books @ cc.

Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain
by Antonio Damasio (2003)

Having been familiar with the prominence of (both Hanna and Antonio) Damasio’s names in neuroscience, I picked this book expecting a popular science book that provides insights into the neurobiological underpinnings of memory and emotions, something like Damasio’s colleague’s work, Joseph LeDoux’ Synaptic Self (maybe with some accounts of Spinoza). I was wrong — the book instead focuses on some basic points which are somehow, in an almost Whiggish manner, related to Spinoza’s ideas.

The Evolutionary Legacy
by Mel Greaves (2000)

In an age where the media is full of unrealistic hyperbole of yet another breakthrough of “cancer cure”, this book offers you a comprehensive analysis of the disease with a lucidity that will engage both layman and specialist readers alike. Drawing from the ‘Darwinian medicine’ principle, Professor Greaves tells the historical and biological complexity of cancer with erudition and sensitive wit.

How Our Brains Become Who We Are
by Joseph LeDoux (2002)

Lucidly written and generously illustrated with simple diagrams, Synaptic Self analyses the way the psychological, social, moral, aesthetic or spiritual self is realised through the interconnectivity between neurons. LeDoux thoroughly and comprehensively summarises and explains neuroscientific terms and discoveries up to the year the book was published (2002), taking the readers through fascinating tour of the working machinery of the brain and nervous system: the relation between memory and hippocampus (retro/anterograde amnesia), Hebbian learning, cellular mechanism of working memory,  the highly developed PFC in human, the popular oxytocin and vasopressin, motive circuitry, dopamine behavioural invigoration, and nervous illness.

How the secrests of the brain were uncovered in seventeenth-century England
by Carl Zimmer (2004)

An account of how people “first” became aware of the secrets of human brain in the seventeenth century, with particular focus on major players, i.e. Thomas Willis and his contemporaries such as Wren, Descartes, Harvey, Boyle and Hooke.

How our animal heritage affects the way we live
by Jared Diamond (1991)

The theme of the book, “[h]ow the human species changed, within a short time, from just another species of big mammal to a world conqueror; and how we acquired the capacity to reverse all that progress overnight,” would be recognisable to readers familiar with Diamond’s later books (Why is Sex Fun?, Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse).

by Olivia Judson (2002)

Arranged in such a way as to mimic sex advice columns, with all sorts of frustrated, confused creatures (although that would be an exaggeration — plants are hardly discussed) writing for an advice on their sexual lives, the book gives you up-to-date information on evolutionary biology of sex.

Psychosis and Human Nature
by Richard P. Bentall (2005)

The book is divided into four parts. Part one deals with the history of psychology: it sketches the simplifying effect that Kraepelin’s classification had on the theory and practice of psychiatry and its growth, the triumph of APA, centred around Euro/American-centric ideas, that doesn’t sufficiently take into account cross-cultural differences, and how the production of DSM was greatly influenced by political and economic agendas (particularly DSM-III) as it strove to create a global standard in psychosis and to synchronise with WHO’s ICD, each subsequent DSM growing more fine-grained yet still failing to improve its kappa value.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive
by Jared Diamond (2005)

Whereas Guns, Germs and Steel explains why history unfolded differently on different continents with varying successes, Collapse gives the other side of the coin: how societies crumble. While the main points of the book emphasize environmental and ecological factors (mostly self-induced), Diamond never reduced it to a mere environmentalist’ diatribe, pragmatically writing as a middlemen with experience of both environmental problems and of business realities.