Here are 100 books that The XX Brain fans have personally recommended if you like
The XX Brain.
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As a techno-optimist, I believe that technology can make us better! Technology should make us stronger and healthier, technology should enable us to do things we couldn’t do without it, and technology should create an equitable future. In 25 years, I want superhuman eyesight, joints, and memory. I want to travel with family and friends both physically and virtually through the metaverse. And I want to make sure that all of our data is used responsibly and ethically to optimize our home and community. All of the books I selected (including mine!) build on these themes painting a picture of a future that is optimistic, and show us how we can be active participants in creating the future we want to see.
Science journalist Sally Adee brings alive the fact that yes, we are electric.
If we could truly understand the way our bodies work electrically and not just chemically, it could open the doors to a revolution in medicine. We would look at the brain and the nervous system in a whole different light; pharmaceuticals would be replaced by electroceuticals; and we might sleep better and live longer.
I recommend this book because I enjoyed going on this journey through history to the future!
Science journalist Sally Adee breaks open the field of bioelectricity—the electric currents that run through our bodies and every living thing—its misunderstood history, and why new discoveries will lead to new ways around antibiotic resistance, cleared arteries, and new ways to combat cancer.
You may be familiar with the idea of our body's biome: the bacterial fauna that populate our gut and can so profoundly affect our health. In We Are Electric we cross into new scientific understanding: discovering your body's electrome.
Every cell in our bodies—bones, skin, nerves, muscle—has a voltage, like a tiny battery. It is the reason…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
As a techno-optimist, I believe that technology can make us better! Technology should make us stronger and healthier, technology should enable us to do things we couldn’t do without it, and technology should create an equitable future. In 25 years, I want superhuman eyesight, joints, and memory. I want to travel with family and friends both physically and virtually through the metaverse. And I want to make sure that all of our data is used responsibly and ethically to optimize our home and community. All of the books I selected (including mine!) build on these themes painting a picture of a future that is optimistic, and show us how we can be active participants in creating the future we want to see.
Tan Le is a good friend and kickass tech entrepreneur who founded the neurotech company Emotiv.
She talks with the top neuroscientists and technologists in the area of brain-computer interfaces. But what makes it relatable is how Tan weaves in her own story. Tan is a Vietnamese-born Australian and talks about her own journey creating and developing an EEG headset and growing a tech company.
I recommend this book because I absolutely believe that technology can improve our brain and brain-computer interfaces are our future!
'A highly engaging guided tour through the frontiers of what science knows about how the brain works, how to extend its power and how to fix it when it's broken.' - David Gillespie, author of Sweet Poison and Teen Brain
'Tan Le writes with optimism and compassion about the extraordinary evolution of brain technology. Totally inspiring!' - Wendy McCarthy AO
Technology now allows us to unlock the amazing potential of the human brain in ways we never dreamt were possible. Join award-winning inventor and entrepreneur Tan Le as she criss-crosses the globe, introducing the brilliant neurotech innovators and neuroscientists at…
As a techno-optimist, I believe that technology can make us better! Technology should make us stronger and healthier, technology should enable us to do things we couldn’t do without it, and technology should create an equitable future. In 25 years, I want superhuman eyesight, joints, and memory. I want to travel with family and friends both physically and virtually through the metaverse. And I want to make sure that all of our data is used responsibly and ethically to optimize our home and community. All of the books I selected (including mine!) build on these themes painting a picture of a future that is optimistic, and show us how we can be active participants in creating the future we want to see.
Dr. Rana el Kaliouby is an Egyptian-born computer scientist and tech entrepreneur who co-founded the company Affectiva based on her pioneering work on Emotion AI, a subfield of Artificial Intelligence.
Emotion AI is designed to understand, respond to, and simulate human emotions. Rana believes this technology has profound implications across various sectors, including mental health, education, transportation, and robotics. It can enhance our digital interactions, create empathetic robots, improve road safety by monitoring driver attention, and aid in mental health diagnosis and treatment.
I recommend this book because what’s not to love about building empathy and emotion into technology!
'Rana el Kaliouby's vision for how technology should work in parallel with empathy is bold, inspired and hopeful' Arianna Huffington, founder and CEO of Thrive Global
'This lucid and captivating book by a renowned pioneer of emotion-AI tackles one of the most pressing issues of our time: How can we ensure a future where this technology empowers rather than surveils and manipulates us?' Max Tegmark, professor of physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of Life 3.0
We are entering an empathy crisis. Most of our communication is conveyed through non-verbal cues - facial expressions, tone of voice, body…
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
Green sketching opened my eyes to the beauty and joy in my life that I’d never noticed before, beauty and joy that cost nothing to me or the planet. It quietened my busy brain, reduced my anxiety, and made me much more resilient. I’m now trying to help others put down their phones and pick up a pencil. Because when we change what we look at, we can change how we feel. And I’m convinced that once we see and appreciate nature’s beauty with fresh eyes, we’ll start to love and take care of it again.
As someone who straddles the sciences and the arts, I devoured this book and loved learning more about why participating in the arts, whether as a creator or a beholder, brings me so much joy.
I had no idea the cells in my heart actively respond to aesthetic stimuli!
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A life-altering journey through the science of neuroaesthetics, which offers proof for how our brains and bodies transform when we participate in the arts—and how this knowledge can improve our health, enable us to flourish, and build stronger communities.
“This book blew my mind!”—Angela Duckworth, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Grit
Many of us think of the arts as entertainment—a luxury of some kind. In Your Brain on Art, authors Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross show how activities from painting and dancing to expressive writing, architecture, and more are essential to our lives.
I founded the All-Weather Friend, which is about helping friends get through difficult situations. My first book, Alzheimer’s: A Crash Course for Friends and Relatives, tells how to help people living with dementia. I’ve had hard times in my life—my husband’s brain tumor and suicide, my father’s dementia, infertility, miscarriage, my brother’s sudden death, and other things that flooded me with grief. But my life is filled with joy; I’ve learned that joy comes from God and from a compassionate connection with friends and people we love. I write and speak about “informed compassion.” I hope you’ll visit my website, where there’s a great dementia resource page with contributions by many readers.
Moments of joy are often all that can be had by people in the later stages of dementia when life is lived moment by forgotten moment. What people may not realize, though, is that while the memories of joyful moments (an ice cream cone, petting a dog, looking at pictures, taking a walk) may be quickly forgotten, the emotion of joy will linger.
Brackey tells us how to create moments of joy for our loved ones with dementia and that people with dementia have much to teach us about ourselves.
The beloved best seller has been revised and expanded for the fifth edition.
Jolene Brackey has a vision: that we will soon look beyond the challenges of Alzheimer's disease to focus more of our energies on creating moments of joy. When people have short-term memory loss, their lives are made up of moments. We are not able to create perfectly wonderful days for people with dementia or Alzheimer's, but we can create perfectly wonderful moments, moments that put a smile on their faces and a twinkle in their eyes. Five minutes later, they will not remember what we did or…
I am a novelist, a journalist, a humanist celebrant, and coauthor with my husband of the best-selling Nicci French thrillers. Witnessing my father’s dementia and his slow-motion dying radically transformed the way I think about what it is to be human. In 2014, I founded John’s Campaign which seeks to make the care of those who are vulnerable and powerless more compassionate, and which is now a national movement in the UK. In 2016, I won the Orwell Prize for Journalism for ‘exposing Britain’s social evils' in the pieces I wrote exploring the nature of dementia.
Erwin Mortier is a poet, and this slim, intense volume is a haunting memorial to his mother in her final months. She died of early-onset dementia, and Mortier struggles to find adequate words for a condition that is profoundly connected to the failure of language and the connection of the self to the world.
'My mother, a house that is slowly collapsing, a bridge dancing to a tremor.'
It started when she could no longer remember the word for 'book'. Then her mind, her language and her identity began to slip away.
This is Erwin Mortier's moving, exquisitely observed memoir of his mother's descent into dementia, as a once-flamboyant woman who loved life and pleasure becomes a shuffling, ghostlike figure wandering through the house. Piecing together the fragments of her lost life, and his own childhood, Mortier asks: what do we become when we lose the repertoire of habits and words that make us…
Almost Home is a fictional retelling of the last great tragedy of the Civil War.
In late April 1865, almost 2,000 newly freed Union prisoners of war are packed onto the steamer Sultana, in poor repair and with a listed capacity of 376 passengers. Among them are four Indiana soldiers…
My dad was an adventure traveler, so I floated down the Amazon, rode chicken busses in rural Guatemala, and stepped on the Russian Steppes before I ever saw Big Ben. All that adventure as a kid engendered an insatiable curiosity about the amazing diversity of people and cultures in this world. Sadly, when I was growing up, most children’s books didn’t reflect this diversity. Not only should all children be able to see themselves on the pages of the books they read, it’s equally important that kids see children who aren’t just like they are. Consequently, adding cultural and ethnic diversity into kids' lit has become a passion for me.
Mercy stole my heart from the very first page. Although more accurately, it’s Mercy’s eccentric foster aunts who did the initial stealing. Their quirky excuse notes—one says Mercy has “the collywobbles,” another that she can’t participate in inter-house cross-country because she “has a bone in her leg”—is just a taste of the humor to come. The story in this gem from South Africa is complex and surprisingly powerful with its focus on Gandhi’s response to discrimination as he traveled through South Africa and how he lived the Sanskrit word satyagraha, which means truth and polite insistence. I was fascinated by South Africa’s complicated ethnic diversity, not unlike America’s complicated diversity, which made the message of satyagraha even more potent for me.
Named a Best Middle-Grade Book of 2020 by Kirkus Reviews 2021 Outstanding International Books List, United States Board on Books for Young People Mercy lives in modern-day Pietermaritzburg, South Africa with her eccentric foster aunts-two elderly sisters so poor, they can only afford one lightbulb. A nasty housing developer is eying their house. And that same house suddenly starts falling apart-just as Aunt Flora starts falling apart. She's forgetting words, names, and even how to behave in public. Mercy tries to keep her head down at school so nobody notices her. But when a classmate frames her for stealing the…
I’m a physician and a writer. Together, they create a matrix of practice, research, and writing. I care for patients at the Penn Memory Center and am a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach and study topics at the intersections of bioethics, aging, and the neurosciences. I wrote The Problem of Alzheimer’s: How Science, Culture, and Politics Turned a Rare Disease into a Crisis and What We Can Do About It and the novel Open Wound: The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont and essays for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, The Hill, STAT, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. I raise whippets, and I’m a passionate reader of the physician and poet John Keats.
This first-person account of living with a biomarker-defined diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease is a clearly written story of two very distinct, even antagonistic experiences. There’s the highly subjective experience of being a patient and the highly objective experience of being a physician who has diagnosed and cared for persons with the same disease. In one book is one narrative of two perspectives embodied in one person. The result is an unadorned account of what it’s like to lose one’s mind just a little bit at a time. Case in point is his account of apathy. I’m routinely prescribing this book to my patients.
Dr Daniel Gibbs is one of 50 million people worldwide with an Alzheimer's disease diagnosis. Unlike most patients with Alzheimer's, however, Dr Gibbs worked as a neurologist for twenty-five years, caring for patients with the very disease now affecting him. Also unusual is that Dr Gibbs had begun to suspect he had Alzheimer's several years before any official diagnosis could be made. Forewarned by genetic testing showing he carried alleles that increased the risk of developing the disease, he noticed symptoms of mild cognitive impairment long before any tests would have alerted him. In this highly personal account, Dr Gibbs…
The inspiration to write about Alzheimer’s came from my own life. My grandfather had the disease. He and I were very close and it broke my heart when I realized I’d been forgotten. He only remembered my voice, that it sounded like a little girl he used to know. I wanted to capture the truth of that in a story. Sadly, dementia is so common, but for some reason, we don’t talk about Alzheimer’s as openly as we do other diseases. Kids need to be able to have everyday conversations about what they might be experiencing in regards to whomever they know with the disease. My hope is that books like Flowers can help.
Stark-McGinnis tackles Alzheimer’s of a parent, in this case, a mother. The disease is already well-progressed as we meet Cassie; her mother has already forgotten her name. Told in the present tense interspersed with a series of flashbacks to before Cassie’s Mom had the disease, we see all that has been lost. Linking memories to math, in that each can be broken down into more finite parts, Cassie draws “memory sketches” in the hopes that connecting all the dots in Mom’s life will make her remember. It doesn’t of course, but with her father, Cassie finds a path toward acceptance.
From the acclaimed author of Extraordinary Birds, a powerful story about family, friendship, and the light that can be found even in the darkest of places.
Cassie's always looked up to her mom, a vibrant woman bursting with grand ideas. Together they planned to check off every dream on their think-big bucket list, no matter how far the adventures took them. The future seemed unlimited.
But then came the diagnosis, and Mom started to lose her memories. Even the ones Cassie thought she'd never forget. Even Cassie's name.
Cassie tries her hardest to keep Mom happy . . . to…
Creativity, Teaching, and Natural Inspiration
by
Mark Doherty,
I have woven numerous delightful and descriptive true life stories, many from my adventures as an outdoorsman and singer songwriter, into my life as a high school English teacher. I think you'll find this work both entertaining as well as informative, and I hope you enjoy the often lighthearted repartee…
I am a conflict resolution coach. I have a master's degree in conflict and am an ICF professional coach. I like my clients to live “clean” between their ears—even when life is not going their way. My book is light and fun. Deep and meaningful. And a flashlight to help those who are in the clouds of conflict get “good with themself.” Conflict becomes less scary when you identify the words that caused the issue. There is no use surviving a bad situation and then replaying it over and over again. Keeping the past alive in your mind keeps the past alive. Bury it with honor and grace.
You cannot help what your body or the chemistry of the mind does. And the journey of self-acceptance, the love of the family around her, and the understanding this could happen to any of us is a reality.
I felt for the characters and was slowly led down the path of the horrors of losing your memory. It was a steady decline, and I felt every feeling with each page turn.
A moving story of a woman with early onset Alzheimer's disease, now a major Academy Award-winning film starring Julianne Moore and Kristen Stewart.
Alice Howland is proud of the life she worked so hard to build. At fifty, she's a cognitive psychology professor at Harvard and a renowned expert in linguistics, with a successful husband and three grown children. When she begins to grow forgetful and disoriented, she dismisses it for as long as she can until a tragic diagnosis changes her life - and her relationship with her family and the world around her - for ever.
