Morten Kringelbach's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Morten Kringelbach recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Morten Kringelbach's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
The Well-Tuned Brain is a call to action. Swept along by the cascading advances of today’s technology, most of us take for granted that progress brings improvement. Despite spectacular material advance, however, the evidence grows that we are failing to create a sustainable future for humanity. We are out of tune with the planet that nurtures us.


Technology itself is not the problem, as Whybrow explains, but rather our behavior. Throughout its evolution the ancient brain that guides us each day has been focused on short-term survival. But fortunately we are intensely...
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Recommended by Morten Kringelbach, and 1 others.

Morten KringelbachTechnology is a great tool but it will never solve our problems. What will solve our problems is having meaningful engagement with other people. (Source)

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2
The tendency to synchronize may be the most mysterious and pervasive drive in all of nature. It has intrigued some of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, including Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Norbert Wiener, Brian Josephson, and Arthur Winfree. At once elegant and riveting, Sync tells the story of the dawn of a new science. Steven Strogatz, a leading mathematician in the fields of chaos and complexity theory, explains how enormous systems can synchronize themselves, from the electrons in a superconductor to the pacemaker cells in our hearts. He shows that although... more
Recommended by Morten Kringelbach, and 1 others.

Morten KringelbachSteven Strogatz is a wonderful scientist. He is both a mathematician and a physicist. He’s done a lot of work on understanding non-linear systems. The reason I’ve chosen this book is that if we really want to understand the language of the brain we have to engage with these very powerful concepts of how it is that things are synchronised. This is a book for the general public that tries to relay... (Source)

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3
The psychological theory of expectation that David Huron proposes in Sweet Anticipation grew out of the author's experimental efforts to understand how music evokes emotions. These efforts evolved into a general theory of expectation that will prove informative to readers interested in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology as well as those interested in music. The book describes a set of psychological mechanisms and illustrates how these mechanisms work in the case of music. All examples of notated music can be heard on the Web.

Huron proposes that emotions evoked by...
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Recommended by Morten Kringelbach, and 1 others.

Morten KringelbachWhy is music so powerful? Why it is that music can evoke emotion within two bars as opposed to a story that takes a long time to develop? (Source)

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4

On the Move

A Life

When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: “Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.” It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California, where he struggled with drug addiction, and then in New York, where he discovered a long-forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, we see how his engagement... more
Recommended by Morten Kringelbach, and 1 others.

Morten KringelbachI became interested in neuroscience was because of the way Oliver Sacks uses stories to illuminate science. (Source)

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5

The Children's Book

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize


A spellbinding novel, at once sweeping and intimate, from the Booker Prize–winning author of Possession, that spans the Victorian era through the World War I years, and centers around a famous children’s book author and the passions, betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves.

When Olive Wellwood’s oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip sketching in the basement of the new Victoria and Albert Museum—a talented working-class boy who could be a character out of one of Olive’s magical tales—she...
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Recommended by Morten Kringelbach, and 1 others.

Morten KringelbachThis book is about how it is that we create lives, how our well-being later on is very much shaped by early childhood. (Source)

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