Books like The Border Between Seeing and Thinking

The brain people are all over art.

Anjan Chatterjee has managed to write a book that a) is very accessible, b) provides thorough coverage of current attempts to understand art and aesthetic experience by using information from the cognitive sciences, and c) outlines an original hypothesis about why humans evolved a love for art. That last part changes the book from a nice review of the topic to a groundbreaking attempt at an explanation of our art practices.

Chatterjee examines our judgments of peoples’ attractiveness, the brain’s system of reward chemicals, and our evolutionary history, in an attempt to understand our passion for art scientifically. 

In an upcoming book on art, I refer to Chatterjee frequently. I don’t always agree with him, but his sensible, clear, and broad approach made his book very useful to me. 

V. S. Ramachandran is a gifted experimentalist and writer who does not hesitate to pursue deep and important questions about our minds. Rather than employing expensive imaging or large sample sizes, he is more likely to use a cardboard box, an old stereopticon, or a rubber hand in his experiments. 

His creativity in finding concrete ways to test seemingly vague but interesting claims about our minds has led to several breakthroughs, in our understanding of phantom limbs and our ability to treat phantom pain, and also in our study of synesthesia—cases in which people see numbers as having colors, for example.

As I can attest, he is able to transmit to his students the idea that pursuing scientific questions can be thrilling, fulfilling, and so much fun that you can’t wait to get to work in the morning.

In the mid-1980s, Patricia Churchland started to pursue the idea that philosophers interested in the mind might want to have a look at what is going on in neuroscience, in her book Neurophilosophy.

This book was formative for me, in that it showed a way I could combine my interest in the brain with my love for philosophy. Since then, new generations of graduate students have seen the naturalness of the link and begun to bring the wealth of neuroscientific discoveries into the philosophical debates. 

In Conscience, she looks at the evolutionary roots of our tendencies to form bonds and create social norms to approach the issue of whether our sociality is hardwired. She also discusses the troubling case of sociopaths, who appear to be naturally unethical.

Sacks is a supreme storyteller of remarkable human experiences in the world of music. The people of these extraordinary tales who are on the neurological edge of sonic perception (e.g., struck by lightning and immediately becoming an inspired pianist) give me such awe of what is possible, even miraculous.

Related from the perspective of a curious scientist, the mysteries are explained in a manner that resembles well-told science fiction… except they are real and relate to our own untapped capacities. Sacks’ extensive body of writing about the marvels of being human stands tall in my library.

I was bowled over by Maureen Seaberg’s book, which brings together recent research that shows our human sensory capacity is much greater than we believed before!

In these days of rising AI, when we are taking a hard look at the limitations of our human capacities, Seaberg’s book shows that we human beings have much amazing sensory potential that remains undeveloped and can know first-hand the blended sensations of synesthesia or out-of-body experiences.

No wonder the book was included in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Next Big Idea Book Club”! I stayed awake an extra two hours one night because I could not put the book down. This book gave me a jolt of wonder about the world and our place within it.

I think Helen Keller is one of the most fascinating and brilliant individuals in human history. In this book, she shows and tells us what it is like to be a person who cannot see, hear, or speak. I find the book quite moving. Some readers will be familiar with the biopics that have been made about Heller. Take my word these movies don’t offer the pleasure of reading Keller’s story. 

While not a book explicitly about creativity, it opened my eyes to how our brains work, how we can make them work better, and what we’re just going to have to live with. For instance, “multi-tasking” is really a myth—some brains just switch from one task to another faster and women are better at that than men, something rooted in our evolutionary development. And our brains are hardwired for movement, particularly walking. Developmental neurobiologist Medina offers plenty of food for creative brains.

I still remember when my son’s speech therapist recommended this to me: she warned me that I would find it overwhelming because Temple had such huge challenges.

But I didn’t feel discouraged or overwhelmed at all. Grandin is so uniquely herself from beginning to end, so smart, so aware, so able to figure out both her own needs and those of the animals whose lives (and deaths) she improves, that I found the book totally uplifting, not to mention fascinating.

The fact that she singlehandedly made our slaughterhouses infinitely more humane proves the point my co-author and I are always trying to make: neurodivergent individuals will think of things no one else does and enrich any project or community they’re part of.

Do stones sit still or do they constantly travel and transform? Both are true!

This lyrical work of fiction explores the stillness and permanency of a single stone. As the world around the stone whirls with activity, the stone remains in place. Though it may seem to change, appearing purple in the moonlight, for example, and though it is perceived and used in a wide range of ways by a wide variety of creatures, it doesn’t budge.

This soothing story invites children to think about the passage of time and to contemplate all a stone experiences as it sits in stillness.

So many of us, when we’re starting out, don’t think of ourselves as movement starters. We just want to get others on board to help us make a change at our school, in our neighborhood, or on our team. We often don’t see ourselves as leaders; instead, we are hoping to find a community with a shared perspective or explore the possibility of making things just a little bit better. But how do we get started, and how do we scale what’s working? 

My friend, Jennifer Dulski, was the head of Groups at Facebook and the former president of Change.org, and her book is all about how we can each play a role in sparking change, whether we’re trying to bring about change in our company, community group, college, or in a startup.

Dulski offers practical techniques based on real-life experience. She gives wonderful and varied examples that remind us… show more.