100 Books Like Who's in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain

This book gave me a deeper appreciation of how moral intuitions shape political divisions—not as accidents of ideology but as features of human psychology. Haidt’s metaphor of the elephant and the rider helped me see why rational argument so often fails to persuade across political lines: because reason follows intuition, not the other way around.

His mapping of multiple “moral taste buds”—including authority, loyalty, and sanctity—also challenged the narrow moral frameworks that dominate secular discourse. While I don’t agree with everything—particularly his optimistic lean toward moral equilibrium or his underemphasis on structural power—I admire his effort to move us beyond outrage toward curiosity. It’s a valuable guide for understanding why we talk past one another—and how we might start listening instead.

This is a highly readable and fun book published back in 1982 by one of the leading primatologists of our era. A close student of ape behavior, Frans de Waal shows how smart apes are and what we can learn about ourselves by studying their behavior. He demonstrates that, contrary to common belief, it is not by physical strength alone that an alpha ape hangs onto its power at the top of the social pyramid. More important than their muscles is their ability to form coalitions with others.  

If your mental image of an alpha ape is a brawny male, forget it. De Waal profiles one female ape, Mama, who manages for years to dominate a group by exercising power more prudently than her male rivals, who shriek and throw tantrums when they don't get their way. This is the good news. The bad news is that apes are Machiavellian.… show more.

To achieve the things that matter to us, we have to know what they are.

We tend to think we know ourselves really well – certainly better than anyone else knows us. But in this book, psychologist Timothy Wilson presents fascinating evidence that we don’t know ourselves as well as we think we do.

In particular, we tend to rationalize our choices after the fact in ways that don’t actually reflect our deeper, emotional state.

This book opened my mind to the idea that we need to “look under the hood” to figure out what matters to us most. 

The subtitle says it all. While many of us may suspect that American elections are not quite what “Schoolhouse Rock” told us years ago, Achen and Bartels explain it in a clear-eyed, candid fashion.

If you want to understand 2024 (and likely more elections to come), this book is fundamental.

World-renowned neuroscientist Anil Seth has spent over twenty years researching the brain, and presents his theory of consciousness and self.

Unlike our book, which approaches the topic from a spiritual perspective, Anil breaks down brain function into its constituent parts and explains how the integration of these constituent parts creates consciousness. 

He makes a complex subject easy to read and engages the reader with his ideas.

This book is a joyous exploration of the mind and its thrilling complexities. It will excite anyone interested in cutting-edge science and technology and the vast philosophical, personal, and ethical implications of finally quantifying what consciousness is. How does our brain generate conscious thoughts? And why does so much of our knowledge remain unconscious? Thanks to clever psychological and brain-imaging experiments, scientists are closer to cracking this mystery than ever before.

I was fascinated while reading this book because it taught me so much about how the brain works, why we are the way we are, and how our brains differ. I enjoyed how the author debunked that if we’re more “right-brained,” we’re more creative, and if we’re more “left-brained,” we’re more creative.

The concept is a whole lot more nuanced than that. I also appreciated her take on nature vs. nurture and how that impacts the way our brains work. It took me a long time to read this because there was so much information to digest, but I felt like the education I received from this book was invaluable.

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.

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. 

Of course I love an exposé, heavily seasoned with gossip. Wade’s book tells the story of a race between two teams of scientists to discover the structure of an important brain hormone.

The reality of science is laid out in all its guts and glory: each team leader’s vaulting ambition to win the race, the complicated, error-prone nature of scientific research, and the tremendous and tedious effort involved from day to day—one of the team leaders later estimated he had processed 100,000 pig brains, just to extract enough of the vital substance to run through a testing regime.

In a delightful twist, one of the labs involved in the race is the very place that Latour infiltrated a few years later, and like Latour, Wade shows how the crucial decision to claim that the structure of the molecule had been discovered was as political as it was scientific.