Hello, i turn 17 years old next month and im looking for books to add to my wishlist. Im autistic, and im fascinated by the human mind and body, as well as diseases and sicknesses like rabies, cancer, really anything. I currently have Rabid by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, The Complete Human Body by Alice Roberts, and Behave The Biology Of Humans At Our Best And Worst by Robert Sapolsky on my list. Im swedish but I like to have my books in English, but im mentioning it as sometimes people will link me to american websites. Thanks
by t0oby101
2 Comments
[I have a big list specific to the brain/intelligence.](https://hardcover.app/@JDM_books/lists/intelligence) Feel free to ask questions about anything on there. Behave is great, but reasonably heavy.
If you haven’t read Temple Grandin, she’s autistic and has a number of books on autism that you may either identify with or learn more about how your brain works from. I only read part of a library book and haven’t been back to dive more into her work, so can’t personally recommend it, but I’ve heard some good stuff.
the human mind is not well understood. The fields of sociology, psychology, and social psychology have no common paradigm that they have all agreed on, to describe people even to themselves. And they also, and in addition, do not seem to have agreed on how to divide up the territory on that, amongst themselves! So getting any one discipline to agree with the other two on just what they do, that others don’t, is fraught.
I would recommend David Funder’s wonderful psych text, The Personality Puzzle. It’s very highly recommended by top psych departments too, so I’m sure you’ll learn a lot.
Also, two books by Dr. Frans de Waal, who has passed on but is a big hero of mine: Chimpanzee Politics, and Mama’s Last Hug. Both of these do a much better job of placing human mentality in its proper, natural animal context than anything else I’ve seen.
The mentality of the great apes, our closest animal relatives, has been the topic of a number of excellent books: Reflections of Eden, by Birute Galdikas, In the Shadow of Man, by Jane Goodall, and Gorillas in the Mist, by Dian Fossey, are all excellent, and the second two are recognized as classics of world literature too. Mary Midgley’s book Beast and Man is also remarkably good. Eugene Marais’ books, The Soul of the Ape (by soul he meant mind) and My Friends the Baboons were also, I thought, very interesting. Not to mention Konrad Lorenz’s classic, King Solomon’s Ring!
lol someone stop me….