Best Introduction to the Human Brain
How the Mind Works
Steven Pinker
Pinker explains the findings of neuroscience in everyday language with clever references to popular culture. He goes where the evidence leads instead of jumping on intellectual bandwagons. Our physiological endowment makes us much more than just the product of cultural training, he asserts. More on the evolutionary foundations of human thought can be found in his excellent book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
Best Field Research
Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind
Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth
When Charles Darwin was in his twenties, he wrote in his notebook: “He who understands the baboon would do more toward metaphysics than Locke.” Cheney and Seyfarth take up Darwin’s challenge by conducting simple experiments on wild baboons. For example, they record baboons’ diverse vocalizations and play them back to analyze the responses of other baboons. Their findings illuminate links between social behaviors and reproductive success. Baboons constantly make sophisticated social judgments about mating and child nurturing. Being a social creature does not mean being “nice” to everyone all the time, and this book shows how a baboon decides whom to favor and when. The authors’ earlier work on vervet monkeys, How Monkeys See the World, also sheds great light on how the primate brain goes about meeting its survival needs.
Best Antidote to Negativity
Beyond Cynical: Transcend Your Mammalian Negativity
Loretta Graziano Breuning
Cynicism is popular because it feels good. It helps you feel superior to others (serotonin), to build social bonds (oxytocin), and to redefine rewards so they feel approachable (dopamine). But you have to stay focused on the negative to enjoy the good feeling of cynicism. This book offers a way out of that vicious cycle, and it sustains the momentum of the present volume. You can rewire yourself to feel good in the world you actually live in instead of letting your happiness wait for the promised land of your imagination.
Best Introduction to the Human Limbic System
The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Who We Are
Joseph LeDoux
This is a clear description of the brain systems we’ve inherited from earlier mammals, especially the amygdala. It helps us make the link between our body parts and our subjective perceptions, and thus to notice the mental activity we conduct with neurochemicals rather than with words. The book tilts toward the negative emotions such as fear, and on disease rather than normalcy. But it is still a highly accessible description of what goes on under the hood. LeDoux’s other great work, Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are, is a great explanation of how we store old experiences and retrieve them to process new experiences.
Best Compilation of Happiness Research
The Science of Happiness: How Our Brains Make Us Happy—and What We Can Do to Get Happier
Stefan Klein
Klein introduces the broad array of research on happiness in a highly accessible style. The book has no overarching theory, but it is a good way to extend one’s knowledge of the happy chemicals.
Best Conceptualization of Nonverbal Thought
Animals in Translation
Temple Grandin
The author is a person with autism who works as a consultant in livestock management. She believes her autism helps her understand how animals think. She explains that animals see more detail than humans. Humans learn to ignore details once we find the abstract pattern in those details. Grandin is good at avoiding the idealized notions about animals that result from projecting one’s ideal world onto the animal world. Her insights are based on a lifetime of direct experience with farm animals, as well as a PhD in animal science. Her descriptions of animal thinking help us understand our own brain’s reactions to the world beneath the verbal abstractions that dominate our attention.
Best Insight into a Happy Home and a Happy Club
The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry Into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations
Robert Ardrey
The most monogamous primate is the gibbon, so one naturally wonders how they keep the magic alive. It seems that couples team up to fight the neighbors, thus defending the fruit trees that keep their children alive. This book is a fascinating description of animals’ wide-ranging social dominance behaviors. The patterns are eerily familiar, and Ardrey clearly shows how they’re produced by natural selection rather than conscious intent. People’s strong attachment to their own little corner of the world makes sense once you read this book.
Best Introduction to Our Neurochemistry
Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine
Candace Pert
This science memoir is a perfect blend of neuroscience and the personal story of the researcher. Candace Pert was an early advocate of the idea that chemicals cause emotion. She was central to the discovery of opiate receptors in the brain, which led to the understanding that the body makes its own opiates.
Best Insight into Mammalian Social Dominance
Cesar’s Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems
Cesar Millan
This is not just a “dog” book. It explains the workings of the mammal brain using dog experiences familiar to everyone. We have all seen dogs struggling for dominance. Millan realized that dogs get agitated when the status hierarchy is unclear. They keep trying to assert dominance until they are dominated. They are calmer when hierarchical relations are established. This book tells the fascinating tale of how Millan figured this out. He grew up on a Mexican farm with working dogs. He saw that they weren’t aggressive like his neighbors’ dogs because his grandfather led them. He never met a “pet” until he moved to Hollywood. There, he met extremely neurotic pets that are loved and coddled but can’t stop struggling for dominance. His life experience makes a great story and a great contribution to our understanding of the mammal brain.
Best Child Development Book
NurtureShock: New Thinking about Children
Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Bronson had children later in life and expected them to mold into his well-meaning hands. He discovered that kids learn from what you do rather than what you say. Who knew? This inspired him to study neuroscience and revisit his long-held presumptions about how “our society” should manage “our children.” He explores the way a child’s mind learns from direct interpersonal experience, not from preachy theories about how the world should work. It makes perfect sense when you understand mirror neurons (which are not directly addressed in the book).
Bronson confronts his own illusion that constant praise can help a kid get ahead. Effusive praise for mediocre effort gives the wrong message, he realizes. Kids are good observers of what gets rewarded and what doesn’t. If mediocre effort gets big praise, kids don’t build trust in their own abilities. Bronson struggled to restrain his urge to shower his children with accolades. His honesty about that makes the book humorous and engaging. Unfortunately, Bronson doesn’t acknowledge his own preoccupation with his children’s future status. Readers familiar with mammalian social dominance will see it clearly.
Best Social History of Our Natural Status Urge
Status Anxiety
Alain de Botton
This book explores the reasons why status bugs us and what we can do about it. The human preoccupation with the good opinion of others has been dissected by philosophers for millennia. Alain de Botton is a British philosopher with an entertaining style and a refreshing lack of bitterness. He provides a riveting history of bohemians, whose conspicuous rejection of bourgeois values often masked a private life consumed by the pursuit of money, fame, and one-upmanship. He explores the temptation to blame the world for the common feeling that we have fallen short in some way. The book brims with historical examples, such as duels over “honor,” and shows how stat
us anxiety has always been a part of human life.
De Botton has written many other books on happiness that are philosophical without being deadly dull. His writing will especially appeal to readers with a more literary and historical than scientific bent.
Best Classic
Sociobiology
Edward O. Wilson
This is the book that started it all, and it’s good reading despite being born as a textbook. It walks you through the social behavior of a huge array of animals, making the survival value of each behavior absolutely clear. You will see a lot of patterns that remind you of people you know.
Best Oldie
The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
Carl Sagan
This book won a 1978 Pulitzer Prize, and it’s easy to see why. Sagan’s famous skill for speculation and popularization are applied here to the distant past rather than distant galaxies. The title refers to the reptilian fears that the first humans might have inherited. Fortunately, the book speculates on the pleasant as well as the unpleasant emotions of our earliest ancestors. Sagan’s ideas about human cognition have been largely validated by the neuroscience that came decades later. And he dares to be positive, saying, “If this is where we have come from, we have come very far.”
Best Picture Book on Human Progress
The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible!
Otto L. Bettmann
Historical cartoon drawings are used to illustrate the unpleasant aspects of days gone by. The author is an eminent historian and founder of the picture archive at the New York Public Library. He brings humor to his descriptions of the insecurity and harshness of daily life in the past. The book conquers the widely held presumption that life has gotten worse in modern times.
Best Explanation of “Hard-Wiring”
The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born, It’s Grown
Daniel Coyle
The author sets out to explain why so many top performers in a field often come from one training center. Coyle investigates these “hotbeds of talent” to learn what these trainers are doing right. The answer he finds rests on a little-known aspect of brain function: the myelination of neurons. Repetition builds the myelin sheaths that make neurons efficient. Great talent develops when we repeat difficult skills enough to myelinate bundles of neurons. We all have plenty of myelinated neural pathways as a result of repeated early experience. But we often get frustrated when we strive to build such pathways consciously. Coyle’s research uncovered the distinctive kind of repetition that best promotes myelination and thus new skills.
Best Hope for the Future
An Unchanged Mind: The Problem of Immaturity in Adolescence
by John McKinnon
Maturity doesn’t just come automatically with time. It has to be learned. We’re all born helpless and need others to meet our needs. We are soothed by the expectation that others will meet our needs, and learn to survive by calling attention to our needs. Yet we all must gradually learn to meet our own needs. What if this shift doesn’t happen? What if a person expects others to meet his or her needs forever? They may not expect this consciously, but the reward structure in their life may have trained it into them. The resulting immature behavior gets labeled as a “disease” in the modern world. It’s not a disease—it’s a learning gap that can be solved by learning. If you didn’t learn realistic expectations and self-care skills in the past, you can learn them now. McKinnon has written a sequel to help: To Change a Mind: Parenting to Promote Maturity in Teenagers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Loretta Graziano Breuning grew up surrounded by unhappiness and was determined to make sense of it. She was not convinced by theories of human motivation she learned in school, so she kept searching. When she learned about the effect brain chemicals have on animals, human frustrations suddenly made sense, so she retired from teaching and founded the Inner Mammal Institute.
Dr. Breuning holds a PhD from Tufts and a BS from Cornell, both in multidisciplinary social science. She is Professor Emerita of Management at California State University, East Bay. Her other books include I, Mammal: Why Your Brain Links Status and Happiness and Beyond Cynical: Transcend Your Mammalian Negativity. She writes the blog Your Neurochemical Self on PsychologyToday.com.
The Inner Mammal Institute provides tools that help people make peace with the animal inside. It has helped thousands of people learn to manage their neurochemical ups and downs. Discover your inner mammal at www.InnerMammalInstitute.org .
After college, Ms. Breuning spent a year in Africa as a United Nations Volunteer. She experienced the corruption that undermines economic development and resolved to teach her students an alternative. She wrote the book Grease-le$$: How to Thrive Without Bribes in Developing Countries, and has lectured on that subject in China, Armenia, the Philippines, and Albania.
Today, she volunteers as a docent at the Oakland Zoo, where she gives tours on mammalian social behavior. And she marvels each day at the overlap between a wildlife documentary and the lyrics to popular love songs.
Copyright © 2016 by Loretta Graziano Breuning.
All rights reserved.
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ISBN 10: 1-4405-9050-8
ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-9050-4
eISBN 10: 1-4405-9051-6
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-9051-1
This book is intended as general information only, and should not be used to diagnose or treat any health condition. In light of the complex, individual, and specific nature of health problems, this book is not intended to replace professional medical advice. The ideas, procedures, and suggestions in this book are intended to supplement, not replace, the advice of a trained medical professional. Consult your physician before adopting any of the suggestions in this book, as well as about any condition that may require diagnosis or medical attention. The author and publisher disclaim any liability arising directly or indirectly from the use of this book.
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