A Reading List, in Four Parts

Have you ever noticed that your clearest thinking tends to happen while you’re walking, doing the dishes, or moving somehow and almost never while sitting still, forcing it?

Or that you can point to your elbow with your eyes closed, instantly, without ever having to “look it up“?

Small, ordinary things like that turn out to be clues to something much bigger about how your brain actually works and a handful of recent, well-regarded neuroscience books have been circling that same discovery from completely different directions.

In these posts there are four short reviews, one book at a time, each built around a simple question you can test against your own experience before you even get to the science.

Part 1

A Brief History of Intelligence by Max Bennett

Why does a nervous system exist at all?

Bennett traces intelligence back 600 million years and finds that the very first nervous systems evolved for exactly one job: steering the body through the world. Everything else — learning, imagining, understanding other people, language — got added on top, later.

Part 2

A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins

Why does tracing an object with your finger tell you more about its shape than just looking at it?

Hawkins’s research suggests your brain can’t build a clear model of anything, including an idea, without movement built into the process.

Part 3

Brainscapes by Rebecca Schwarzlose

How does your brain know where your elbow is without checking?

Schwarzlose maps out the internal, constantly-updating maps your nervous system builds of your body, your surroundings, other people, and yourself.

Part 4 

How We Learn by Stanislas Dehaene

Why does practicing something for years sometimes barely improve it, while other skills click almost immediately?

Dehaene identifies exactly what separates real learning from mere repetition.

Four scientists, four specialties, working independently — and all four keep landing on ground a movement teacher named Moshe Feldenkrais was already standing on decades earlier, with no brain scanner in sight.

You won’t just have to take that on faith, either: along the way, I’ll point out a few simple, low-pressure ways to feel some of this for yourself, in an actual class or lesson, if you’re curious.