Resources For PSY 3891 Students

Faces and Minds of Psychological Science. – Psychological science covers a broad spectrum of topics ranging from fundamental brain processes involved in how we think, learn, and remember, to the ways that people function in groups and organizations. This webpage lists many of the distinguished individuals who are leaders in field of psychological science. As you go about identifying specific topics that you’d like to explore this semester, use this ‘roster’ as a resource – the topics listed here cover the complexities of human behavior in all of its forms, from the most basic brain research to real-life applications in health, education, business, and society.

Brain Pickings – a weekly newsletter devoted to the challenge of understanding how to live, and how to live well. Each week’s newsletter tackles a theme built around essays drawn from art, science, psychology, design, philosophy, history, politics, literature, anthropology.

Nautilus – an online science magazine that aims to deliver “big-picture science by reporting on a single monthly topic from multiple perspectives.”

Science Daily – pick your topic(s) and you’ll get summaries of science news stories written in layperson’s language. Mixture of jewels and junk.

Healthy skepticism – The late Carl Sagan wrote an influential book titled The Demon-Haunted World, and in that book is a marvelous chapter (“The fine art of baloney detection”) on achieving balance between skepticism and open-mindedness. You can read a synopsis of the chapter here, and you can access the entire chapter here. For a more polemic but stimulating exposure to skeptical thinking, try Why people believe weird things by Michael Shermer. This author has made a career out of being skeptical, and in this provocative book he examines why humans have such a propensity to delude themselves.

The nature of explanation (1943) Kenneth Craik, Cambridge University Press. A monograph on the mind/brain and the essential role of symbolic representation and reasoning in psychology. This short book was a force in the transition from the sterile school of thought called behaviorism to the new field of cognitive psychology.

Consciousness and the Social Brain (2013), by Princeton psychologist Michael Graizano, tries to take the mystery of out the notion of consciousness by treating it as a characteristic that your mind/brain sees in others and attributes to yourself/itself.

The Politics of Experience, by Scottish anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing. What is normal, what is crazy? Laing says we are alienated from ourselves by the craziness of the world we live in. This uncomfortable book is a true classic, and you really should read it if you’re committed to learning about psychopathology.

Free Will, by philosopher/neuroscientist Sam Harris. To quote from the publisher, “Belief in free will touches nearly everything that human beings value. It is difficult to think about law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, morality—as well as feelings of remorse or personal achievement—without first imagining that every person is the true source of his or her thoughts and actions. And yet the facts tell us that free will is an illusion.”

Do elephants have souls? Psychology is often touted as the study of human behavior and the human mind. But, in fact, non-human animals have always formed the bedrock for thinking in psychology, and the more we learn about animals the more we realize they can have very human-like traits. This New Atlantis essay by Caitrin Nicol provides remarkable accounts of the behaviors of elephants that will expand the way you think about intelligence, love and spirituality.

What it’s like to be a bat, an essay written decades ago by Thomas Nagel, has become a cult classic among philosophically-oriented scholars. Nagel’s essay concerns the mind/body problem and the impossibility of solving it based solely on central state materialism (biological determinism). Nagel lays his cards on the table early in the essay: “Without consciousness, the mind/body problem would be uninteresting; with consciousness it seems hopeless.”

The terrible beauty of brain surgery, a mesmerizing essay by Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, vividly reminds us that the brain is the house where the mind lives, and when a damaged portion of that house requires repair the neurosurgeon had better know what he/she is  doing. Knausgaard’s eye witness account of this most terrifying of surgeries is both disturbing and humbling. (Permalink or here)

You Learn by Living is a short, evocative monograph authored by Eleanor Roosevelt when she was in her mid-70’s. As one admirer put it, the book is “an elegantly written, relentlessly insightful compendium of her philosophy on the meaningful life.” It’s instructive to look for connections between her ideas (e.g., “happiness is not a goal, it’s a by-product”) and contemporary research in psychological science (e.g., “The art of happiness”).