🧲 Books like this
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
Steven Pinker · back to the book
What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorKluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind
Gary F. Marcus · 224 pages
The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
Daniel J. Levitin · 354 pages
The author of the New York Times bestseller and Los Angeles Times Book Award Finalist This Is Your Brain on Music tunes us in to six evolutionary musical forms that brought about the evolution of human culture.An unprecedented blend of science and art, Daniel Levitin's debut, This Is Your Brain on Music, delighted readers with an exuberant guide to the neural impulses behind those songs that make
Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique
Michael S. Gazzaniga · 352 pages
One of the world's leading neuroscientists explores how best to understand the human condition by examining the biological, psychological, and highly social nature of our species within the social context of our lives.What happened along the evolutionary trail that made humans so unique? In his widely accessible style, Michael Gazzaniga looks to a broad range of studies to pinpoint the change that
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Robert M. Sapolsky · 790 pages
Why do we do the things we do? Over a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky's genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle. Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise mo
The Meme Machine
Susan Blackmore · 264 pages
After Richard Dawkins' *The Selfish Gene*, Susan Blackmore drive us deeply into the theory of the meme, social and cultural "replicators", trying to explain the human unique ability to imitate. Altruism, ideas, human behaviours, sex, poetry, music... seems to be simply the result of such as memetic selection... > Even our inner conscious self and our sense of free will are illlusion created by
The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
Jonathan Gottschall · 271 pages
Metaphors We Live By
George Lakoff, Mark Johnson · 259 pages
Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"--Metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.
What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves
Benjamin K. Bergen · 287 pages
"Smart as hell and funny as fuck, this book explains why we can't stop swearing and what it tells us about our language and brains. Everyone swears. Only the rare individual can avoid ever letting slip an expletive. And yet, we ban the words from television and insist that polite people excise them from their vocabularies. That's a fucking shame. Not only is swearing colorful, fun, and often power
Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
Daniel C. Dennett · 586 pages
In this groundbreaking and very accessible book, Daniel C. Dennett, the acclaimed author of Consciousness Explained, demonstrates the power of the theory of natural selection and shows how Darwin's great idea transforms and illuminates our traditional view of our place in the universe. Following Darwinian thinking to its logical conclusions is a risky business, with pitfalls for everybody. Creati
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
Peter Godfrey-Smith · 272 pages
"Peter Godfrey-Smith is a leading philosopher of science. He is also a scuba diver whose underwater videos of warring octopuses have attracted wide notice. In this book, he brings his parallel careers together to tell a bold new story of how nature became aware of itself. Mammals and birds are widely seen as the smartest creatures on earth. But one other branch of the tree of life has also sproute
The Singing Neanderthals
Steven Mithen · 384 pages
The Synaptic Self: How Our Brain Becomes Who We Are
Joseph E. Ledoux
Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences
Cordelia Fine · 320 pages
Subtitle: How our minds, society, and neurosexism create difference Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology, the author criticizes claims about innate biological differences between men and women's minds as being faulty and exaggerated and considers how cultural and societal beliefs contribute to sex differences. Cornelia Fine is an academic psychologist.
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
Maryanne Wolf · 320 pages
In the Book. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Harper Perennial, 2008. This is an account of how our brains change as we learn to read.
The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us
James W. Pennebaker · 360 pages
The Secret Life of Pronouns is based on a large-scale research project that links natural language use to real world social and psychological processes. Using computerized text analyses on hundreds of thousands of letters, poems, books, blogs, Tweets, conversations, and other texts, it is possible to begin to read people’s hearts and minds in ways they can’t do themselves.
Seeing Voices
Oliver Sacks · 186 pages
A neurologist investigates the world of the deaf, examining their past and present treatment at the hands of society, and assesses the value and significance of sign language.
Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food: Taming Our Primal Instincts
Terry Burnham, Jay Phelan · 272 pages
How the Pill Changes Everything: Your Brain on Birth Control
Sarah E. Hill · 320 pages
Me, Myself, and Why: Searching for the Science of Self
Jennifer Ouellette
"A fascinating survey of the forces that shape who we are and how we act-from the author of The Calculus Diaries. Following her previous tours through the worlds of physics (Black Bodies and Quantum Cats) and calculus (The Calculus Diaries), acclaimed science writer Jennifer Ouellette now turns her attention to the mysteries of human identity and behavior with Me, Myself, and Why. She draws on gen
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman · 499 pages
In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, th
The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life
Robert Trivers · 406 pages
Explores the author's theorized evolutionary basis for self-deception, which he says is tied to group conflict, courtship, neurophysiology, and immunology, but can be negated by awareness of it and its results.
Why is the Penis Shaped Like That?: And Other Reflections on Being Human
Jesse Bering · 352 pages
"Titillating and provocative essays from one of the freshest voices in science today -- Why do testicles hang the way they do? Is there an adaptive function to the female orgasm? What does it feel like to want to kill yourself? Does "free will" really exist? And why is the penis shaped like that anyway? In Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?, the research psychologist and award-winning columnist Je