Recommended Books

I think Mirror Neurons are one of the most exciting and important discoveries in neuroscience, and I have a feeling they could turn out to be the fundamental building blocks of consciousness itself.

Marco Iacaboni has been involved in this area of research since they were first discovered and fascinatingly details the discoveries since and their implications. Simply one of the most exciting books I've read in a long time.

This book's subtitle is 'The haphazard construction of the human mind', and the author builds his case brilliantly well. In the first few pages he demolishes the idea of Intelligent Design by his simple demonstration that our brain is anything but designed intelligently.

The word Kluge is an engineering term for a makeshift solution - what we in england might call a 'bodge'. Gary Marcus takes you on a journey through the brain demonstrating how imperfect and ill-adapted our brains are, and how the compromises cobbled together by evolutionary pressures contribute to the difficulties we face in life.

An absorbing read, engagingly deeply interesting.

Paul Ekman is probably the world's leading researcher into emotions and their relationship to expression. It was he who discovered that all humans non-verbally express seven basic emotions using the same facial muscles; they're hard-wired in our brain, not taught culturally.

What he has to say in this area is interesting enough, but his findings about the relationship between the physical signaling of emotion (particularly) in our faces, and the intensity of that emotion, opens up a wealth of possible uses in the realms of therapy and personal development. It emphasises the importance of the role of the body in the mind/body connection.