Category: Favourites

  • When The Body Says No

    Gabor Maté

    At the outset, let’s just say that I am a believer when it comes to Gabor Maté’s philosophy. That’s because I first had the lived experience, then started connecting the dots, and finally came across ‘When the Body Says No’ which gave the whole thing a logical framing and rationale. I’ve had stress sequentially give me migraines, a heart attack, back pain, IBS and I suspect, even a (yet to be connected) BPPV. Most doctors I went to tried to cure the symptoms, only a couple of them pointed to stress. After I systematically began reading more (Robert Sapolsky, Lisa Feldman Barrett etc) and knocking off stress points, I reached a place where stress was my only stress! And I wondered why I have that stress in the first place. Enter Maté, with a systems thinking approach that I wish doctors would really look at! It is strange that they don’t because even a Roman physician in the second century, Galen, had pointed out that “any part of the body can affect any other part through neural connections.“

    “No disease has a single cause. Even where significant risks can be identified such as biological heredity in some autoimmune diseases or smoking in lung cancer-these vulnerabilities do not exist in isolation. Personality also does not by itself cause disease: one does not get cancer simply from repressing anger or ALS just from being too nice. A systems model recognizes that many processes and factors work together in the formation of disease or in the creation of health. We have demonstrated in this book a biopsychosocial model of medicine. According to the biopsychosocial view, individual biology reflects the history of a human organism in lifelong interaction with an environment, a perpetual inter-change of energy in which psychological and social factors are as vital as physical ones.”

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  • The Tao of Physics

    Fritjof Capra

    The Tao of Physics was first published in 1975, and I’d say that it’s even more relevant now in the context of science and the direction of human advancement in general. As the subtitle of the book states, the idea is to explore the parallels between modern physics and eastern mysticism. 

    Both science and religion/philosophy are trying to get to the reality that lies beyond our senses. One approaches it predominantly through rational means, the other through a non-intellectual experience by quieting the mind with meditation and fine tuning intuition. Broadly, it turns out that many Eastern philosophies/religions – Hinduism, Buddhism, Tao, Zen – had already reached the understanding that modern (in the 80s) science later discovered. 

    The Tao of Physics is divided into three elegant sections – the way of physics, the way of eastern mysticism, and the parallels. Capra begins by summing up the evolution of physics from the time of the Greeks to its modern formulation in the form of Descartes’ philosophy – the separation of mind and matter, which influenced not just the development of modern physics but also the general Western way of thinking – a mechanistic world. On the other hand Eastern philosophies have emphasised the unity of not just mind and matter but the individual and the universe at large. 

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  • The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

    Alice Miller

    I discovered The Drama of the Gifted Child via a fantastic conversation on the Tim Ferriss podcast in which Dr. Gabor Maté spoke about his life and work. This was one of the books that was brought up when the latter spoke about the question that drove his life’s work – what is it that makes people be the way they are? Apparently, the German title of the book when translated is Prisoners of Childhood, which I think is more apt, but probably ‘darker’! 🙂

    Through logic and anecdotes of patients, Miller explores the complexity of childhood and the impact it has on us as adults. The title of the book makes sense because of some focus on the gifted child, who is more intelligent/ sensitive/ emotionally aware than someone their age. These children understand their parents’ expectations so well that they often develop a “false self” by suppressing their own emotions, needs, and authenticity to gain love, approval, or validation from their parents. This process often leads to emotional numbness, perfectionism, and low self-esteem, as the child grows up detached from their authentic self.

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  • Alchemy: The Magic of Original Thinking in a World of Mind-Numbing Conformity

    Rory Sutherland

    I think Alchemy is the first book I’ve read by anyone associated with marketing/advertising. For anyone involved in selling anything, I’d say this is a must-read. You should also read this if you’re intellectually curious, because in essence, this is a behavioural science book. It is even more relevant now because of the obsession with data. It isn’t that you should not look at data, but as Rory says, if you’re only using data, it’s like playing golf with only one club. “Logic should be a tool, not a rule”. This book is about the magic, which I think we’re forgetting in the fixation for data. Rory calls it psycho-logical, which is the way we make decisions in daily life.

    Thanks to books like Donald D. Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality and Andy Clark’s The Experience Machine, the hypothesis is that our entire biological system (body and mind) are built to navigate the world, and we only see a version of reality. The brain predicts based on its experience and hypothesis and we fill in the details. When we do not have a complete understanding of decisions we ourselves take, it is hubris to think that we completely understand the motivations of others. Especially without considering nuances beyond data. “By using a simple economic model with a narrow view of human motivation, the neo-liberal project has become a threat to the human imagination’.

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  • The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality

    Andy Clark

    The subtitle of The Experience Machine is “How our minds predict and shape reality”, and that’s what the book is about. The conventional notion of cognition, at least to me, is that it begins with sense organs perceiving and providing inputs from what we experience, and the brain quickly piecing it all together to present me a coherent picture of what is, and what I should do next. But if we go by the “predictive brain” thesis, the brain doesn’t just passively interpret the world but is constantly predicting, shaping, and refining our reality based on sensory inputs.

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