5 brilliant books to demystify the brain

Around the turn of the 19th century, a Viennese physician named Franz Joseph Gall proposed a new, and controversial, hypothesis about the human brain. Even as a child, Gall was fascinated by the brain and its connection with people’s personalities, and so throughout his career, he intensely studied its anatomy while also gathering data on people’s skull sizes and facial features.

He came to believe that people’s mental faculties were localized within specific brain regions. And because these regions molded the shape of people’s skulls, a trained eye could divinate a person’s capabilities for love, violence, greed, intelligence, and other traits simply by examining their cranial bumps and recessions.

As you’ve probably guessed, Gall’s hypotheses provided the basis for phrenology — though Gall never used that term, preferring the more lexically accurate but less marketable “cranioscopy.” Today, researchers have rejected cranioscopy for its lack of empirical rigor, and the phrenology crazes that followed Gall’s death — spearheaded by grifters like the Fowler Brothers — are recognized as pseudoscientific fads.

But let’s not be too hard on the old Gall. The human brain is an incredibly complex organ, and his research represents some of the earliest attempts to understand it scientifically. In the 200 years since, neuroscientists have learned a lot about the brain’s relationship with intelligence and personality, as well as how its unique regions play both specialized and coordinated roles in bodily and cognitive functions. 

Yet many mysteries remain, and plenty of myths and pseudoscientific claims surrounding the brain are still out there — many based on either misunderstandings of the empirical data or the misleading promises of hucksters.

To help us learn more and demystify the brain a bit, we asked Rachel Barr, a neuroscientist and the author of How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend, to recommend some books on the subject. She suggested the following five, written by some of the top experts and thinkers in her field.

Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

You’ve probably heard the myth that people who favor thinking with their brain’s left hemisphere are more analytical, whereas right-brained people are more creative and thoughtful. While it is true that some brain functions are primarily the domain of one hemisphere or the other, there’s no substantial evidence that individuals favor one side of the brain, and researchers now know that traits such as creativity are whole-brain activities.

However, this doesn’t mean the brain’s two halves always play the close-and-cozy couple. 

In the 1970s, researchers Roger Sperry, Joseph Bogen, and Michael Gazzaniga began what became known as the “split-brain studies.” These studies focused on patients who had undergone callosotomies — surgical procedures that require cutting the corpus callosum, the area of the brain that connects the left and right hemispheres, usually as a treatment for severe seizures.

What they found by examining these patients was astonishing. When unable to communicate, the two hemispheres processed information and made decisions independently. For instance, in one experiment, a patient would be shown two pictures: one only visible to the left eye and one only visible to the right. When asked to draw and describe what they saw, the patient would sketch the image seen by their left eye, but their explanation would be for the image seen by their right.

These findings led some neuroscientists to propose what is called the “split consciousness” hypothesis, the idea that the brain houses two or more conscious agents. The findings also revealed cognitive functions in which the brain’s hemispheres actually do specialize, such as language (left) and facial recognition (right).

Gazzaniga’s 2015 book, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain, is one part memoir, one part review of this groundbreaking research.

“Few lab studies have rewritten philosophy, but Gazzaniga’s split-brain experiments did,” Barr tells us. “They showed that inside a single skull, two minds can argue over the same world. It’s one of the coolest experiments in neuroscience history!”

Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought

How do you experience thought? Do you think in words narrated by a voice in your head? Are your thoughts more like a painting, and if so, would you describe them as naturalistic, minimalist, or abstract? And even if these metaphors help you explain the experience of your thoughts, do they represent the actual stuff of thought?

In her 2019 book, Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky tackles these heady questions to reveal an often overlooked aspect of thinking: spatial cognition.

Spatial cognition refers to the skills we use to process information about our environments in order to navigate or act within them. The last time you unfurled a mental map of your hometown, built a tower out of Lego bricks with your nephew, or pulled off a brilliant strategy to win a game of Settlers of Catan, you used spatial cognition. 

However, for Tversky, this isn’t just some overlooked aspect of thought. It’s a foundational one. Our brains are one part of an entire nervous system that weaves throughout our bodies. As we experience the world through our actions and movement, these bodily interactions create perceptions that form the basis of our abstract thoughts. Far from swimming alone in the ocean of our skulls, thoughts evolve in the entire ecosystem of us being us.

“Mind in Motion is the reminder that cognition has a body,” Barr says. “If you’ve ever solved a problem by moving your hands or drawing boxes, you’re squarely in its thesis. It’s also one of the few neuroscience books that doesn’t feel allergic to lived life.”

Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

Few problems in philosophy are as sticky as the problem of consciousness. Despite some of history’s best thinkers probing the question for centuries, we still aren’t sure whether people experience consciousness in the same way, how self-aware animals are, or how subjective experiences arise from mere sparks between neurons. For that matter, is a biological brain even necessary for consciousness to emerge?

In this 2019 book, writer Annaka Harris offers a consciousness primer. The book introduces readers to the mysteries surrounding consciousness and explores the field’s central ideas from both a scientific and philosophical perspective. Harris’s goal is less to stake a claim in the ongoing debate — though she certainly has her theories — but to help get readers up-to-speed and provide them a sense of how things may evolve in the near future with the advent of technologies like AI.

“If you’re a beginner looking for answers, this book is essential reading — because it dares not to give you any,” Barr says. “Harris leaves the hard questions open, but does so without leaving you begging for a point in a fog of Socratic hedging. It’s a clear, unpretentious tour of consciousness.”

She adds, “At under 150 pages, Conscious is over before you can get comfortable. It works because it doesn’t pretend to solve the mystery. Harris steps back, leaving the hard questions open as she pulls them into sharper focus.”

The Brain from Inside Out 

“The Brain from Inside Out opens hard and stays that way. This is brutalist neuroscience, Buzsáki does not coddle,” Barr says. “What you get is a first principles education that sharpens your intuitions about brain function and brain science.”

That’s one hell of a blurb, but neuroscientist György Buzsáki’s 2019 book has earned it. In the book, Buzsáki explores the different frameworks for understanding the brain in neuroscience. The most prominent, known as the “outside-in framework,” views the brain’s complexity as growing as we take in more information about the world. This information forms the basis of learning and informs our actions, decisions, and observations.

However, Buzsáki argues the outside-in framework has grown stagnant and proposes an “inside-out” approach instead. This framework views the brain’s complexity as self-organized, the result of a network of preformed patterns. These patterns initially produce nonsense, but as we interact with our environment through our actions, they begin to calibrate and derive meaning through outcomes.

Buzsáki wants his readers to understand the brain not as something that processes information but as a creator of it.

“Buzsáki is hard-nosed in a way I’m not,” Barr adds. “He doesn’t sentimentalise the brain; he doesn’t need it to mean anything. His science writing is a kind of yang to my yin. I read it the way a musician runs scales. Where Buzsáki clears the myths away, I try to build them back, but with a disciplined re-mythologising that is biologically faithful.”

The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience

Returning to Gall, his theory was ultimately proven to be a misstep, but he did advance our knowledge of the brain in some ways. For instance, he is credited with identifying the functional differences between gray and white brain matter, realizing the brain’s connection to the central nervous system, and correctly identifying the brain as the “organ of the soul.”

That’s important because before the Enlightenment, few people recognized even the brainy basics. A few ancient Greek thinkers, such as Alcmaeon of Croton, appreciated some of the brain’s more fundamental functions. But for centuries, most physicians followed Aristotle’s “cardiocentric” view that the heart housed intelligence and consciousness while the brain simply cooled the blood.

All of which is to say that the history of how we have come to understand the brain is long and interesting, and zoologist Matthew Cobb’s 2020 book narrates that tale. Cobb informs readers about how our ideas of the brain’s biology and its functions have evolved over the centuries, and he explores how the significant technologies of each era shaped that understanding and the frameworks used to discuss it. For instance, today the popular metaphor is to say the brain is a computer, but in the 19th century, one may have called it a steam engine.

“This book changed the way I think as a scientist,” Barr tells me. “I treat history as part of the experiment now. I try to understand how similar problems were framed and pursued before me. Trying to see which old mistakes I might be on the verge of repeating.

“Cobb’s historical account left me with the eerie sense that I was part of a lineage I hadn’t known existed. It’s a hard pivot. Scientists are trained to look forward, but Cobb makes a strong case for looking backward, too. Because if you don’t know how an idea got into your lab in the first place, you can’t see the trap it might become.”

Books on the brain

Reading these books will help you understand what we know about the brain and why we know it. But even if you finish all five, you’ll find that many mysteries surrounding the brain still remain. 

Neuroscientists don’t know how all the parts of the brain combine to create a unified perception of the brain (the so-called “binding problem”). They also don’t know what all the different types of neurons and brain cells are or what they do, or how changes in them may contribute to neurological diseases. And their grasp of how billions of neurons and trillions of synaptic connections interact to form individual minds continues to deepen.

That’s great! It means there’s still so much for us to learn and discover about not only our more endearing organ but also, by extension, ourselves. It also means we have many more brilliant books on the subject to look forward to.