkov, and Dzyaloshinski - Methods of Quantum Field Theory in Statistical Physics

   Cohen-Tannoudji - Quantum Mechanics (1+2)

   Dirac - Lectures on Quantum Mechanics

   Eddington - Space, Time, and Gravitation

   Feynman - Feynman's Thesis

   Feynman and Hibbs - Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals

   Fermi - Thermodynamics

   Gattringer & Lang - Quantum Chromodynamics on the Lattice

   Goldstein - Classical Mechanics (the old version, NOT with Poole and Safko)

   Griffiths - Introduction to Electrodynamics

   Griffiths - Introduction to Quantum Mechanics

   Jackson - Classical Electrodynamics (2nd edition---the last one entirely in CGS---is preferable)

   Kleppner and Kolenkow - An Introduction to Mechanics

   Landau and Lifshitz - any book in this series

   Nielsen and Chuang - Quantum Computation and Quantum Information

   Pauli - Selected Topics in Field Quantization

   Peskin & Schroeder - An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory

   Purcell - Electricity and Magnetism

   Ryden - Introduction to Cosmology

   Sakurai - Modern Quantum Mechanics (up to chapter 5, after which Sakurai dies and the editors put his notes together)

   Sussman and Wisdom - Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics

   Sipser - Introduction to the Theory of Computation

   Thorne - Black Holes & Time Warps

   Thouless - The Quantum Mechanics of Many-Body Systems

   Weinberg - The Quantum Theory of Fields I, II, and III

   Zee - Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell

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3. nackerAug 2012
   I enjoyed the personal story, it was quite gripping!

   Inspired by "Broca's Brain" by Carl Sagan, I made it halfway through medical school with the intention of being a psychiatrist, before I finally realized that, on closer examination, psychiatry was not only a scam, but actually pernicious, repressive and evil!

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4. hermitcrabAug 2025
   “But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” ― Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science
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5. atombenderJun 2024
   Counter-counterpoint: "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." — Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain (1979).
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6. ShorelJun 2024
   I think Carl Sagan discusses this topic in "Broca's Brain".

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca's_Brain

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