The Master and the Emissary by Iain McGilchrist
Read the reviews on Amazon to see what it’s all about
I read it a few years ago and I’ve read quite a few books that changed how I view the world but none as much as this book
Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
551–560 of 747 posts
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
'Very far off to left field' side note: The human brain is still active during unconsciousness. EEG traces of the brain show this. When you are awake, drowsy, asleep, or under anesthesia, the patterns of your brain waves are very different [0,1]. But, the brain is not 'paused', it's just firing differently than when you are awake or drowsy. So, the 'pattern' is not just 3-D, it's 4-D. You need time as well. You'd nee…
Sometimes I wonder if I ever actually stop thinking at night; maybe I just don't remember it in the morning? Maybe every night is just laying concious for 8 hours, thinking weird dreamlike thoughts, but being unable to form memories. I know brain measurements show that our brains operates differently during sleep, but we may still be concious, at least internally. Have you ever had the same "sleep stage 1" experience…
> sleep stage 1
Like this?
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#553Ok, without wanting to sound like a crazy guy, this book has really had a large impact on me : https://www.amazon.fr/Finding-Your-Own-North-Star-ebook/dp/B... It's basically a method that helps you find what exactly get you on, what you get energy from, and how to reach it. Of course it requires a lot of introspection but the book helps you there. It sounds cheesy I know, but that book had enough impact that it reall…
A bit of err, self-actualization? Goes a long way. I've been in a similar point, eventually I was offered to go to a career coach. It's basically someone that challenges you about what you want to do, what you want to achieve. And in my case, identify that I'm a people-pleaser, I'd rather defer to others to tell me what to do rather than take my own initiative, because comfort zone, risk, etc.
Yes, pretty much really. Nothing you couldn't have done by yourself. The book is just helping you along the way to make you realize those things yourself. It sounds like you had a similar experience :)
It helped me a lot though. And I'm very surprised to see the amount of people around me that don't know why they are doing what they're doing. That often leads to a lot of frustration. :)
Good job!
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the throes of your rant at someone making a perfectly accurate observation you seemed to have made a false dichotomy. The options aren't just that everyone on HN is sexist nor that women aren't interested in writing books on mind bending concepts, but another reason, as has been mentioned above, is that women for most of human history weren't allowed to write. From there it becomes rather obvious why there are les…
>is that women for most of human history weren't allowed to write. Isn't this sexism? Read my argument again. I literally said that the reason why there are more men then women authors on mind bending concepts is because of Sexism. We are in total agreement. I know of Ursula K. Le guin. If you read her biography you'll read about all the hardships she had to go through to get her work published. As a woman her books…
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Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#555Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe that's Permutation City. I don't remember the exact details from the book but there's definitely some similar things in it.
That idea also comes back in Diaspora. That book contains some nice things, like mind-grafts, procreation/creation in a non-biological society etc. Loved that book. I also like Ted Chiangs books. I.e. the idea from story of your life (a language that treats time flow differently), also "Understand" [0] is nice: What happens we we actually increase our thinking capacity. I mean that is hard to comprehend without a nic…
"Understand" is one of my favorite stories of all time.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#556At random Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand. Love her or hate her, she makes you think. The Hard Thing About Hard Things - This is a great book about building businesses, and business in general. Capital in the 21st Century - One of the greatest books about economics and capital written ever - let alone in the last decade. The Intelligent Investor - This is Buffet's favourite book, and regardless of how many times I read it,…
I read _Atlas Shrugged_ without any preconceptions (I didn't know who Ayn Rand was, and Libertarianism wasn't nearly as trendy back then). I was taken in by the story of how everything fell apart, but was completely turned off by her solution—creating a "utopia" is quite easy when you only allow in a select few and have unlimited free energy. It struck me as the Libertarian equivalent of _The Jungle_: tell a compelli…
This is exactly what I love about that book. To many it's a bible of libertarianism. To many it's everything that's bad about it. Either way I find it definitely encourages debate and thinking - much more than her other works.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#557Homo Deus, by Yuval Noah Harari. This is the second book in the very famous series Sapiens. The book explains how technology will effect our lives in the future in a way that is interesting, entertaining and above all, mind-boggling.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#558Most likely no one is going to like this post. My father was a physicist and he had a large library of books. Growing up all of these books were over my head but I tried reading all of them. The more difficult the book the more determined I became to read and understand the content. I found this to be mind expanding. I began a life long quest to read the most difficult books and texts I could find. It sometimes takes…
I actually am planning to buy a handful of books that are way outside my education / intelligence level in hope to gain a better understanding of some concepts and tech that I'm interested in. Well see how this goes.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#559Super serious question. Of the 278 comments that have been posted to this thread in the last 8 hours, has anyone suggested a single female author? I looked for a while and saw exactly zero. Isn’t that kind of notable?
Its hard. After decades of reading indiscriminately, I found I was reading almost purely male authors. Of course; there are so many in comparison. So I have a female-author reading list now.
Same thing here. Only 16% of the books I've read 2015-now were written by women. Needless to say, as soon as I've realized that, I've picked up a book written by a woman and prioritized a few of them in my to-read list. So far this year I'm 3/7, aiming for >50% this year.
Re: Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
#560Godel, Escher, and Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter