You can click to view my favorites for anthropology, biology, cognitive sciences, ethology, climate, evolution, brains, language, the future -- not to mention Patrick O'Brian novels.

There is a lot of overlap with cognitive sciences, so see that list too.

William H. Calvin, The Cerebral Code: Thinking a Thought in the Mosaics of the Mind (MIT Press, 1996).

Unlike my other books, it’s more for scientists than general readers — but then I have worked harder (glossary, tutorials, cartoons) to help out fans of science. Chapter titles are: The Representation Problem and the Copying Solution, Cloning in Cerebral Cortex, A Compressed Code Emerges, Managing the Cerebral Commons, Resonating with your Chaotic Memories, Partitioning the Playfield, Intermission Notes, The Brownian Notion, Convergence Zones with a Hint of Sex, Chimes on the Quarter Hour, The Making of Metaphor, Thinking a Thought in the Mosaics of the Mind.
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anthropology, biology, cognitive sciences, ethology, climate, evolution, brains, language, the future -- not to mention Patrick O'Brian novels and the Science Masters series.

You can click on the topics to see a collection of favorite books on the subject.

William H. Calvin, How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now (Science Masters, BasicBooks, 1996).

A dozen translations are pending. It expands on my October 1994 Scientific American article to address the evolution of consciousness, intelligence, and language.The chapter titles are What to Do Next, Evolving a Good Guess, The Janitor’s Dream, Evolving Intelligent Animals, Syntax as a Foundation of Intelligence, Evolution On-The-Fly, Shaping Up an Intelligent Act from Humble Origins, and Prospects for a Superhuman Intelligence. It is suitable for biology and cognitive neuroscience supplementary reading lists.
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William H. Calvin and George A. Ojemann, Conversations with Neil’s Brain: The Neural Nature of Thought and Language (Addison-Wesley, 1994).

It’s a tour of the human cerebral cortex, conducted from the operating room, and has been on the New Scientist bestseller list of science books. Chapter titles are A Window to the Brain, Losing Consciousness, Seeing the Brain Speak, If Language Is Left, What’s Right?, The Problems with Paying Attention, The Personality of the Lowly Neuron, The What and Where of Memory, How Are Memories Made? What’s Up Front? When Things Go Wrong with Thought and Mood, Tuning Up the Brain by Pruning, Acquiring and Reacquiring Language, Taking Apart the Visual Image, How the Brain Subdivides Language, Why Can We Read So Well? Stringing Things Together in Novel Ways, Deep in the Temporal Lobe, Just Across from the Brain Stem, In Search of the Narrator. It is suitable for biology and cognitive neuroscience supplementary reading lists.
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William H. Calvin, The Ascent of Mind: Ice Age Climates and the Evolution of Intelligence (Bantam 1990)

This is my book on the ice ages and how human intelligence evolved; the “throwing theory” is one aspect. It is suitable for high-school and undergraduate projects in neurobiology and anthropology. My Scientific American article, “The emergence of intelligence,” (October 1994) also discusses ice-age evolution of intelligence.
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William H. Calvin, The Cerebral Symphony (Bantam 1989)

This is my book on animal and human consciousness, using the setting of the Marine Biological Labs and Cape Cod. It's the predecessor of How Brains Think. It is suitable for high-school and undergraduate projects in neurobiology and psychology.
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William H. Calvin, The River That Flows Uphill: A Journey from the Big Bang to the Big Brain (Sierra Club Books 1987)

It's my river diary of a two-week whitewater trip through the bottom of the Grand Canyon, discussing everything from cosmology to anthropology to brain mechanisms. It became a bestseller in German translation in 1995 but is out of print in English. For Grand Canyon photographs and sound files to match, see Leonard Thurman’s Grand Canyon River Running web pages.
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William H. Calvin, The Throwing Madonna: Essays on the Brain (McGraw-Hill 1983, Bantam 1991).

17 essays: The Throwing Madonna. The Lovable Cat: Mimicry Strikes Again. Woman the Toolmaker? Did Throwing Stones Lead to Bigger Brains? The Ratchets of Social Evolution. The Computer as Metaphor in Neurobiology. Last Year in Jerusalem. Computing Without Nerve Impulses. Aplysia, the Hare of the Ocean. Left Brain, Right Brain: Science or the New Phrenology? What to Do About Tic Douloureux. The Woodrow Wilson Story. Thinking Clearly About Schizophrenia. Of Cancer Pain, Magic Bullets, and Humor. Linguistics and the Brain’s Buffer. Probing Language Cortex: The Second Wave, and The Creation Myth, Updated: A Scenario for Humankind.
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anthropology, biology, cognitive sciences, ethology, climate, evolution, brains, language, the future -- not to mention Patrick O'Brian novels and the Science Masters series.

You can click on the topics to see a collection of favorite books on the subject.

Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain (W. W. Norton, August 1997).

As I said in The New York Times Book Review (10 August 1997):
        In our evolutionary ascent from an ape-like ancestor, we gained our most prized possession, the mental abilities that underlie language. We're still trying to figure out what language is (from monkey cries to structured syntax), how it works (the short-term processes in the brain that construct and deconstruct utterances), and why it evolved (the Darwinian processes that bootstrapped it over the long run).
        That's what Terrence W. Deacon's book, "The Symbolic Species," is about. His first section is on symbols and language, the next tackles the brain's language specializations, and the last addresses the coevolution of language and the human brain, ending up with Darwinian views of consciousness. It's a work of enormous breadth, likely to pleasantly surprise both general readers and experts. Continued....
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Walter J. Freeman, Societies of Brains (Erlbaum, 1995).

        "Having played its role in setting the initial conditions, the sense-dependent activity is washed away, and the perceptual message that is sent on into the forebrain is the construction, not the residue of a filter or a computational algorithm. A requirement for this process of "laundering" is for spatial coherence, which arises from cooperativity over the cortical populations. This process of replacement of sensory inputs by endogenous constructions in perception constitutes the basis of epistemological solipsism in brains."
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J. Allan Hobson, The Chemistry of Conscious States (Little, Brown, 1994).

        "The intense visual images of our dreams are like the visual hallucinations that frequently occur in toxic states like the DTs. Our conviction as we dream that the physically impossible events we experience are real is like the delusional belief that is the hallmark of psychosis. The stories that we concoct to explain improbable and impossible dream events are like the confabulations of delirium. The intense anxiety we suffer during nightmares approaches that experienced by people with panic disorder. And the poor memory we have of dreams once we awaken from them is similar to the memory lapses experienced by Alzheimer's patients and people with other tragic forms of dementia."
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J. Allan Hobson, The Dreaming Brain (BasicBooks, 1988).

        "People are, and have been, unhappy with the idea of gods as insane, and must believe that their nocturnal visitations have a point, however obscure.... Complementing the notion of an external agency is the out-of-body experience that may occur in nocturnal dreams or in the transitional states between waking and sleep. In these states, it seems that a part of the self (the soul or the ego) leaves the body and becomes an external agency. It may even seem that the soul wanders abroad, exerting its action in places remote from the body. In this way, magical interventions can be achieved, and the notion of gods as external agents is complemented by the sense of being visited by disembodied spirits, with agency power. [Hobson goes on to develop his thesis that dreams are largely meaningless, except as evidence that there are free-wheeling mechanisms in the brain juxtaposing things]."
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Other books by Allan Hobson in the Amazon.com database.

anthropology, biology, cognitive sciences, ethology, climate, evolution, brains, language, the future -- not to mention Patrick O'Brian novels and the Science Masters series.

You can click on the topics to see a collection of favorite books on the subject.

Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched With Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (Free Press 1993).

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Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (Knopf 1995).

        "There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against - you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there."
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Israel Rosenfield, The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten: An Anatomy of Consciousness (Knopf 1992).

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Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist from Mars (Knopf 1995)

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Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices (University of California Press, 1989).

        "Joseph [ten-year-old deaf boy raised without sign language] saw, distinguished, categorized, used; he had no problems with perceptual categorization or generalization, but he could not, it seemed, go much beyond this, hold abstract ideas in mind, reflect, play, plan. He seemed completely literal — unable to juggle images or hypotheses or possibilities, unable to enter an imaginative or figurative realm.... He seemed, like an animal, or an infant, to be stuck in the present, to be confined to literal and immediate perception, though made aware of this by a consciousness that no infant could have."
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Other books by Oliver Sacks in the Amazon.com database.

J. Z. Young, Philosophy and the Brain (Oxford University Press, 1987).

"I must stress how little is yet known about the programs of the brain. The code has not yet been properly broken; but we begin to see the units of it.... We can see that the code is somehow a matter of sequences of neural activities, providing expectancies of what to do next."
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Other "J. Zed" books in the Amazon.com database.

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