The holiday season is a great time to read some good books --- and a great time to give a good book as a gift! Here are five books on psychology, neuroscience and poltiics that are on my reading list for the holiday season, in no particular order.
Carl Schoonover, Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century. This book of essays and images sounds like a great one for those interested in neuroscience. It recently was reviewed and recommended by Scientific American.
Oliver Sacks, The Mind's Eye. Sacks has written a number of wonderful books in the past, including one of my all-time favorites, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985). In The Mind's Eye, Sacks writes about people who have lost important abilities or senses, and how they have managed to work around those losses.
Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind. Damasio, a world-leading neuroscientist and author of Descartes' Error (who works across town at USC), writes here about consciousness. I look forward to reading Damasio's new book, as I'm curious to read about how his ideas about emotion factor into his new thinking about consciousness. Here's an interesting interview of Damasio by Jonah Lehrer about the book.
Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life. This one is a bit different from the others, being a biography of one of a well studied figure from American history, George Washington. But if Chernow's study of Washington is as thorough and interesting as his 2005 book on Alexander Hamilton, I know it will keep me busy!
Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. This is a book that I've been looking forward to having the time to read. While I'll probably not have an opportunity to be an astronaut, Roach covers all of those important questions that we all ask about what it would really be like to be in space, the sights, smells, and psychological issues that would be likely to arise.
Note: The image here is from a paper I published with M.L. Spezio, et al., "A Neural Basis for the Effect of Candidate Appearance on Election Outcomes", Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2008.
