Brains And How We Think

by Eric Brechner
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5 books
It’s fun to program computers and solve technical problems, but people are far more interesting and nuanced. That’s why I switched to being a manager and focused my career on cultivating high-performing teams and growing individuals. What makes people so different from computers? How do you create teams that get the most from each other? You could read countless management and leadership books, each with their own theories and anecdotes, or you could understand how people think and what drives their actions. I prefer to go to the brain’s source code, which is in the midst of being unlocked.
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A Brief History of Intelligence

Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains
Max Bennett, 2023
A clear, thorough, and engaging account of how intelligence arose from primordial soup. Max Bennett has tied together centuries of wide-ranging research to create a page-turner of a story of the human brain. Why do we think the way we do? What drives our best and worst behavior as individuals and collectives? How did we evolve into self-aware beings? It’s all here in plain language that makes you want to know what comes next.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman, 2011
Danny Kahneman’s instant classic and seminal text on the way people think, and how we get so many things wrong. While written in plain language, it’s detailed and technical, so if you’re looking for an overview, check the next book: The Righteous Mind.

The Righteous Mind

Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
Jonathan Haidt, 2013
Jonathan Haidt expands Danny Kahneman’s work into belief systems and politics. It is a surprising and enlightening read that is easy to access and hard to forget.

A Thousand Brains

A New Theory of Intelligence
Jeff Hawkins, 2021
For thousands of years, people have speculated about how the mind works, but no one proposed a theory of intelligence that you could verify under a microscope and within simulations. Jeff Hawkins and Richard Dawkins studied brain biology for years, and now have produced the first verifiable theory of how the brain creates consciousness. It’s a groundbreaking, deeply technical book that is still accessible to ordinary readers.

Reading in the Brain

The New Science of How We Read
Stanislas Dehaene, 2009
With a firm grounding of how the brain works in general, this book reveals the particulars of how your brain reads. Couldn’t complete a reading list about the brain without it.