"Origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind" by Julian Jaynes. Controversial, but interesting thesis nevertheless.
Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
31–40 of 747 posts
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#32A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle https://www.amazon.com/New-Earth-Awakening-Purpose-Selection...
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#33Marcus Aurelius' Meditations
Framework for a happy life in any context.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#34I really enjoy books on neuroscience that change the way I think about perception.
Phantoms in the Brain by V S Ramachandran - a book about how the brain organises itself in bizarre edge cases. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes us Human. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes us Human by the same author is also worth reading.
Admissions by Henry Marsh - An experienced neurosurgeon's account of how his job has changed over the decades. Really interesting discussion of what's important and how people react in a real crisis.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks. More of a collection of interesting curiousities but does an amazing job of humanising the discussion of brain.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#35Any intro to philosophy book, e.g. "Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy" by Simon Blackburn
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#36Thinking Fast and Slow. I recommend this to absolutely everyone. It’s a huge study on how everyone thinks, even when they think they’re above thinking like that. Truly amazing!
Is the whole book actually worth reading? I mean the concept is very simple (although extremely important) and can be explained concisely in a couple of minutes - why a 500-pages book?
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#37Orwell's 1984 and Camus' Outsider, read in tandem.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#38Cracking the coding interview :)
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#39The first time I read Talebs Black Swan was pretty mind bending. It's a intriguing mix of philosophy, history and the application of probabilistic thinking. It's also a great aggregator book. It introduced me to the works of Kahneman, Tetlock, Poincare and Mandelbrot.
Read "fooled by randomness" if you haven't already. I much preferred it to his later work, and it introduced me to Popper (who was someone that 3 years of philosophy at university somehow managed to skip) who you might also enjoy.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#40I will take the bullet and suggest Ayn Rand's Fountainhead.
If you are a teenager it will definitely make you think and likely leave an impact on you. It's not a typical novel, more like philosophical ideas presented in the form of a novel. Ideal characters placed in real life. You will also understand why the world is divided into Ayn Rand lovers and haters.
It questions how the world works, how it should work, how people live their lives, and how they should live their lives, etc, etc.
Warning you, it's not filled with plots twists.