Here’s an ever-expanding list of books that have influenced me in one way or another or are influencing me right now. Among the authors are psychologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, neurologists, Pulitzer Prize winning writers, and at least one each Nobel Prize winning psychologist, behavioral economists, cognitive scientist, social psychologist, mathematician and engineer, Professor of English, philosopher, and literary scholar.
Some are more challenging than others, some more interesting and engaging than others, and some more practically useful than others. Several cover similar ground but from different perspectives and with additional information. All of them have been well worth reading and are books I recommend.
Here’s a post going into greater detail about the 12 books that have been foundational for me.
The Books
The Power of Habit (Charles Duhigg)
Redirect (Timothy D. Wilson)
What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite (David DiSalvo)
Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman)
Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind (Guy Claxton)
The Storytelling Animal (Jonathan Gottschall)
The Hidden Brain (Shankar Vedantam)
Incognito (David Eagleman)
Subliminal (Leonard Mlodinow)
The Biology of Belief (Joseph Giovannoli)
The Drunkard’s Walk (Leonard Mlodinow)
The Black Swan (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
The Paradox of Choice (Barry Schwartz)
Why We Make Mistakes (Joseph T. Hallinan)
Stumbling on Happiness (Daniel Gilbert)
Descartes’ Error (Antonio R. Damasio)
Strangers to Ourselves (Timothy D. Wilson)
Synaptic Self (Joseph LeDeux)
The Reflexive Universe (Arthur M. Young)
On the Origin of Stories (Brian Boyd)
Making Up The Mind (Chris Frith)
Man’s Search for Meaning (Viktor Frankl)
Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life (Winifred Gallagher)
Your Brain Has a Mind of Its Own (Richard Restak)
Making Habits, Breaking Habits (Jeremy Dean)
A Mind of Its Own (Cordelia Fine)
Brain Changer (David DiSalvo)
Predictably Irrational (Dan Ariely)
Habit (William James)
Meet Your Happy Chemicals (Loretta Graziano Breuning)
Uncertainty (Jonathan Fields)
The Critical Thinker’s Dictionary (Robert Todd Carroll)
You Are Not so Smart (David McRaney)
Sex, Murder and the Meaning of Life (Douglas T. Kenrick)
I, Mammal (Loretta Graziano Breuning)
Wired for Story (Lisa Cron)
The Ego Trick (Julian Baggini)
The Believing Brain (Michael Shermer)
The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain (John Kounios and Mark Beeman)
Smarter Faster Better (Charles Duhigg)
On Being Certain (Robert A. Burton)
You Are Now Less Dumb (David McRaney)
A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind (Robert A. Burton)
The Aesthetic Brain (Anjan Chaterjee)
Quirk (Hannah Holmes)
Mind over Mind: The Surprising Power of Expectations (Chris Berdik)
Surfing Uncertainty (Andy Clark)
The Distracted Mind (Adam Gazzaley and Larry D. Rosen)
The Invisible Gorilla (Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons)
The Brain (David Eagleman) + The Brain with David Eagleman (6-part PBS series)
Succeed (Heidi Grant Halvorson)
The Upward Spiral (Alex Korb)
The Conquest of Happiness (Bertrand Russell)
Tell Me a Story (Roger Schank)
The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (Christopher Vogler)
The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative (Vivian Gornick)
Originals: How Non-Conformists Change the World (Adam Grant)
How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (Lisa Feldman Barrett)
The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World (David Eagleman & Anthony Brandt)
The Trickster Brain: Neuroscience, Evolution, and Narrative (David Williams)
Wild/Lives: Trickster, Place and Liminality on Screen (Terrie Waddell)
Trickster Makes this World (Lewis Hyde)
New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change (Winifred Gallagher)
Brain, Mind and Imagination (Thomas Czerner)
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)
Creativity (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)
The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional (Agustin Fuentes)
Rethinking Positive Thinking (Gabriele Oettingen)
A More Beautiful Question (Warren Berger)
Curious (Ian Leslie)
Why? What Makes Us Curious (Mario Livio)
The Molecule of More (Daniel Z. Lieberman, MD and Michael E. Long)
Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (Antonio Damasio)
Thinking in Systems (Donella H. Meadows)
Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (Agnes Callard)
Neuroplasticity (Moheb Costandi)
Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain (Lisa Feldman Barrett)
Currently Reading
The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality (Andy Clark)
The Design of Everyday Things (Don Norman)
The Seven Sins of Memory (Daniel L. Schacter)
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
Existential Physics (Sabine Hossenfelder)
In Various Stages of Investigation (that I will probably never finish)
The Evolution of Imagination (Stephen T. Asma)
The Stories We Are (William Lowell Randall)
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)
The Organized Mind (Daniel J. Levitin)
The Upright Thinkers (Leonard Mlodinow)
On the Waiting List
Deviate (Beau Lotto)
Emotional (Leonard Mlodinow)
The Book of Human Emotions (Tiffany Watt Smith)
The Pursuit of Pleasure (Lionel Tiger)
Just for Fun
I’ve Been Thinking (Daniel Dennett)