Here are 100 books that The Hypnotic Brain fans have personally recommended if you like
The Hypnotic Brain.
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I have always been fascinated by how the human mind adapts, both individually and through history. Julian Jaynes, who taught me while pursuing my PhD in anthropology from Princeton University, provided me with a theoretical framework to explore how the personal and cultural configure each other. Jaynes inspired me to publish on psychotherapeutics, the history of Japanese psychology, linguistics, education, nationalism, the origin of religion, the Bible, ancient Egypt, popular culture, and changing definitions of self, time, and space. My interests have taken me to China and Japan, where I lived for many years. I taught at the University of Arizona and currently work as a licensed mental health counselor.
Supported by a wide range of examples drawn from various disciplines, this book demonstrates how we are only conscious of a small amount of what our hidden psychological machinery manufactures nonconsciously.
This work provides a key perspective needed to appreciate Julian Jaynes’s theory of consciousness and, thus his ideas on bicameral mentality.
As John Casti wrote, "Finally, a book that really does explain consciousness." This groundbreaking work by Denmark's leading science writer draws on psychology, evolutionary biology, information theory, and other disciplines to argue its revolutionary point: that consciousness represents only an infinitesimal fraction of our ability to process information. Although we are unaware of it, our brains sift through and discard billions of pieces of data in order to allow us to understand the world around us. In fact, most of what we call thought is actually the unconscious discarding of information. What our consciousness rejects constitutes the most valuable part…
Was Jesus of Nazareth a remarkably holy man and a prophet, or was he God in human form? This question tore the early Christian community apart in the fourth century CE, generating 60 years of violent conflict and raising questions that still concern millions of people worldwide.
My interest in this topic began after my father died when I was a young teenager and I was left looking for answers, explanations, and meanings. My dad was an architect and had written a book on Jeremy Bentham’s panoptican and prison architecture published before the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s famous Discipline and Punish. A small collection of Foucault’s books stood prominently on my father’s bookshelves and I really wanted to understand them. At university I studied all of Foucault’s works and many authors inspired by him. These are the best books that explain how we have developed philosophical and psychological theories to understand ourselves in the contemporary world.
The epic 900-page Discovery of the Unconscious is a phenomenally detailed and well-researched book that still challenges many of today’s psychological ‘truths.’ Ellenberger takes as his starting point models of the unconscious developed by Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Jung, which still influence many contemporary therapeutic treatments. He then skilfully links these models of the unconscious mind back to exorcism, magnetism, and hypnotism. Ellenberger’s detailed account of the use of magnetism and hypnosis by Jean Martin Charcot and others is fascinating because he explains exactly how Charcot's approaches premised new “uncovering” models devised by Nietzsche and the neo-Romantic movement. He also explains how Charcot’s work related to the growing interest in instincts and sexuality inspired by Darwin that culminated in the Freudian unconscious. In doing so, Ellenberger exposes what was genuinely new in the modern unconscious, and which parts of it have a much longer history. The…
This classic work is a monumental, integrated view of man's search for an understanding of the inner reaches of the mind. In an account that is both exhaustive and exciting, the distinguished psychiatrist and author demonstrates the long chain of development,through the exorcists, magnetists, and hypnotists,that led to the fruition of dynamic psychiatry in the psychological systems of Janet, Freud, Adler, and Jung.
I have always been fascinated by how the human mind adapts, both individually and through history. Julian Jaynes, who taught me while pursuing my PhD in anthropology from Princeton University, provided me with a theoretical framework to explore how the personal and cultural configure each other. Jaynes inspired me to publish on psychotherapeutics, the history of Japanese psychology, linguistics, education, nationalism, the origin of religion, the Bible, ancient Egypt, popular culture, and changing definitions of self, time, and space. My interests have taken me to China and Japan, where I lived for many years. I taught at the University of Arizona and currently work as a licensed mental health counselor.
According to Julian Jaynes, the mentality predating consciousness was bicameral. To appreciate the subtlety of his arguments, a grand historical sweep is needed.
At over a thousand pages, this magisterial tour through the origins and impact of anthropology, sociology, linguistics, economics, and psychology affords context by showing how, from the sixteenth century to the present day, the emergence of a post-bicameral, introspective language of the self-played out in modern times.
A comprehensive history of the human sciences-psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science-from their precursors in early human culture to the present.
This erudite yet accessible volume in Norton's highly praised History of Science series tracks the long and circuitous path by which human beings came to see themselves and their societies as scientific subjects like any other. Beginning with the Renaissance's rediscovery of Greek psychology, political philosophy, and ethics, Roger Smith recounts how the human sciences gradually organized themselves around a scientific conception of psychology, and how this trend has continued to the present day in a circle of…
Was Jesus of Nazareth a remarkably holy man and a prophet, or was he God in human form? This question tore the early Christian community apart in the fourth century CE, generating 60 years of violent conflict and raising questions that still concern millions of people worldwide.
I have always been fascinated by how the human mind adapts, both individually and through history. Julian Jaynes, who taught me while pursuing my PhD in anthropology from Princeton University, provided me with a theoretical framework to explore how the personal and cultural configure each other. Jaynes inspired me to publish on psychotherapeutics, the history of Japanese psychology, linguistics, education, nationalism, the origin of religion, the Bible, ancient Egypt, popular culture, and changing definitions of self, time, and space. My interests have taken me to China and Japan, where I lived for many years. I taught at the University of Arizona and currently work as a licensed mental health counselor.
This book, in a fashion similar to Julian Jaynes’s theories about bicameral mentality and consciousness, challenges comfortable assumptions. It does this by demonstrating that though what we think (content) differs by place and period, mentalities (processes) themselves are neither invariant nor universal.
Specifically, it offers a detailed study of literature and shows how notions of causality and temporal thought processes that we take for granted were undeveloped in earlier centuries.
LePan challenges the assumption that everybody thinks in the same way by examining a particular mental faculty - expectation. He concludes that certain forms of expectation did not exist in the minds of most medieval people, any more than they do in children or adults in many primitive societies.
Over the past decade, I’ve become very concerned with the direction authoritarianism is taking human society. It’s a global problem that now infects America, leaving us with a partisan divide we may not be able to bridge. My recommended books helped me understand the situation and how one might speak out against this negative force effectively. Convinced that bombarding readers with facts alone is useless, I chose to provide a novel that is interesting and captivates readers. My goal is to entice readers to press on to the end regardless of their political persuasion, in hopes that along the way some thought will be devoted to the issues raised.
Our future is determined by us, and our actions are determined by our thought processes. In other words, the future of human society can be influenced by manipulating group thought. Colin applies years of training and experience as a hypnotist to give us a view of how the human brain functions and how it can be manipulated. He views it as two computing systems. A subconscious mind performing 40 million tasks/second deals only in the present, ignoring abstract things like “yesterday,” “don’t,” etc. The second conscious mind uses 40 tasks/second to control and program the first. It doesn’t exist in babies and develops during childhood. How that growth is managed determines its adult thought process and ultimately group thought. Colin provides insights on how it can be manipulated for good or bad results.
MANIPULATIONGet it, before it gets you! Do you realize you are being manipulated, or are you oblivious? Do you know who or what is manipulating you? Can you identify the manipulation? If you can identify it, can you do anything about it? How is manipulation affecting you? Can you change these effects? Can you use them to your advantage?Success through Manipulation delves deeply into how you think and how your mind reacts to your environment, friends, family, work, and much more.Learn how to stop reacting, become consciously aware and take control of your mind. Manipulate your thinking and become more…
I fell in love with technology when I wrote my first computer program at age 14 when there was no public Internet, no personal computers, no iPhone, no cloud. I have made technical contributions to every era of computing from mainframes, to PCs, Internet, Cloud, and now AI. I was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering. AI currently surpasses my wildest imagination on the art of what’s possible. I'm still passionately working in technology at Google focused on how to live healthier lives. I believe we can make AI the telescope of the future, to helping everyone live long and healthy lives.
The opening paragraph of this book is pure poetry in motion, putting me in a trance and craving to read the entire book.
You wouldn’t know this is a book about neuroscience when reading the opening lines in Chapter 1. Connectome is a thought-provoking exploration of the brain's neural connections and their potential to transform our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.
Given that artificial intelligence is inspired by neuroscience it’s a great book to understand how the brain works.
Connectome, by Sebastian Seung is 'One of the most eagerly awaited scientific books of the year ... intellectually exhilarating, beautifully written, exquisitely precise yet still managing to be inspirational' Irish Times
What really makes us who we are? In this groundbreaking book, pioneering neuroscientist Sebastian Seung shows that our identity does not lie in our genes, but in the connections between our brain cells - our own particular wiring, or 'connectomes'.
Everything about us - emotions, thoughts, memories - is encoded in these tangled patterns of neural connections, and now Seung and a dedicated team are mapping them in order…
Admittedly, I’m just a painfully average Joe, but therein lies the paradoxical aptness of my credentials. Like most people, I wasn’t raised specially educated or trained, fed by a spiritual spoon. Instead, my qualifications arise from transitioning out of the common, materialistically driven, atheistic perspective to see the contrasting light of the other side. What was originally a drive for self-development has evolved into a passion for spirituality, which inevitably arises if one introspects long enough. These past few years, I’ve been motivated to try and make more sense out of this senseless topic with the intent of sharing its value with others.
This book offers an interesting perspective on the potential biological basis for religious experiences and beliefs, supported by scientific research.
Even without a background in neuroscience or psychology, I still found it to be a fully understandable book, well-written but not overly complicated. In the modern era where we need to provide a logical basis and justification, it adds to the overall endeavor to bridge science and spirituality.
While I can’t say this book has many practical tips, it has deepened my perspective on the subject of spirituality, allowing me to better comprehend and visualize physical correlates of certain esoteric experiences.
Is Man the product of a God...or is "God" the product of human evolution?
From the dawn of our species, every human culture―no matter how isolated―has believed in some form of a spiritual realm. According to author Matthew Alper, this is no mere coincidence but rather due to the fact that humans, as a species, are genetically predisposed to believe in the universal concepts of a god, a soul and an afterlife. This instinct to believe is the result of an evolutionary adaptation―a coping mechanism―that emerged in our species to help us survive our unique and otherwise debilitating awareness of…
I’m a veteran teacher, instructional coach, and speaker. I’ve dealt with the bull crap and beauty of education for a decade and a half. As such, I’m dedicated to helping educators find their love of this work, even amidst the struggles. I’m a columnist for Education Leadershipand host of the Educator Happy Hour podcast. I travel all over the world to help teachers and school leaders learn the science of well-being so they can be at their best in order to give their best, even on full-moon, post-holiday, “WIFI crashed” days of student chaos.
Alright, alright. There should be at least one book that actually helps with the practiceof teaching. And this is the one. Countless books admonish specific programs and practices, chock full of the fanciest edu-buzz words. But rarely do they discuss why a strategy works based on the science of human cognition and development. Even less frequently do they back the why with multiple peer-reviewed studies.
Jensen and McConchie combine an absurd level of nerd as researchers and veteran educators. This book and its predecessors helped me gain a deep understanding of why a strategy worked (or how to make it work), whether it was something new or something tried-and-true. The job of a teacher is to mold human brains. We should probably know everything we can about how those brains work.
The more you know about the brains of your students, the better you can be at your profession. Brain-based teaching gives you the tools to boost cognitive functioning, decrease discipline issues, increase graduation rates, and foster the joy of learning. This innovative, new edition of the bestselling Brain-Based Learning by Eric Jensen and master teacher and trainer Liesl McConchie provides an up-to-date, evidence-based learning approach that reveals how the brain naturally learns best in school. Based on findings from neuroscience, biology, and psychology, you will find:
I am an accidental guru on leadership, as a result of starting Teach First which is now the UK’s largest graduate recruiter. I discovered that the best leaders are not always the most skilled. That set me on a 20 year quest to discover their secret X-Factor: their mindset. I have conducted thousands of original interviews plus studying neuroscience with Harvard and Positive Psychology with the University of Pennsylvania. I also practice what I preach: I have set up 7 NGOs with turnover of £100m, started a bank, and built a business in Japan. It has been a life-enhancing journey of discovery: I hope you enjoy it too.
Let’s face it, this book is heavy. It is a university textbook, so it requires hard work. But it is worth it.
This is a magical mystery tour into the bizarre wonders of our own brains: why spend a fortune exploring the world when you can explore your own brain sitting in a chair, for free?
By the end of it, I was left ruminating over how we really see and think and over reality itself. The book is your entry ticket to a world of wonder: your own brain.
The book is a massive antidote to all the pop psychology books out there, and will enable you to be a far more critical and insightful reader of such books.
Acclaimed for its clear, friendly style, excellent illustrations, leading author team, and compelling theme of exploration, Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain, 4e takes a fresh, contemporary approach to the study of neuroscience, emphasizing the biological basis of behavior. The authors' passion for the dynamic field of neuroscience is evident on every page, engaging students and helping them master the material.
In just a few years, the field of neuroscience has been transformed by exciting new technologies and an explosion of knowledge about the brain. The human genome has been sequenced, sophisticated new methods have been developed for genetic engineering, and new…
During my medical career, specializing as a psychiatrist in a cancer hospital in England, I observed huge variations in the way patients respond to the diagnosis of physical disease. Some become overwhelmed by distress, some carry on just as before, but others make positive and creative changes that are inspiring to witness. Coping can be especially challenging and complex for clinicians who find themselves in the role of patient. My five chosen books are all written by doctors and illustrate how the illness experience has shaped their lives. Now retired from medicine, I am based in New Zealand, and I have interests in writing, choral singing, and animal welfare.
I found this a distressing but compelling read that made me reflect on my own life and mortality. Being a retired doctor myself, I know that healthcare professionals often delay seeking help for their own medical problems and can feel disconcerted and even humiliated when cast into the role of patient.
In this brutally honest account of his transition from famous surgeon to “just another old man with prostate cancer,” Henry Marsh combines a factual account of his illness and treatment with heartfelt ruminations about the prospect of dying. The text is interwoven with recollections of his career as a neurosurgeon in the UK and Ukraine, more fully described in his previous books “Do No Harm” and “Admissions.”
From the No.1 bestselling author of Do No Harm, an entrancing and uplifting meditation on the gift of life.
'A book to treasure and reread' Gavin Francis, author of Adventures in Human Being
As a retired brain surgeon, Henry Marsh thought he understood illness, but even he was unprepared for the impact of his diagnosis of advanced cancer.
In And Finally, he navigates the bewildering transition from doctor to patient. As the days pass, his mind turns to his career, to the people and places he has known, and to creative projects still to be completed.