How the world works

Psychology & the mind

How we think, decide, remember and feel — and why we so often fool ourselves.

Read your way in

  1. The gorilla that attention edited out — Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons · The Invisible GorillaA glance
  2. The self that remembers the ending — Daniel Kahneman · Thinking, Fast and SlowA glance
  3. The man who saw faces in everything — Oliver Sacks · HallucinationsA glance
  4. Fear takes more than one road — Joseph E. LeDoux · The Emotional BrainA glance
  5. Perception is a controlled guess — Anil Seth · Being YouA glance
  6. Remembering can reopen a memory — Joseph E. LeDoux · The Deep History of OurselvesA glance
  7. The ten-percent brain has no hidden reserve — Scott O. Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, John Ruscio, and Barry L. Beyerstein · 50 Great Myths of Popular PsychologyA glance
  8. You are not a left-brained person — Christian Jarrett · Great Myths of the BrainA glance
  9. The bicycle ride without a yesterday — Suzanne Corkin · Permanent Present TenseA glance
  10. The memory that could not forget — A. R. Luria · The Mind of a MnemonistA glance
  11. Give the feeling a narrower name — Lisa Feldman Barrett · How Emotions Are MadeA glance
  12. Notice where attention went — Amishi P. Jha · Peak MindA glance

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The books behind it

  • Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, 2010. Why this book: A lucid tour of experiments showing where confidence in attention and memory outruns performance.
  • Daniel Kahneman, 2011. Why this book: Connects classic judgement experiments to the practical difference between lived and remembered experience.
  • Oliver Sacks, 2012. Why this book: Pairs humane case histories with a careful account of the many routes by which minds generate perceptions.
  • Joseph E. LeDoux, 1996. Why this book: Explains how threat processing became experimentally tractable without pretending emotion lives in one spot.
  • Anil Seth, 2021. Why this book: A measured guide to predictive perception and consciousness that separates evidence from speculation.
  • Joseph E. LeDoux, 2019. Why this book: Places modern work on memory and survival circuits inside a long evolutionary account of nervous systems.
  • Scott O. Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, John Ruscio, and Barry L. Beyerstein, 2010. Why this book: Tests durable psychology claims against evidence and explains why the attractive versions keep spreading.
  • Christian Jarrett, 2014. Why this book: A compact, evidence-led correction to familiar claims that oversimplify brain structure and behaviour.
  • Suzanne Corkin, 2013. Why this book: The lead researcher’s detailed history of H.M. and the experiments that divided memory into distinct systems.
  • A. R. Luria, 1968. Why this book: A classic case study of extraordinary recall that is equally attentive to its cognitive costs.
  • Lisa Feldman Barrett, 2017. Why this book: A provocative, research-rich account of how bodies, predictions, and concepts contribute to emotion.
  • Amishi P. Jha, 2021. Why this book: Combines attention research with restrained exercises for noticing and redirecting a finite resource.