How Our Brains Work: A Reading List for Non-Scientists

Lisa Feldman Barrett: ”Ignore the bits about the ‘limbic system‘—but watch the dissections, which are amazing.“

The tools we use to help us think—from language to smartphones—may be part of thought itself.

In an age thick with anger and fear, we might dream of a purely rational politics. But it would be a denial of our humanity.

Do you believe that what you see influences how you feel? Actually, the opposite is true: What you feel — your “affect” — influences what you see, hear, smell, taste, and touch.

Growing scientific evidence suggests that getting up and grooving with others has a lot of benefits.

When it comes to accuracy, if you put a horoscope on one end and a heart monitor on the other, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator falls about halfway in between.

Using amazing new technologies, evolutionary neuroscientist Melina Hale and her graduate students at the University of Chicago are discovering that the basic movements of one tiny fish can teach us big ideas about how the brain’s circuitry works.

Despite our best intentions, scientists sometimes make a very basic mistake: we look for what makes humans unique.

LFB: This recipe demonstrates how segregating information and then integrating it at the end produces complexity. If you cook a bunch of vegetables together in a pot, the mixture will have a single, blended flavor. No individual ingredient stands out. But, Keller explains, there’s a better, tastier way to make your dish: cook each vegetable separately and assemble them in the pot at the end. Now every spoonful is a different complex medley of flavors. A brain works sort of in the same way.

If we have learned nothing else in the past 50 years of research on child development, it is that children do best in families and that violating this norm has terrible effects.

An excerpt from Dr. Barrett’s first book, How Emotions Are Made.