RECOMMENDED READS
01.
BEHAVE
By Robert M Sapolsky
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Why do we do the things we do? Over a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky's genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle. Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its genetic inheritance.
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02.
THE BRAIN
By David Eagleman
Locked in the silence and darkness of your skull, your brain fashions the rich narratives of your reality and your identity. Join renowned neuroscientist David Eagleman for a journey into the questions at the mysterious heart of our existence. What is reality? Who are “you”? How do you make decisions? Why does your brain need other people? How is technology poised to change what it means to be human? In the course of his investigations, Eagleman guides us through the world of extreme sports, criminal justice, facial expressions, genocide, brain surgery, gut feelings, robotics, and the search for immortality. Strap in for a whistle-stop tour into the inner cosmos. In the infinitely dense tangle of billions of brain cells and their trillions of connections, something emerges that you might not have expected to see in there: you.
This is the story of how your life shapes your brain, and how your brain shapes your life.
03.
BRAIN RULES: 12 PRINCIPLES FOR SURVIVING AND THRIVING AT WORK, HOME AND SCHOOL
By John Medina
Most of us have no idea what’s really going on inside our heads. Yet brain scientists have uncovered details every business leader, parent, and teacher should know—like the need for physical activity to get your brain working its best.
In Brain Rules, Dr. John Medina, a molecular biologist, shares his lifelong interest in how the brain sciences might influence the way we teach our children and the way we work. In each chapter, he describes a brain rule—what scientists know for sure about how our brains work—and then offers transformative ideas for our daily lives.
04.
THE POWER OF HABIT
By Charles Duhigg
In The Power of Habit, business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation.
At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work.
Habits aren’t destiny. As Charles Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science of habit formation, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.
05.
BEFORE YOU KNOW IT
By John Burgh
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Over "John Bargh's Before You Know It moves our understanding of the mysteries of human behaviour one giant step forward. The world's leading expert on the unconscious mind reveals the hidden mental processes that secretly govern every aspect of our behaviour. For more than three decades, Dr John Bargh has been conducting revolutionary research into the unconscious mind - not Freud's dark, malevolent unconscious but a helpful and powerful part of the mind that we can access and understand through experimental science. Now, Dr Bargh presents an engaging and enlightening tour of the influential psychological forces that are at work as we go about our daily lives - checking a dating app, holding a cup of hot coffee or getting a flu jab. Dr Bargh takes you into his labs at New York University and Yale, where his ingenious experiments have shown how the unconscious guides our behaviour, goals and motivations in areas like race relations, parenting, business, consumer behaviour and addiction. Before You Know It will profoundly change the way you understand yourself by introducing you to a fascinating world only recently discovered, the world that exists below the surface of your awareness and yet is the key to unlocking new ways of thinking, feeling and behaving
06.
SOFT-WIRED: HOW THE NEW SCIENCE
OF BRAIN PLASTICITY CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE
By Dr Michael Merzenich PhD
In Soft-Wired, Dr Michael Merzenich; a world authority on brain plasticity explains how the brain rewires itself across the lifespan, and how you can take control of that process to improve your life. In addition to fascinating descriptions of how your brain has produced your unique memories, skills, quirks, and emotions, Soft-Wired offers sound advice for evaluating your brain and gives clear, specific, scientifically proven guidance for how to rejuvenate, remodel, and reshape your brain to improve it at any age.
07.
BLACK BOX THINKING
By Matthew Syed
Black Box Thinking is a new approach to high performance, a means of finding an edge in a complex and fast-changing world. It is not just about sport, but has powerful implications for business and politics, as well as for parents and students. In other words, all of us.
Drawing on a dizzying array of case studies and real-world examples, together with cutting-edge research on marginal gains, creativity and grit, Matthew Syed tells the inside story of how success really happens - and how we cannot grow unless we are prepared to learn from our mistakes.
08.
THE BRAIN THAT CHANGES ITSELF
By Norman Doidge MD
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An astonishing new scientific discovery called neuroplasticity is overthrowing the centuries-old notion that the adult human brain is fixed and unchanging. It is, instead, able to change its own structure and function, even into old age.
Doidge takes us onto terrain that might seem fantastic. We learn that our thoughts can switch our genes on and off, altering our brain anatomy. We learn how people of average intelligence can, with brain exercises, improve their cognition and perception, develop muscle strength, or learn to play a musical instrument - simply by imagining doing so.
Using personal stories from the heart of this neuroplasticity revolution, Dr Doidge has written an immensely moving, inspiring book that will permanently alter the way we look at our brains, human nature, and human potential.
09.
INSIDE OUT
By Larry Wilson, Gary A Higbee
Traditional methods of improving safety performance through extrinsic control will only take you so far. Realizing this, many leading-edge companies have abandoned their old paradigms and have taken a new approach. Learn how to develop a positive safety culture using inside-out thinking—a culture that begins in the workplace and spreads out to include both the family and the community.
10.
GOOD HABITS BAD HABITS
By Wendy Wood
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A profoundly insightful and helpful book on the power of habit and how to change your behaviour for a lifetime. We spend a shocking 43 percent of our day doing things without thinking about them. That means that almost half of our actions aren't conscious choices but the result of our non-conscious mind nudging our body to act along learned behaviors. How we respond to the people around us; the way we conduct ourselves in a meeting; what we buy; when and how we exercise, eat, and drink--a truly remarkable number of things we do every day, regardless of their complexity, operate outside of our awareness. We do them automatically.
Wendy Wood draws on three decades of original research to explain the fascinating science of how we form habits, and offers the key to unlocking our habitual mind in order to make the changes we seek.
11.
THE HUMAN BRAIN
By Suasn Greenfield
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What would you see if you removed the skull from the human brain and then slowly worked your way deeper and deeper into the brain, to the level of an individual neuron?
With renowned brain researcher Susan Greenfield as your guide, here is your chance to gain a bird's eye view of the human brain--and to learn more about what the brain is, how it works, what happens when one part of the brain is made dysfunctional through stroke or accident, how brain mood-modifying drugs find their targets. In a particularly fascinating chapter, Greenfield surveys for us how a brain is built and then takes us on a tour of the developing brain from the moment of conception. Throughout Greenfield poses the larger questions all readers want to consider, including: At what stage does individuality creep into the developing brain? How does the collection of circuits of neurons give rise not just to an individual brain but an individual consciousness? What might a fetus be conscious of?
12.
THINKING FAST AND SLOW
By Daniel Kahneman
In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation - each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions.