15 Best NeuroPsychology Books

Think your way to a more confident, successful you.

Women’s brains are different. It’s not one-size-fits both men and women. Yet many women still believe the myths we tell ourselves.

• Myth: Women make emotional decisions when stressed.
• Myth: Women suffer more from unhappiness than men.
• Myth: Women have to act like men to be effective leaders.

Dispel the myths! Stop underestimating your abilities. Stop downplaying your successes. And stop apologizing.

In Think Like a Girl, award-winning psychologist, professor, and TEDx speaker Dr. Tracy Packiam Alloway will help you discover how:

• sticking your hand in a bucket of ice can help you make a less emotional decision
• changing one word can provide a buffer against depressive thoughts
• adopting a more relationship-centric leadership approach can be better for mental health

Dare to think differently. Dare to think like a girl.

An accompanying empathy exercise is available in the audiobook companion PDF download.

A psychiatrist and psychedelic researcher explores the science of connection–why we need it, how we’ve lost it, and how we might find it again.

We are suffering from an epidemic of disconnection that antidepressants and social media can’t fix. This state of isolation puts us in “fight or flight mode,” deranging sleep, metabolism and libido. What’s worse, we’re paranoid of others. This kill-or-be-killed framework is not a way to live. But, when we feel safe and loved, we can rest, digest, and repair. We can heal. And it is only in this state of belonging that we can open up to connection with others.

In this powerful book, Holland helps us to understand the science of connection as revealed in human experiences from the spiritual to the psychedelic. The key is oxytocin–a neurotransmitter and hormone produced in our bodies that allows us to trust and bond. It fosters attachment between mothers and infants, romantic partners, friends, and even with our pets. There are many ways to reach this state of mental and physical wellbeing that modern medicine has overlooked. The implications for our happiness and health are profound.

We can find oneness in meditation, in community, or in awe at the beauty around us. Another option: psychedelic medicines that can catalyze a connection with the self, with nature, or the cosmos. Good Chemistry points us on the right path to forging true and deeper attachments with our own souls, to one another, and even to our planet, helping us heal ourselves and our world.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

A world at once familiar and unimaginably strange exists all around us—and within us. It is the world of consciousness, a protean mental landscape that each of us knows intimately and yet understands scarcely at all. Despite the attempts of scientists and mystics, poets and dreamers, crackpots and geniuses, to map its contours and explain its secret workings, the mind remains mysterious—even more so the more we learn about it.

Yet, as gonzo science journalist Jeff Warren demonstrates in this provocative and entertaining synthesis of cutting-edge research and personal experience, just how much we do now know is little short of astonishing. And when Warren fits the pieces together, the implications of that knowledge are, well, mind blowing.

Beginning with the insight that consciousness is not a simple on-off proposition, with rigid demarcations separating waking awareness from sleep, Jeff Warren explores twelve distinct, natural states we can experience in a twenty-four-hour day, each offering its own kind of insight and adventure. He then sets out to experience for himself the seemingly miraculous, all-but-untapped potential of the human mind.

From the full-immersion virtual realities of lucid dreaming to the esoteric Eastern meditative practices that have reached outposts of consciousness far beyond the grasp of Western science, from techniques of hypnosis and neurofeedback to such exotic states of awareness as the Watch and the Pure Conscious Event, Warren takes us on an incredible journey through our own heads, conducted with a spirit of adventure and humor, curiosity and wonder.

Have you ever had an experience where you felt particularly aware of God? If God is real and we are created in God’s image, then it makes sense that our minds and bodies would be designed with the perceptive ability to sense and experience God.

Scientists are now discovering ways that our bodies are designed to connect with God. Research shows that our brain systems are wired to enable us to have spiritual experiences. The spiritual circuits that are used in prayer or worship are also involved in developing compassion for others. Our bodies have actually been created to love God and serve our neighbors.

Award-winning journalist Rob Moll chronicles the fascinating ways in which our brains and bodies interact with God and spiritual realities. He reports on neuroscience findings that show how our brains actually change and adapt when engaged in spiritual practices. We live longer, healthier, happier, and more fulfilling lives when we cultivate the biological spiritual capacity that puts us in touch with God. God has created our bodies to fulfill the Great Commandment; we are hardwired to commune with God and to have compassion and community with other people. Moll explores the neuroscience of prayer, how liturgy helps us worship, why loving God causes us to love others, and how a life of love and service leads to the abundant life for which we were created.

Just as our physical bodies require exercise to stay healthy, so too can spiritual exercises and practices revitalize our awareness of God. Heighten your spiritual senses and discover how you have been designed for physical and spiritual flourishing.

Dr. John Bargh, the world’s leading expert on the unconscious mind, presents a “brilliant and convincing book” (Malcolm Gladwell) cited as an outstanding read of 2017 by Business Insider and The Financial Times–giving us an entirely new understanding of the hidden mental processes that secretly govern every aspect of our behavior.

For more than three decades, Dr. John Bargh has conducted revolutionary research into the unconscious mind, research featured in bestsellers like Blink and Thinking Fast and Slow. Now, in what Dr. John Gottman said was “the most important and exciting book in psychology that has been written in the past twenty years,” Dr. Bargh takes us on an entertaining and enlightening tour of the forces that affect everyday behavior while transforming our understanding of ourselves in profound ways.

Dr. Bargh takes us into his labs at New York University and Yale–where he and his colleagues have discovered how the unconscious guides our behavior, goals, and motivations in areas like race relations, parenting, business, consumer behavior, and addiction. With infectious enthusiasm he reveals what science now knows about the pervasive influence of the unconscious mind in who we choose to date or vote for, what we buy, where we live, how we perform on tests and in job interviews, and much more. Because the unconscious works in ways we are completely unaware of, Before You Know It is full of surprising and entertaining revelations as well as useful tricks to help you remember items on your to-do list, to shop smarter, and to sleep better.

Before You Know It is “a fascinating compendium of landmark social-psychology research” (Publishers Weekly) and an introduction to a fabulous world that exists below the surface of your awareness and yet is the key to knowing yourself and unlocking new ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.

We do not come into the world with an innate sense of taste and nutrition; as omnivores, we have to learn how and what to eat, how sweet is too sweet, and what food will give us the most energy for the coming day. But how does this education happen? What are the origins of taste?

In First Bite, the beloved food writer Bee Wilson draws on the latest research from food psychologists, neuroscientists, and nutritionists to reveal that our food habits are shaped by a whole host of factors, including family, culture, memory, gender, hunger, and love. An exploration of the extraordinary and surprising origins of our tastes and eating habits–from people who can only eat foods of a certain color to an amnesiac who can eat meal after meal without getting full–First Bite also shows us how we can change our palates to lead healthier, happier lives.

A radically new cosmological view from a groundbreaking neuroscientist placing the human brain at the center of humanity’s universe.

Renowned neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis introduces listeners to a revolutionary new theory of how the human brain evolved to become an organic computer without rival in the known universe.

Nicolelis undertakes the first attempt to explain the entirety of human history, culture, and civilization based on a series of recently uncovered key principles of brain function. This new cosmology is centered around three fundamental properties of the human brain: its insurmountable malleability to adapt and learn; its exquisite ability to allow multiple individuals to synchronize their minds around a task, goal, or belief; and its incomparable capacity for abstraction.

Combining insights from such diverse fields as neuroscience, mathematics, evolution, computer science, physics, history, art, and philosophy, Nicolelis presents a neurobiologically based manifesto for the uniqueness of the human mind and a cautionary tale of the threats that technology poses to present and future generations.

Have you ever . . .

• Invested time in something that, in hindsight, just wasn’t worth it?
• Paid too much in an eBay auction?
• Continued to do something you knew was bad for you?
• Sold stocks too late, or too early?
• Taken credit for success, but blamed failure on external circumstances?
• Backed the wrong horse?

These are examples of what the author calls cognitive biases, simple errors all of us make in day-to-day thinking. But by knowing what they are and how to identify them, we can avoid them and make better choices: whether in dealing with personal problems or business negotiations, trying to save money or earn profits, or merely working out what we really want in life–and strategizing the best way to get it.

Already an international bestseller, The Art of Thinking Clearly distills cutting-edge research from behavioral economics, psychology, and neuroscience into a clever, practical guide for anyone who’s ever wanted to be wiser and make better decisions. A novelist, thinker, and entrepreneur, Rolf Dobelli deftlyshows that in order to lead happier, more prosperous lives, we don’t need extra cunning, new ideas, shiny gadgets, or more frantic hyperactivity–all we need is less irrationality.

Simple, clear, and always surprising, this indispensable book will change the way you think and transform your decision making–at work, at home, every day. From why you shouldn’t accept a free drink to why you should walk out of a movie you don’t like, from why it’s so hard to predict the future to why you shouldn’t watch the news, The Art of Thinking Clearly helps solve the puzzle of human reasoning.

From irrational phobias to a midlife crisis, we’ve all experienced moments of utter confusion about the nature of our own behavior, emotions, or perception of reality. In this audiobook, neurologists and other scientists share what they know about how the mind works, including some of these baffling psychological experiences.

A tour through the groundbreaking science behind the enigmatic, but crucial, brain developments of adolescence and how those translate into teenage behavior

The brain creates every feeling, emotion, and desire we experience, and stores every one of our memories. And yet, until very recently, scientists believed our brains were fully developed from childhood on. Now, thanks to imaging technology that enables us to look inside the living human brain at all ages, we know that this isn’t so. Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, one of the world’s leading researchers into adolescent neurology, explains precisely what is going on in the complex and fascinating brains of teenagers — namely that the brain goes on developing and changing right through adolescence–with profound implications for the adults these young people will become.

Drawing from cutting-edge research, including her own, Blakemore shows:

• How an adolescent brain differs from those of children and adults
• Why problem-free kids can turn into challenging teens
• What drives the excessive risk-taking and all-consuming relationships common among teenagers
• And why many mental illnesses — depression, addiction, schizophrenia — present during these formative years

Blakemore’s discoveries have transformed our understanding of the teenage mind, with consequences for law, education policy and practice, and, most of all, parents.

Why do testicles hang the way they do? Is there an adaptive function to the female orgasm? What does it feel like to want to kill yourself? Does “free will” really exist? And why is the penis shaped like that anyway?

In Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?, the research psychologist and award-winning columnist Jesse Bering features more than thirty of his most popular essays from Scientific American and Slate, as well as two new pieces, that take readers on a bold and captivating journey through some of the most taboo issues related to evolution and human behavior. Exploring the history of cannibalism, the neurology of people who are sexually attracted to animals, the evolution of human body fluids, the science of homosexuality, and serious questions about life and death, Bering astutely covers a generous expanse of our kaleidoscope of quirks and origins.

With his characteristic irreverence and trademark cheekiness, Bering leaves no topic unturned or curiosity unexamined, and he does it all with an audaciously original voice. Whether you’re interested in the psychological history behind the many facets of sexual desire or the evolutionary patterns that have dictated our current mystique and phallic physique, Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? is bound to create lively discussion and debate for years to come.

The neuroscience of why bad habits are so hard to break–and how evidence-based strategies can help us change our behavior more effectively

We all have habits we’d like to break, but for many of us it can be nearly impossible to do so. There is a good reason for this: the brain is a habit-building machine. In Hard to Break, leading neuroscientist Russell Poldrack provides an engaging and authoritative account of the science of how habits are built in the brain, why they are so hard to break, and how evidence-based strategies may help us change unwanted behaviors.

Hard to Break offers a clear-eyed tour of what neuroscience tells us about habit change and debunks “easy fixes” that aren’t backed by science. It explains how dopamine is essential for building habits and how the battle between habits and intentional goaldirected behaviors reflects a competition between different brain systems. Along the way, we learn how cues trigger habits; why we should make rules, not decisions; how the stimuli of the modern world hijack the brain’s habit machinery and lead to drug abuse and other addictions; and how neuroscience may one day enable us to hack our habits. Shifting from the individual to society, the book also discusses the massive habit changes that will be needed to address the biggest challenges of our time.

Moving beyond the hype to offer a deeper understanding of the biology of habits in the brain, Hard to Break reveals how we might be able to make the changes we desire–and why we should have greater empathy with ourselves and others who struggle to do so.

People behave in strange ways. We sometimes giggle when someone falls down, swear we’ve been to places we haven’t or continue believing in something despite scientific evidence to the contrary. For more than a decade, Scientific American MIND’s long-running feature “Ask the Brains” has addressed questions from their readers on the quirks and quandaries of human behavior, psychology, and neurology. Here, in Ask the Brains, Part 1, they’ve compiled some of the best and most interesting inquiries about the human brain.

A no-nonsense and helpful guide on how to cope with a slew of mental-health issues that are hell-bent on ruining the lives of millions of people worldwide

Our brains do their best to help us out, but every so often they can be real assholes–having meltdowns, getting addicted to things, or shutting down completely at the worst possible moments. Your brain knows it’s not good to do these things, but it can’t help it sometimes–especially if it’s obsessing about trauma it can’t overcome. That’s where this life-changing book comes in.

With humor, patience, science, and lots of good-ole swearing, Dr. Faith explains what’s going on in your skull, and talks you through the process of retraining your brain to respond appropriately to the nonemergencies of everyday life, and to deal effectively with old, or newly acquired, traumas (particularly post-traumatic stress disorder).

La neuropsicologia es una de las maneras contemporaneas de entender el pensamiento y la conducta, en sus relaciones fisiologicas, como un conjunto de sistemas y procesos organicos. Este libro presenta una solida guia para los estudiantes de psicologia que deseen iniciarse en el conocimiento de las bases biologicas de la conducta.