100 Books Like The "God" Part of the Brain

Simple, lyrical, beautiful.

Siddhartha is the story of an epic journey of a man traveling through ancient India, with life lessons subtly woven through the narrative.

Ultimately, this book is about how all things are connected through nature, and more specifically, how attaching too much weight to individual events—good, bad, happy, sad—misses the totality of appreciating how those events work together to make a more joyful, meaningful life.

It wasn’t until reading this book that I realized how important it was to focus on the fast, instinctive part of our mind. Getting that initial judgment and reaction right makes everything else easier. Too often, I found myself wanting to understand things logically and rationally, assuming that my instincts and emotions were simply wrong.

This book helped me understand how useful both systems were and how to leverage them to achieve my goals faster and more effectively.

A turning point in my spiritual path was the discovery that the mystics of all traditions, in all eras, have reported similar or identical spiritual experiences. They used different terminology, hailed from different cultures, practiced different methods, and even had different belief systems, but experientially, they found that all paths lead to the same mountaintop of spiritual illumination.

Scholars have a name for this perspective: perennialism. Huxley published the classic account in the mid-40s, offering as evidence excerpts of writings from both well-known and obscure mystics. The book taught me (and millions of others) that spirituality is universal and there are treasures to be found in all the wisdom traditions. It remains a source of inspiration and illumination to this day. 

While a delightful and heartwarming children's book, its meaning is profound, speaking to our underlying interconnectedness.

Jim Carrey has been known to have gone through personal spiritual transformations and it resonates in this book. We can get quite deep and detailed when it comes to the spiritual subject but its true nature is simple.

I’ve always known of the wave and ocean metaphor but seeing it personified adds a beneficial facet to my cognitive visualization, helping me better foster senses of empathy and compassion for others. Its illustrations and playful writing are comical and uplifting, aligning with how I perceive Jim Carrey.

For a very quick read, it instills lasting feelings of harmony. 

I have viewed The Spiritual Brain as a fascinating exploration of spirituality in a manner similar to my own investigations of neurotheology.

Beauregard bridges the gap between science and spirituality presenting a range of neuroscientific research studies that explore the neural correlates of spiritual experiences. Beauregard draws from various spiritual traditions, including Christianity, Buddhism, and Native American spirituality, to support his arguments.

By incorporating a range of perspectives, he emphasizes the universality of spiritual experiences across different cultures and traditions. He also delves into questions about the nature of consciousness, free will, morality, and human nature. Beauregard argues for the existence of the soul and presents a non-reductive view of consciousness that acknowledges the spiritual dimension of human experiences.

Wallis Eates is the master of picking scabs and upturning stones to see what scuttles beneath. And often among all the dirt and bugs, she finds such amazing treasure. In this book, she has such vivid and detailed memories I found myself staring into her wonderful pencil marks and time travelling back into the mind of my own little self and feeling all the fear and awe of those years. I was going to write, it's like happening upon someone’s secret diary, but it's so visceral, it's more like being Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap and suddenly, wonderfully finding yourself in someone else’s body for a minute.

This National Geographic Little Kids book gives elementary children age-appropriate, true answers to fun, mind-bending science puzzles.

It is filled with tons of questions about how the world works, interesting facts, funny brain teasers, science experiments, and colorful pictures. I love that it encourages kids to think deeply about God’s world because God is not afraid of our scientific questions. In fact, asking “Why?” can be an act of worship!

This book has so much inside to keep kids coming back again and again to read on their own or with a parent while feeding their curiosity and interest in God’s world. 

This book offers a captivating tale of how the increasing knowledge of one disease, syphilis, created the foundations to understanding that the brain and mind are one and the same. The authors narrate the stories of patients whose “hysteria” (today referred to as functional neurological disorder) were traced to degenerative brain lesions that only belatedly were understood to be complications caused by remote infections with the bacterium Treponema pallidum. Several chapters follow the story of the important characters depicted by André Brouillet in the Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière (A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière), one of the most recognized paintings by neurologists, as it depicts Jean-Martin Charcot, shown among many of his disciples, demonstrating a “hysteric” seizure in one of his patients. The authors illustrate how we have gotten away with conceptualizing behaviors without biological basis and put the reader on notice that “mental illnesses” are neurological problems… show more.

This is an expansive treatment of the intellectual and cultural ramifications of the bilateral mind from ancient times to the present. The dominance of the analytic left hemisphere (the “emissary”), McGilchrist fears, threatens to usurp its experience-grounded “master” – to the detriment of human culture.

While The Master and His Emissary and The Origin of Consciousness cover similar topics, it is interesting and important to note that there are areas where their perspectives complement each other and those where they differ, such as their accounts of schizophrenia. I still find myself vacillating between the two. I sometimes wonder whether my indecision may itself be the result of my own hemispheric split.

This book picks up brilliantly from where Zero to Birth leaves off. It’s the story of how the brain encodes the reality of the world outside the womb, how our experiences change the brain, and how we acquire knowledge, skills, and sociability.

I found this book to be extremely readable. It’s full of fascinating and illustrative examples of how the human brain continues to change to function effectively in the real world.