Category: Non fiction

  • 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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  • Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

    Annie Jacobsen

    It was in a show called Hunters that I first heard about Operation Paperclip. Even before WW 2 ended, and though there were common organisations among Allies, the race was on between the would-be victors to get Nazi science and tech to their own countries. This expanded to the Nazis who were working on such projects. Originally called Operation Overcast, the then rechristened Operation Paperclip was the US version, which ran between 1945 and 1959, and as a part of which more than 1600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from Nazi Germany to the U.S. and more often than not, given government employment. The American Dream!

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  • The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

    Daniel J. Levitin

    The title – The Organized Mind, and the subtitle – Thinking straight in the age of information overload – led me to quite some expectation, which unfortunately weren’t met. A better title for the book, IMO, would have been ‘How the mind is organised’. That the book was published in 2014, when the noise levels were of a magnitude different from the current circumstances, also doesn’t help.

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