The best books to start the new year with a clean slate
The start of a new year is, for many, a quiet moment for reflection. Although introspection is an individual project, you don’t have to do it alone: Turn inward as we turn the calendar page with these books on mindfulness, consciousness, and our complicated inner lives.
Read on to explore these and more titles on mindfulness, and sign up for our newsletter to receive updates from the Press.
Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness by Nicholas Humphrey
We feel, therefore we are. Conscious sensations ground our sense of self. They are crucial to our idea of ourselves as psychic beings: present, existent, and mattering. But is it only humans who feel this way? Do other animals? Will future machines? Weaving together intellectual adventure and cutting-edge science, Nicholas Humphrey describes in Sentience his quest for answers: from his discovery of blindsight in monkeys and his pioneering work on social intelligence to breakthroughs in the philosophy of mind.
The Spontaneous Brain: From the Mind–Body to the World–Brain Problem by Georg Northoff
Philosophers have long debated the mind-body problem—whether to attribute such mental features as consciousness to mind or to body. Meanwhile, neuroscientists search for empirical answers, seeking neural correlates for consciousness, self, and free will. In this book, Georg Northoff does not propose new solutions to the mind-body problem; instead, he questions the problem itself, arguing that it is an empirically, ontologically, and conceptually implausible way to address the existence and reality of mental features. We are better off, he contends, by addressing consciousness and other mental features in terms of the relationship between world and brain; philosophers should consider the world-brain problem rather than the mind-body problem. This calls for a Copernican shift in vantage point—from within the mind or brain to beyond the brain—in our consideration of mental features.
The Creative Brain: Myths and Truths by Anna Abraham
What is the relationship between creativity and madness? Creativity and intelligence? Do psychedelics truly enhance creativity? How should we understand the left and right hemispheres of the brain? Is the left brain, in fact, the seat of reasoning and the right brain the seat of creativity? These are just some of the questions Anna Abraham, a renowned expert of human creativity and the imagination, explores in The Creative Brain, a fascinating deep dive into the origins of the seven most common beliefs about the human brain. Rather than endorse or debunk these myths, Abraham traces them back to their origins to explain just how they started and why they spread—and what at their core is the truth.
Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age: Coping with Digital Distraction and Sensory Overload by Richard E. Cytowic
The human brain hasn’t changed much since the Stone Age, let alone in the mere thirty years of the Screen Age. That’s why, according to neurologist Richard Cytowic—who, Oliver Sacks observed, “changed the way we think of the human brain”—our brains are so poorly equipped to resist the incursions of Big Tech: They are programmed for the wildly different needs of a prehistoric world. In Your Stone Age Brain in the Screen Age, Cytowic explains exactly how this programming works—from the brain’s point of view. What he reveals in this book shows why we are easily addicted to screen devices; why young, developing brains are particularly vulnerable; why we need silence; and what we can do to push back.
Curious Minds: The Power of Connection by Perry Zurn and Dani S. Bassett
Curious about something? Google it. Look at it. Ask a question. But is curiosity simply information seeking? According to this exhilarating, genre-bending book, what’s left out of the conventional understanding of curiosity are the wandering tracks, the weaving concepts, the knitting of ideas, and the thatching of knowledge systems—the networks, the relations between ideas and between people. Curiosity, say Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett, is a practice of connection: it connects ideas into networks of knowledge, and it connects knowers themselves, both to the knowledge they seek and to each other.
Happiness by Tim Lomas
What does it mean to feel happiness? As a state of mind, it’s elusive. As a concept—despite the plethora of pop psychology books on the subject—it’s poorly understood. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, psychologist Tim Lomas offers a concise and engaging overview of our current understanding of happiness. Lomas explains that although the field of positive psychology, which focuses on happiness, emerged only in the last twenty-five years, interest in the meaning of happiness goes back several millennia. Drawing on a variety of disciplines, from philosophy and sociology to economics and anthropology, Lomas offers an expansive vision of what happiness means, exploring a significant range of experiential territory.
Body Am I: The New Science of Self-Consciousness by Moheb Costandi
The body is central to our sense of identity. It can be a canvas for self-expression, decorated with clothing, jewelry, cosmetics, tattoos, and piercings. But the body is more than that. Bodily awareness, says scientist-writer Moheb Costandi, is key to self-consciousness. In Body Am I, Costandi examines how the brain perceives the body, how that perception translates into our conscious experience of the body, and how that experience contributes to our sense of self. Along the way, he explores what can happen when the mechanisms of bodily awareness are disturbed, leading to such phenomena as phantom limbs, alien hands, and amputee fetishes.
Out of Touch: How to Survive an Intimacy Famine by Michelle Drouin
Millions of people around the world are not getting the physical, emotional, and intellectual intimacy they crave. Through the wonders of modern technology, we are connecting with more people more often than ever before, but are these connections what we long for? Pandemic isolation has made us even more alone. In Out of Touch, Professor of Psychology Michelle Drouin investigates what she calls our intimacy famine, exploring love, belongingness, and fulfillment and considering why relationships carried out on technological platforms may leave us starving for physical connection. Drouin puts it this way: when most of our interactions are through social media, we are taking tiny hits of dopamine rather than the huge shots of oxytocin that an intimate in-person relationship would provide.