Books like We Are Electric

First of all, how could anyone not love a book with an author’s name like that?

This book was on display mere inches from me while I was signing books at an exceptionally enchanting indie bookstore called Sudden Fiction in Castle Rock, Colorado. I couldn’t wait for the signing to be over so I could get a copy for myself. And it did not disappoint, the contents being as beguiling as the cover. 

Sheldrake describes not only the incredible and seemingly irrepressible capacity fungi have for survival and thrival (yep, I made that word up), but also encourages us to practice the same spells. I may have to become a mycologist in my next iteration – it’s good to remake oneself every few months, I think.

I found this book to be a fascinating journey into realms of the world below the surface I had never thought about or even known existed. Cave diving is my worst nightmare, so one particular section stands out about the wild, terrifying, and utterly unrelatable passion of cave divers and the perils one faces when stuck very, very underground.

The mixture of purely natural environments and human-created ones, such as underground tunnels and cities, all held my attention as pieces of information I had read very little about in the past, all collected into one unifying theme. Having such a broad but specific topic all in one read was a fun, dynamic journey. 

As a circular economy professional from Cambridge university, I pursue to cross that bridge between life sciences and organizational theory.

Capra and Luisi provide exactly that. Their synthesis of systems thinking, complexity theory, and living systems research gives us the conceptual foundation for understanding why organizations function best when mimicking natural characteristics.

I was especially moved by their argument that the mechanistic worldview dominating business for centuries is not just outdated but actively harmful. They show how living systems operate through networks of relationships rather than hierarchies, through emergence rather than control, through continuous adaptation rather than static structures.

Every time I work with an organization struggling with rigid hierarchies or siloed thinking, I draw on frameworks from this book. Their chapter on cognition and consciousness in living systems shifted how I think about organizational learning.

This is dense material, but they write with such clarity that complex concepts become… show more.

I loved the way Guy Claxton joined the dots between so many separate scientific disciplines.

He is (I believe) a professor of linguistics, yet he dove into human biology with clarity and gusto, presenting an accessible description of an extremely complex concept—that intelligence incorporates our whole body, not just our brain.

Luigi Galvani found the first evidence that the signals between the brain and the body are electric at the end of the 18th century in Italy.

But his discovery was almost immediately overshadowed by the much more immediately useful invention of the battery. After this, the very idea of bioelectricity fell into disrepute along with Galvani’s reputation.

Neurophysiologist Marco Piccolino and historian of science Marco Bresadola dig into the original controversy over animal electricity and detail how this schism would shape the next 200 years of neuroscience and electrophysiology.

The authors draw on deep-cut archival source material to conclusively restore the unfairly tarnished reputation of Galvani.

This is not a book for people with a mild interest, but will nourish those with an obsessive interest in every detail around the controversy. 

This book tells the story of how bioelectricity was finally accepted in modern neuroscience, how it interacts with biochemical elements of the nervous signal, and how its manipulation led to great medica and scientific advances in the late 20th century.

The author knew several of the leading figures who made these discoveries and provides personal anecdotes about them, as well as illuminating episodes from the history of neuroscience. 

Gruesome experiments extended Luigi Galvani’s early work with frog cadavers into human ones.

Victorian-era scientists shocked the bodies of executed prisoners, or sold improbably electrical cures, all in the hopes of finding the answers to questions about the boundary between life and death.

Iwan Rhys Morus chooses four case studies that explain how science got to grips with electricity and its effects on the human body, and what the intersection implied about both.

The book provides lasting insights into why electric medicine is still widely associated with pseudoscience today.

I received this book from my father as a Christmas present at age 16, in 1956. The author is a Professor of Zoology who made one of the most stunning discoveries of biology of the last century: honeybees communicate direction and distance of a food source they had found to their hive-mates, within the darkness of their hive.

The code involves the movements of their bodies in a "dance," that gives directions with respect to the position of the sun, but at the same time that position shifts with time, the bees without seeing it take into account its movement in the sky, to within about 15 minutes. His experimental proofs deciphering the bees' "dances" are simple and direct, as was his writing of them. The book was and still is an inspiration, a revelation of nature's beauty that no one had seen before.

Joanna sadly left this world in 2025, but her work will stay with me forever. 

This was the book that helped me move past my panic attacks about the future of humanity. How should we be when we accept the fact that the world is falling apart? How does one act, prioritize, and engage? How do you do it, without falling apart yourself? 

Not an easy book to read, because it clearly lays out the trouble we’re in as human beings on this planet—no tiptoeing around. And yet, that’s exactly what gave me comfort. I needed to recognize, name, and honor the fears I felt within, instead of continuing to try to bat them away. 

This book meets our moment with truth and clarity. 

This collection of essays blew my mind. Researchers in a range of disciplines were asked to elaborate on why a given idea in their field should be put to rest. There is a chapter dedicated to big data, nature versus nurture, cause and effect, race, Linnaean classification, etc. The book’s essays inspired me to shape a section on “Reductionism and related ideas that will die” as part of a solicited article I wrote with Tony Lang in 2018 aiming to predict the future of Parkinson’s disease research in the 2020s (Ben Stecher credited it as his reason to relocate to Cincinnati to work with us in our CCBP study). This book is also a reminder that progress requires new ideas, and most cannot emerge without first abandoning outdated ones (as Kuhn articulated).  

An idea that must die in neurology is the clinico-pathologic model of classifying neurodegenerative diseases: abnormalities on brain… show more.