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As requested by students in NTU's CogPsych HP2600, here are my favourite book tips for summer reading! Read broadly, think deeply!

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Our lecture on the cognitive psychology of the paranormal is indebted to these two fantastic books by psych professors!

Richard Wiseman is the OG ghost busting prof. He has been working for years on what it means to have a paranormal experience and how we can test what is going on under the hood of a spooky feeling. He’s the Prof who conduced studies of ghostly encounters in a haunted palace. He’s also a stage magician, and a great storyteller. Paranormality is a great book with lots of fun stories and a powerful evidence base.

Chris French is an experimental psychologist who built his own experimental haunted house! The Science of Weird Shit Another great collection of evidence and perspectives on why people experience the supernatural and the spooky.

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New and exiting journalism on AI.

In Empire of AI, Karen Hao, a long-time tech journalist gives an incredible review of the internal machinations of Open AI and its impacts on the planet, from some of the weird connections to Harry Potter fan fiction (🖇️), through its era as a non-profit, to the trauma caused by the human-industry required to provide labelled data for the supposedly intelligent engines to develop something moderately relevant. She also reviews powerful people-drived movements from across the globe pushing back on the environmental impact of current scaling models. A fascinating insight into corporate power, key individuals and the tools they are trying to dream into existence.

Emily Bender (professor of Computational Linguistics) and Alex Hanna (researcher for Distributed AI Research) co-host a weekly Twitch stream where they tackle AI-related spin with great humour and highly informed perspectives. In The AI Con they break down the dangers of taking corporate messaging at face value, and share their insights into the nature of machine learning, its real-life limits, and real-world harms. Lightly written and compelling to read, this book can arm you against an onslaught of unnecessary acquiescence.

#HP2600_CogPsych

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Sensation, signalling and the wiring of experience

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Sensation, signalling and the wiring of experience

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Two fabulous audio books on this book date, both wonderfully narrated by the authors in audio format.

Ed Yong is a fantastic science writer, and in ‘An Immense World’ his tremendous overview of sensory systems in a wide variety of animals illuminates the wild diversity of how different minds perceive their environments. From moths trapped in the alluring pull of streetlights to dolphins able to detect pregnancies using sonar.

Sally Adee is a journalist who made a splash with her first hand experience of electrically enhanced sniper training. In “We are electric” she revisits the topic of electricity in the body with one eye on the history of bioelectricity (Galvani was done dirty by Volta), and the other on the future (including possible applications in wound healing, cancer treatment and recovery from spinal cord damage). Her cautionary tales about snake-oil sellers are prescient reminders that hype-merchants aren’t always the most diligent nor the most ethical scientists!

The books are linked by the fact that sensation relies on bioelectric signals, but the overlaps are even more interesting when you get into the weeds.

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These two books should go on a date together! Both address human cognition through comparison with other species - some living, and some extinct.

Vanessa Woods is a cognitive psychologist who has worked substantially on the evolution of prosocial behaviours in species as diverse as dogs and bonobos. Writing together with Brian Hare, Survival of the Friendliest is infused with humour and personal insights.

Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death and art is an exhaustive overview of how our past relatives have been misunderstood as brutish sub-humans, and reviews extensive evidence of the complexity of their cognitive and social landscapes. Rebecca Wragg Sykes is a respected scholar in this field, and ties together the history of the discipline with cogent explanations of cutting edge data.

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Gretchen McCulloch is one of the hosts of the popular Lingthusiasm podcast. In Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, her characteristic sense of humor shines through as she brings sharp linguistic analysis to everything from emojis (are they gestures?) and millennial punctuation (full stops are for boomers). Great fun!

#HP4036_LanguageInPerceptionAndThought

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Janelle Shane is a computer scientist with a love of the absurd. She creates and AI systems, and trains them to generate things like novel 'valentines day candy' slogans (as in the title of the book, You look like a thing and I love you). The outputs of her systems are hilarious, and reveal how artificial 'intelligence' is deeply unintelligent.

Criado Perez's book Invisible Women: Exposing data bias in a world designed for men, gives a thoroughly sobering run-down of how male-centred design (that is, excluding women from the idea of a 'typical bodies') biases the physical world against women - in everything from seat belts to smartphone screen size.

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These two books are great for folks interested in words and minds: how language is processed in the moment, and what downstream impacts that might have on how a person experiences the world

Aitchison’s Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the mental lexicon is a wonderfully written romp that manages cover the basics of psycholinguistics with curiosity and charm.

Gentner and Goldin-Meadow’s edited collection Words in Mind: Adventures in the Study of Language and Thought was the first to bring together papers asking the Neo-Whorfian question: in what ways could the language we speak bias the way we experience the world.

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#HP4036_LanguageInPerceptionAndThought

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Thought processes and how they can be hacked

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Thought processes and how they can be hacked

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Thinking Fast and Slow is a catalogue of Dan Kahneman's Nobel prize winning research (together with Alan Tversky - who sadly passed away before book and the Nobel), spanning decades of insights into the ways that the mind processes different kinds of information - including processing biases and 'hunches'. An absolute classic, although for current readers should be aware that not all of the findings hold up to date.

Orestes & Conway's Merchants of Doubt is an amazing piece of investigative journalism, documenting the ways in which a handful of spin-doctors employed by the tobacco industry managed to sew 'seeds of doubt' about the carcinogenic effects of cigarettes. Full of insights into contemporary strategies employed by large corporations, and how they try to capitalize on human cognition to overshadow truth with doubt.

#HP2600_CogPsych
#Scicomms #MediaStudies

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Different ways of being in the world (clinical psych)

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Different ways of being in the world (clinical psych)

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VS Ramachandran is known for his knack for storytelling, and in The Tell Tale Brain: Unlocking the Mystery of Human Nature he spins grand narratives out of his experience as a clinical neurologist - everything from synaesthesia to phantom limbs!

A classic in the field of clinical neurology, Oliver Sack's The man who mistook his wife for a hat is a collection of clinical observations that go well beyond individual case-notes. Sack's humanity and compassion for his patients shines through his insightful narratives.

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Chritine Kenneally is a journalist who tackled the daunting task of making sense of all the different threads and perspectives in Language Evolution through a series of interviews with some of the field's most vocal thought leaders. The resulting book, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, is an intriguing outsiders' view of the field, complete with contradictory viewpoints and divergent narratives. Lovely writing from front to back, and thoroughly enjoyable.

For a different perspective on our nearest living primate relatives, and the ways we have learned about their social interactions, the graphic novel Primates: The fearless science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Birute Galdikas gives an overview of the research of pioneers in field research into gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans. Maris Wicks's adorable  art gives as much personality and charisma to the primates as to their human investigators, and Jim Ottovani's narrative of lives in research is compelling.

Both books focus on the personal narratives and experiences of individual researchers, which is a refreshing change!

#HP3204_AnApe'sGuideToHumanLanguage
#Primatology #LanguageEvolution #ComparativePsychology

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OK real talk - Doidge is a psychiatrist, not a neuroscientist, and not an educational psychologist. Some of the claims made in The Brain that Changes Itself are a bit overstated, and do not stand up to clinical scrutiny... That said, there are some great insights into the ways that brains can change their wiring, and the impacts such changes can have at the individual level. Best bits: Merznich's experiments; Bac y Rita's experiments; Recovery following stroke; neuropathic pain; the chapter on porn (!!!); and neuroplasticity throughout the lifespan.

Susan S Barry is a neuroscientist - and used to be depth-blind. In Fixing my gaze: A scientist's journey into seeing in three dimensions, she shares her step-by-step story of firstly discovering she lacked 3D vision, then entering into a programme of neuroplastic training (developed for kids) to rewire the way her brain processed signals from the eyes. Excellent empirical grounding, and a great story, told well.

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Study tips & educational insights from cognitive psychology

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Study tips & educational insights from cognitive psychology

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The Learning Scientists (podcast and blog) are a great team of Cognitive Psychologists whose own research addresses how learning works, and what can make it work better in classrooms and study situations. Understanding How We Learn is their first print publication, and it's chock full of tips and strategies to be an effective learner. One of their Six Key Strategies for Effective learning is "Dual Coding" (presenting the same information in more than one format e.g., text and images), and this message is literally integrated throughout the book, with icons and images designed to provide key information in a multimodal way. However, real talk, the authors aren't graphic designers, and I'm not convinced the 2-column layout, large text size and illustrations work together as intended - the illustrations often seem to be cluttering up the text in unpredictable ways, rather than illuminating it. That said, the text is genius, evidence-based and contains great tips for students and instructors.

#HP2600_CogPsych
#ScienceOfLearning #StudySkills #UniversalStudent

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An absolute classic - based on Ben Goldacre's blog of the same name, Bad Science is an insightful series of case studies into how current commercial incentives and industry-wide regulatory weaknesses can undermine the scientific record. Brings a really useful perspective on how 'sciency-ness' can carry more weight in the public imagination than high-quality evidence-based science. Everything from face creams to the vaccine/MMR scandal.

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My students know I use tonne of graphical presentations in my teaching - and not necessarily the ones from the textbook! These two books helped me think deeper about the way I present information in visual formats.

Edward Tufte's book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a classic in the field of dataviz, and condenses lessons from centuries of visualization practice. It's where I learned the name for 'chart junk', and started thinking critically about effective communication through graphics.

Information is Beautiful came out of David McCandless's popular blog of the same name. Its a joyous exploration of various visualization technique, deployed on its subject matter from pop-culture to population science.

#UniversalStudent #Dataviz #Scicomms

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One of the most prominent voices in the Open Science movement, Chris Chambers lays out the case for scientific reform in The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology: A manifesto for reforming the culture of scientific practice. This is a great text to sharpen your critical knife, and think hard about whether the scientific mission (advancement of human knowledge) is supported by current scientific practices… or by the current reward structures in academic science. Covers the basics of questionable research practices including p-hacking, cherry picking, and HARKing, and introduces strategies like preregistration and registered reports.

#OpenScience #ConfirmationBias #OpenAccess #ImprovingScientificMethodology

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Three fantastic books for folks interested in how cognition and social interaction can differ between mammals, and the deep evolutionary time involved in incremental genomic changes.

Lee Dugatkin worked with Siberian scientist Lyudmila Trut to bring the story of How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) to life. It's an absolute roller coaster of a story spanning Soviet era scientific disappearances, the scientific underground, and the establishment of a secret genetics lab hidden in a fox-fur farm.

Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? by Frans De Waal is a glorious exploration of animals minds, and how the humans seem exquisitely biased to misunderstand them. Packed with extraordinary animal facts, and a humbling perspective about how intelligent humans aren't.

In Monkeytalk:  Inside the worlds and minds of humans, primatologist Julia Fisher shares insights from her detailed investigations into primate communication in the wild, and ways in which it is similar to and different from human communication.

#HP3204_AnApe'sGuideToHumanLanguage

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Save these for the coffee table not the cabana! Both gorgeous art books delight the eye with beautifully illustrated neuroscience.

Neurocomic is a graphic novel by Farinella and Ros tells the story of a tiny character travelling among giant, tree-like neurons. In his travels he meets famous neuroscientists and learns about the structures and functions of neuron signalling.

The Beautiful Brain is a long-overdue art book collecting together archival ink drawings of Santiago Ramon y Cajal, a pioneering neuroscientist and microscopist. Still some of the most wonderful and insightful illustrations around.

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#HP3204_AnApe'sGuideToHumanLanguage

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Eye and Brain by Richard Gregory is a classic in the field of perception science. Its fabulously well written, and curiosity inspiring - from the development of vision (all the way from eyespots in early sea life), to kittens in baskets, and visual illusions.

Cytowic (a medical doctor with synaesthesia) and Eagleman (a cognitive neuropsychologist) teamed up for Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synaesthesia. Chock full of research findings and personal narratives from synaesthetes, this book is a great intro to what life is like for people who experience intermingling of the senses.

#HP2600_CogPsych
#HP4036_LanguageInPerceptionAndThought

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I am a developmental psycholinguist. My work investigates the way the brain handles language, and the ways in which speaking particular languages might influence other aspects of cognition. I studied linguistics at the Australian National University and Tohoku University, and took my doctorate in Experimental Psychology at Oxford. I teach and lead a lab at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

In the BLIP Lab, we investigate the Brain, Language and Intersensory Perception. We are on facebook too. One of our biggest projects is working on understanding the mix of languages that Singaporean preschoolers hear, and how it contributes to their developing language skills. We are also working on understanding the quality of evidence in educational interventions, and improving EEG methodology - especially for children. We have lots of ways to get involved in our research as a participant or as a research assistant.

Currently teaching:
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