Ten Books That Fundamentally Changed How I think
Most book lists are about people’s “favorites”. Having read well over 500 books in my adult life, I couldn’t possibly list favorites unless given a genre. But I tried to pick out ten books that had a massive influence on how I think about both myself and the world.
1. Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
This is the book that changed everything. I read it one fateful week on summer vacation. I remember feeling a sense of excitement like no book had ever given me, like I was reading a religious text. Jaynes puts forth a daring theory of consciousness, the origin of the religion, and the evolution of the human species. Many people consider Origin of Consciousness to either be the work of a genius or a crackpot. I am firmly convinced of the former.
The writing is beautiful, poetic even. The book is backed up by a surprisingly array of evidence from every conceivable field of human study. Jaynes himself was a bachelor for life, a Princeton psychologist who turned down the prestige of the professorate class so that he could pursue his research independently.
The only single-author, peer-reviewed publication I ever got in grad school was a paper in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences…
