Introductory Books:
 Clark, Mindware: an Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science
 Crane, The Mechanical Mind
 Gardner, The Mind's New Science
Lower-level Books:
 Ariely, Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality
 Baron, Thinking and Deciding
 Damasio, Descartes' Error and Looking for Spinoza
 Dennett, Consciousness Explained
 Eysenck and Keane, Cognitive Psychology
 Gazzaniga, Human
 Gazzaniga, Ivry and Mangun, Cognitive Neuroscience
 Pinker, How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate
 Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain
Mid-level Books:
 Chalmers, The Conscious Mind
 Clark, Natural Born Cyborgs and Supersizing the Mind
 Gigerenzer, Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox
 Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
 Kahneman and Tversky, Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
 Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things
 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
 Johnson-Laird, How We Reason
 Newell and Simon, Human Problem Solving
 Russell and Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
 Sloman, Causal Models
 Varela, Thompson and Roch, The Embodied Mind
Advanced Books:
 Anderson, The Adaptive Character of Thought
 Churchland and Sejnowski, The Computational Brain
 Koch, The Quest for Consciousness
 Marr, Vision
 Oaksford and Chater, Bayesian Rationality
 Pearl, Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference
 Rumelhart and McClelland, Parallel Distributed Processing






A great introduction to dual process theory of mind and rationality:
Stanovich, The Robot's Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin
An excellent philosophical take on consciousness:
Hofstadter, I Am A Strange Loop
More fundamental, a great book on categorization and memory:
Gazzaniga, Perspectives in Memory Research
On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins. I enjoyed reading his ideas about what intelligence really is, how
the brain may categorize/interpret things, and how we might be able to create real artificial
intelligence. He goes into lots of details but it was fairly easy for me to follow.
However, I've also seen people comment that this book is not great and has too elementary of a
view of the brain. I am curious what other people think of this book, and whether there's a better
book than this that covers the same kind of stuff.
Rather than present a hodgepodge of competing theoretical frameworks, I thought I would present a
brief reading list for one particular school of thought within cog sci that is currently very much up and
coming and, if right, paradigm busting: 4EA cog sci (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended,
affective). The movement is self-consciously a reaction to the Fodorian computational Language of
Thought theories that dominate orthodox cog sci as well as formalist, nativist, and representationalist
approaches to cognitive science.
 Chemero, A. (2009). Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT
press.
 Clark, A. (1997). Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
 Clark, A. (2003). Natural-born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of
Human Intelligence. New York: Oxford University Press.
 Clark, A. (2008). Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive
Extension. New York: Oxford University Press.
 Gallagher, S. (2005). How the Body Shapes the Mind. New York: Oxford University
Press.
 Gibbs, R. W., Jr. (1994). The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and
Understanding. New York: Cambridge University Press.
 Gibson, E. J., & Pick, A. D. (2000). An Ecological Approach to Perceptual Learning
and Development. New York: Oxford University Press.
 Hutto, D., D. (2008). Folk Psychological Narratives. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
 Johnson, M. (2007). The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
 Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh : the embodied mind and
its challenge to Western thought. New York: Basic Books.
 Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1987). The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots
of Human Understanding. Boston: New Science Library.
 Noë, A. (2004). Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
 Noë, A. (2009). Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons
from the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang.
 Protevi, J. (2009). Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
 Ramsey, W. (2007). Representation reconsidered. Cambridge;New York: Cambridge
University Press.
 Ratcliffe, M. (2008). Feelings of being: Phenomenology, psychiatry and the sense of
reality. New York: Oxford University Press.
 Reed, E. (1996). Encountering the World: Toward and Ecological Psychology. New
York: Oxford University Press.
 Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of
Mind. Cambrige, MA: Harvard University Press.
 Tomasello, M. (1999). The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
 Varela, F., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive
Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
 Wheeler, M. (2005). Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
I would recommend the book A User's guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four
Theaters of the Brain by John J. Ratey to anyone who is really new to the field, or is trying to figure
out if they are interested in cognitive science.
This is the type of book that you might have to read for an intro to cognitive science class. It isn't too
technical, but gives a very good overview and you will learn a lot.
The Art of Learning (Waitzkin), about stress and recovery, peak performance, harnessing your
energies to focus, triggering flow states, and meta-awareness.