Here are 100 books that The Scientist fans have personally recommended if you like
The Scientist.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Green tracers in the sky over Baghdad. My first political memory is the start of the Gulf War in 1991. I remember writing angry essays criticizing the US decision to invade Iraq in 2003 for my high-school assignments. I have always been interested in US foreign policy and in how presidents make decisions. During my PhD, as I was working on a chapter on the origins of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I discovered the extent and–frankly–the madness of some of the plots the CIA and the White House concocted against Fidel Castro. More recently, the US government’s use of assassination and “targeted killings” have become the focus of my research.
Now for some facts, although they will appear stranger than the fiction above. Born with a club foot and unable to join the army during World War II, Sydney Gottlieb became a leading covert warrior. For years, he oversaw some of the CIA’s most controversial programs. He developed poisons to kill foreign leaders and officials, and he worked in MKULTRA, the Agency’s program for mind control, which included the use of LSD, drugs, isolation, and other invasive experiments and forms of torture on witting and unwitting subjects.
The book is a detailed, if harrowing, history. It is even more impressive as most of the documents on these programs were destroyed by Gottlieb himself in 1973, under orders from the CIA Director at the time, Richard Helms.
The visionary chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA's master magician and gentle hearted torturer - the agency's "poisoner in chief." As head of the MK-ULTRA mind control project, he directed brutal experiments at secret prisons on three continents. He made pills, powders, and potions that could kill or maim without a trace, and he secretly dosed unsuspecting American citizens with mind-altering drugs. His experiments spread LSD across the United States, making him a hidden godfather of the 1960s counterculture, and he was also the chief supplier of spy tools used by CIA officers around the world.
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I have always been fascinated with morally grey or complex characters. For me, the sign of a great novel is one where you find yourself talking about the characters as if they were real people you know. I want to experience something when I read, and characters that are flawed, imperfect, or morally grey have always intrigued me because they can take me to places I haven’t (or wouldn’t!) go myself. And, of course, they provide ample grounds for fun discussions with my friends! Sci-fi apocalyptic fiction is fertile ground for such characters, so I’ve tried to pick books you may not have heard of. I hope you like them!
This was a book club choice, and as soon as I finished it, I bought the other two books in the trilogy. I literally couldn’t put them down! Another post-apocalypse for this list, this time, the story is told through the memories of Jimmy/Snowman. But make no mistake, the novel is about Crake, a brilliant, lonely, and terrifying young man.
As Jimmy tries to recover his past, shadowed by the gentle, green-skinned ‘children of Crake,’ he recalls the events leading up to the end of humanity. This is very much a mystery, so I must be careful what I reveal, but if you are all about misguided genius and hubris, you will adore this novel. Needless to say, with an author like Atwood, the writing is superb.
By the author of THE HANDMAID'S TALE and ALIAS GRACE
*
Pigs might not fly but they are strangely altered. So, for that matter, are wolves and racoons. A man, once named Jimmy, lives in a tree, wrapped in old bedsheets, now calls himself Snowman. The voice of Oryx, the woman he loved, teasingly haunts him. And the green-eyed Children of Crake are, for some reason, his responsibility.
*
Praise for Oryx and Crake:
'In Jimmy, Atwood has created a great character: a tragic-comic artist of the future, part buffoon, part Orpheus. An adman who's a sad man; a jealous…
Christopher Rankin is an author, the host of the Vanadium podcast on YouTube, and a scientist in the field of renewable materials. He was awarded a PhD in materials science from the University of Pennsylvania and holds several patents. A lifelong lover of science, Rankin hopes to encourage greater public interest and a broader understanding of technical subjects.
This story of a scientist becoming obsessed with the psychedelic world was part of the inspiration for writing Ann Marie’s Asylum. The sensory deprivation tank, the electrodes to the head, and the hallucinogenic potion made from exotic jungle plants were bits that just had to make it into one of my books.
1978, hardcover edition, Harper & Row, NY. 184 pages. One of our finest teleplay / screen writers, the man responsible for THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY / HOSPITAL / NETWORK / and many others. This is his first novel, about a young scientist entombed in an isolation tank.
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
Raised in a proud Jewish home, I was instilled with an appreciation for my cultural heritage from a very young age. Today, I am utterly fascinated with the convergence of Judaism and popular culture in film, television, comics, literature, and other media. After college, I became a freelance entertainment journalist, writing stories for SYFY WIRE,The Hollywood Reporter,Forbes, and Marvel Entertainment. I currently reside in Philadelphia with my wife, Leora, and adorable Cavapoo, Archie.
In someone else’s hands, the tale of a global Nazi conspiracy to restore the Third Reich to its former glory by cloning Adolf Hitler would probably come off as utter insanity. But Levin makes you believe every word of it, funneling the story through the eyes of Nazi hunter Yakov Liebermann (based on Simon Wiesenthal) and infamous doctor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Josef Mengele.
In this classic thriller, Ira Levin imagines Dr Josef Mengele's nightmarish plot to restore the Third Reich. Alive and hiding in South America, thirty years after the end of the Second World War, Mengele gathers a group of former colleagues for a sinister project - the creation of the Fourth Reich. Ageing Nazi hunter Yakov Lieberman is informed of the plot but before he hears the evidence, his source is killed . . .
Spanning continents and inspired by true events, what follows is one of Levin's most masterful tales, both timeless and chillingly plausible.
I’ve been exploring the natural world most of my life as a gardener, naturalist, student, and researcher. I’ve come to appreciate the essentiality of our dependence on plant and other animal life. But I always want to know more. So I try to read across diverse areas of science as well as history, anthropology, linguistics, and archaeology. I want to know the mind of the thinker, the discoverer of ideas, the developer of technology. I want to understand the process of creativity from the view of the artist or inventor. Thus, I seek first-person accounts of scientists, doctors, inventors, as they struggle to understand the world that fascinates them.
The meaning of evolution, the foundation of creativity, the nature of consciousness—nobody can write so clearly and evocatively about these things as Oliver Sacks did over his long and productive career. This book offers a fresh look into the mind of a big thinker. Sacks explores issues and ideas across a remarkable breadth of disciplines. Here, he delved into questions most people probably have never thought to ask about evolution, botany, medicine, as well as the arts. He explores the science and humanity in everything, including his own growing awareness of memory loss. Having read most of his other books, I found this one as new and novel and enlightening as the first I came across decades ago.
From the best-selling author of Gratitude, On the Move, and Musicophilia, a collection of essays that displays Oliver Sacks's passionate engagement with the most compelling and seminal ideas of human endeavor: evolution, creativity, memory, time, consciousness, and experience.
Oliver Sacks, a scientist and a storyteller, is beloved by readers for the extraordinary neurological case histories (Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars) in which he introduced and explored many now familiar disorders--autism, Tourette's syndrome, face blindness, savant syndrome. He was also a memoirist who wrote with honesty and humor about the remarkable and strange encounters and experiences that shaped him (Uncle Tungsten,…
I am a work in progress, on my way to becoming a conscious communicator and an even better human being. I believe that intentional communication and (the) quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives, careers, and societies. I’ve spent decades guiding people and cultures to foster open communication, cultivate self-understanding, and deepen trust, from large Fortune 500 to small businesses. Building communication skills is a practice that leads to self-transformation and finding meaning, and happiness. Each of these books will help you to better understand yourself and others, and learn to communicate at the level of trust.
By exploring the different levels of consciousness and how they manifest in our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, you will gain insights into your patterns of communication and how they impact the people around you.
It teaches you to be more mindful of your interactions with others, how to be more present and attentive in conversations, and to be able to see how you are perceived when communicating. And as you raise your level of consciousness, you will naturally become a more intentional, empathic, and compassionate communicator.
The Map of Consciousness Explained is an essential primer on the late Dr David R. Hawkins's teachings on human consciousness and their associated energy fields.
Using muscle testing, Dr Hawkins conducted more than 250,000 calibrations during 20 years of research to define a range of values, attitudes and emotions that correspond to levels of consciousness. This range of values - along with a logarithmic scale of 1 to 1,000 - became the Map of Consciousness, which Dr Hawkins first wrote about in his New York Times bestseller, Power vs. Force.
In this book, readers will gain an introduction and deeper…
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
I am now a Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sheffield, UK. I co-wrote Mind Hacks with technologist Matt Webb; we had great fun doing it. My research has always been in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, using experiments to understand the mind and brain and how they fit together.
This book captures what is so exciting about psychology - that our own minds are at once so familiar yet so deeply weird. There’s so much to be explored!
Warren is a perfect guide, sharing his learning but not getting bogged down with it, as he visits different states of consciousness, some of which we visit every day, like the daydream or the feeling of falling asleep, others, like the lucid dream, might be less familiar.
This book will change the way you think, sleep, and dream for good. It is a book of psychology and neuroscience, and also of adventure wherein the author explores the extremes to which consciousness can be stretched, from the lucid dream to the quasi-mystical substratum of awareness known as the Pure Conscious Event. Replete with stylish graphics and brightened by comic panels conceived and drawn by the author, The Head Trip is an instant classic, a brilliant and original description of the shifting experience of consciousness that's also a practical guide to enhancing creativity and mental health. This book does…
Somehow, electrical impulses shoot through our brains to generate a surround sound, 3D-movie experience of the world. How on earth is this possible? When I was a college student, this question burrowed into my brain and wouldn’t get out. So I decided to make a living thinking about it. Now it’s 20 years later, I’m a philosophy professor at Yale-NUS College, and I still don’t know the answer!
Most things are ultimately explained by physics, but what if consciousness isn't? David Chalmers explores the idea that consciousness can't be explained in terms of bits of matter and energy scattered across spacetime; instead, consciousness is another basic part of the universe.
I’m impressed by how Chalmers’s arguments are extremely rigorous, but he also makes them accessible to ordinary people. It’s no surprise that this has become a classic of recent philosophy.
What is consciousness? How do physical processes in the brain give rise to the self-aware mind and to feelings as profoundly varied as love or hate, aesthetic pleasure or spiritual yearning?
David J. Chalmers unveils a major new theory of consciousness, one that rejects the prevailing reductionist trend of science, while offering provocative insights into the relationship between mind and brain. Writing in a thought-provoking style, Chalmers proposes that conscious experience must be understood as an irreducible entity similar to such physical properties as time, mass, and space that exists at a fundamental level and cannot be understood as the…
I am excited by books that broaden my perspective on existence, dissolve mental barriers, broaden our visions, and offer powerful new ways to see the world; life-affirming books that help us to understand life, ourselves, become more conscious of existence, create our own realities and show us how to become masters of our lives instead of victims; books that blend science, spirituality, art, philosophy, life. The types of books I read and the types of books I write have plots that continuously span the terror of the human condition and transformation.
This is a cognitive scientist and neurologist who stopped me in my tracks. The title felt like a whisper of a profound truth I’ve always sensed: each of us is not merely in the world, but a world unto ourselves. The book lives up to its promise.
Koch offers luminous reflections that bridge neuroscience with some of life’s most ungraspable questions. He explores consciousness not just through science, but also through psychedelic experiences, mystical states, near-death experiences, and even artificial intelligence.
What excites me most is the book’s courageous breadth, refusing to limit consciousness to mere circuitry or dogma. Koch straddles the line between materialism and mystery, between what can be measured and what must be felt. For anyone deeply interested in the soul’s terrain and the evolving relationships between mind, machine, and mortality, this book serves as a map—not one that gives answers, but better questions.
In Then I Am Myself the World, Christof Koch explores the only thing we directly experience: consciousness. At the book's heart is integrated-information theory, the idea that the essence of consciousness is the ability to exert causal power over itself, to be an agent of change. Koch investigates the physical origins of consciousness in the brain and how this knowledge can be used to measure consciousness in natural and artificial systems.
Enabled by such tools, Koch reveals when and where consciousness exists, and uses that knowledge to confront major social and scientific questions: When does a foetus first become self-aware?…
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
I am an artist and mathematical neuroscientist. I’ve spent my life cracking some of reality’s greatest mysteries, including consciousness, self-consciousness, language, music, suffering, pain, anesthesia, compassionate love, extraterrestrial communication, and autism.
This is it. The Bible of the Mind. The Codex of Consciousness. The Scroll of the Soul. Stephen Grossberg’s masterwork is a comprehensive mathematical account of human cognition.
Pick any part of the brain, any mental function—a sodium channel, a pyramidal neuron, a circadian circuit, a cerebellar lobe, audio recognition, hate, melodic preferences, linguistic meaning, throwing a spear at a target, visual memory, schizophrenia, free will—and Dr. Grossberg has put math to it. You’ll find that math in this book.
But be forewarned: this book is very, very, very challenging. The math isn’t derived from some other field of science. Because consciousness is not a subset of electromagnetism or a variety of planetary orbit. Consciousness is its own unique thing in the cosmos, and demands its own unique math.
Sophisticated, ornery math. Inaccessible math for most of us, sadly, but if you want to take a shot at the Finnegan’s…
How does your mind work? How does your brain give rise to your mind? These are questions that all of us have wondered about at some point in our lives, if only because everything that we know is experienced in our minds. They are also very hard questions to answer. After all, how can a mind understand itself? How can you understand something as complex as the tool that is being used to understand it?
This book provides an introductory and self-contained description of some of the exciting answers to these questions that modern theories of mind and brain have…
