This Is Your Brain @ the Library

The month of May brought with it the end of the TV series House, M.D. as well as the publication of the book Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior by Leonard Mlodinow. In the series send-off, the producers highlighted the similarities between the show's characters, House and Wilson, and the fictional characters of Holmes and Watson.

The Library may be a place you associate more with Oscar Wilde than Olivia Wilde, but there are a lot of great books for those interested in how the mind works or medical mystery type nonfiction. Although the fictional character of Gregory House is not a neurologist, there is a card in the opening credits of a diagram of a human brain and many of the infamously "interesting" cases that he tackles involve the mind-body connection. Scientists and philosophers have long struggled with the connection between the mind and the brain, and technologies such as fMRI scanners mean that some of those connections can now be mapped. Lots of diet and health books, work efficiency improvement book, and self-help “law of attraction” type books muddy the waters between the brain and the mind and suggest that happiness can be found by changing your thoughts. House might take issue with this as "nobody changes" is almost as salient a precept with him as "everybody lies."

House: The Wounded Healer on Television: Jungian and Post-Jungian Reflections

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

The Omnivorous Mind: Our Evolving Relationship with Food by John S. Allen

Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy by Martin Lindström, author of Buyology

Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by MaryannWolf

The Three-Pound Enigma: The Human Brain and the Quest to Unlock Its Mysteries by Shannon Moffett

More resources on the brain.