🧲 Books like this
What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves
Benjamin K. Bergen · back to the book
What’s in it
Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.
24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorWords and Rules: The Ingredients of Language
Steven Pinker · 368 pages
How does language work, and how do we learn to speak? Why do languages change over time, and why do they have so many quirks and irregularities? In this book, the profound mysteries of language are explored.
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.
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.
Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention
Stanislas Dehaene · 388 pages
A renowned cognitive neuroscientist's fascinating and highly informative account of how the brain acquires readingHow can a few black marks on a white page evoke an entire universe of sounds and meanings? In this riveting investigation, Stanislas Dehaene provides an accessible account of the brain circuitry of reading and explores what he calls the "reading paradox": Our cortex is the product of m
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.
The Unfolding Of Language
Guy Deutscher · 360 pages
The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language
John McWhorter · 336 pages
How Language Works: How Babies Babble, Words Change Meaning, and Languages Live or Die
David Crystal · 506 pages
In the author's own words, "How Language Works is not about music, cookery, or sex. But it is about how we talk about music, cookery, and sex—or, indeed, anything at all." Language is so fundamental to everyday life that we take it for granted. But as David Crystal makes clear in this work of unprecedented scope, language is an extremely powerful tool that defines the human species. Crystal offers
Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant
Daniel Tammet · 256 pages
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind
George Lakoff · 614 pages
Focusing on studies of how humans categorize objects and ideas, this book examines the new understanding of human thought which proposes that human reason is imaginative, metaphorical, and intrinsically linked with the human body.
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.
Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything
David Bellos · 304 pages
The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language
Mark Forsyth · 373 pages
The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us
Christopher Chabris, Daniel Simons · 306 pages
One Hundred Names for Love – A Memoir
Diane Ackerman · 336 pages
The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can't Do Without It
Philip Ball · 452 pages
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Joshua Foer · 307 pages
The blockbuster phenomenon that charts an amazing journey of the mind while revolutionizing our concept of memory “Highly entertaining.” —Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker “Funny, curious, erudite, and full of useful details about ancient techniques of training memory.” —The Boston Globe An instant bestseller that has now become a classic, Moonwalking with Einstein recounts Joshua Foer's yearlo
The Science of Superstition
Bruce M. Hood
"John McEnroe notoriously refused to step on the white lines of a tennis court between points. Wade Boggs insisted on eating a chicken dinner before every Boston Red Sox game. Presidential candidate Barak Obama played a game of basketball the morning of his victory in the Iowa primary, and continued the tradition the day of every following primary. Superstitious habits are common. Do you ever cros
Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking
Douglas R. Hofstadter, Emmanuel Sander · 578 pages
Shows how analogy-making pervades human thought at all levels, influencing the choice of words and phrases in speech, providing guidance in unfamiliar situations, and giving rise to great acts of imagination.
The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
Sam Harris · 307 pages
What is the best “moral” decision that you can make in any given situation? Many aspects of your physical being work in unison to be able to use your cognitive processes to even come to a conscious decision. There have been many instances, especially recently, where scientific research is being conducted wherein people think about not just morality and what it means to them but also what is occu
The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance
Steven Kotler · 234 pages
"An exploration of how extreme athletes are able to break the limits of ultimate human performance and what we can learn from their mastery of the state of consciousness known as "flow." "--
From Bacteria to Bach and Back - The Evolution of Minds
Daniel C. Dennett · 496 pages
xviii, 476 pages, 2 unnumbered pages of plates : 25 cm