Books

“Unlocking the Mystery of Human Nature- The Tell-Tale Brain” is a masterpiece, written by Dr. V.S.Ramchandran, who is quite rightly, called ‘The Marco Polo of neuroscience’.

Divided in nine chapters, this book takes us to the mysterious, intriguing but very informative journey of human brain. Trapped inside the hundreds of billions of neurons and tens of thousands of synapses among each of them lives the mysterious truth of our brain and our behaviour. Each synapses can be excitatory or inhibitory and permutation of all of it presents the possible brain states, which easily exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe. This very statement unravels the truth of human mind and behaviour in front of me.

But this is just the beginning. ‘Phantom Limbs and Plastic Brains’, ‘Seeing and Knowing’, ‘Loud Colours and Hot Babes: Synaesthesia’, ‘The Neurons that shaped the civilization’, ‘Where is Steven? The riddle of autism’, ‘The Power of Babble: The evolution of language’, ‘Beauty and the brain: The emergence of Aesthetics’, ‘The Artful Brain: Universal Laws’ and ‘An Ape with a soul: How introspection evolved’ unravels the mystery of human brain and behaviour one by one. Being the student of Behavioural Economics and Neuromarketing, “Introduction, first chapter ‘Phantom Limbs and Plastic Brain’, second chapter ‘Seeing and Knowing’, fourth chapter ‘The Neurons that shaped the civilization’, sixth chapter ‘The Power of babble: The evolution of language’, eighth chapter is ‘The Artful Brain: Universal Laws’ and ninth chapter ‘An Ape with a soul: How introspection Evolved’ are my favourite.

It is a must buy for everyone who are in the field of neuromarketing, behavioural economics and neuroconsumerscience. Neuroscience as a subject I have not touched despite this book falling into that genre because it is not my domain. I took out only those things which I found relevant for myself.

You can also buy the book following this link: The Tell Tale Brain

Few lines from this book which won my mind and heart:

“ We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative- whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives a ‘narrative’, and that this narrative is us, our identities.

If we wish to know about a man, we ask, ‘what is his story- his real inmost story?’ – for each of us is a biography, a story . Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us- through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives- we are each of us unique.

To be ourselves we must have ourselves- possess, if need be re-possess, our life stories. We must ‘recollect’ ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.

This narrative needs, perhaps, in the clue to Mr. Thompson’s desperate tale-telling, his verbosity. Deprived on continuity, of a quiet, continuous inner narrative, he is driven to a sort of narrational frenzy- hence his ceaseless tale, his confabulations, his mythomania. Unable to maintain a genuine narrative or continuity, unable to maintain a genuine world, he is driven to the proliferation of pseudo-narratives, in a pseudo- continuity, pseudo-worlds peopled by pseudo-people, phantoms.”

Above four paragraphs are the reasons behind infinite stories floating in the world and everyone holding those views, narratives and stories believes them true.

Oliver Sacks is a physician, Professor of Neurology at NYU School of Medicine and best-selling author of many books, this being one of them.

Four parts and twenty fours chapters, this book explores many aspects of human behavior with scientific explanations and examples which he witnessed as a physician, research scholar and professor.

I am sure you will worth buying and reading. You can buy by the book here The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat

Though spiritualism had initiated in my quest of knowing the brain and how it functions, one of the initial scientific exposure about it came from the book “The Brain” by David Eagleman. I never ever felt while reading this book that it is written by a scientist, a neuroscientist because narration is so lucid and words are so simple that it looks like bed time story. It paved way for me to buy more books, pick courses on neuroscience online and dig deep to understand what I want to understand better.

Buying a book is very easy but going beyond the first few pages is very difficult. It tells you that whether you will be able to finish reading the book or not. But this book is so simple worded and lucid that not only it kept me interested in the book but it ignited y interest in the very topic itself and it is growing year after year. This kind of impact it had on me.

Some of examples are here: 

While explaining “AM IN THE SUM OF MY MEMORIES?”, he writes, “Our brains and bodies change so much during our life that – like a clock’s hour hand – it’s difficult to detect the changes. Every four months your red blood cells are entirely replaced, for instance, and your skin cells are replaced every few weeks. Within about seven years every atom in your body will be replaced by other atoms. Physically, you are constantly a new you. Fortunately, there may be one constant that links all these different versions of your self together: memory. Perhaps memory can serve as the thread that makes you who you are. It sits on the core of your identity, providing a single, continuous sense of self.”

Further, explaining this very thought, he writes, “Rather than memory being an accurate video recording on a moment in your life, it is fragile brain state from your bygone time that must be resurrected for you to remember”.

In the chapter “The Storyteller”, He writes, “Your brain serves up a narrative- and each of us believes whatever narrative it tells. Whatever you’re falling for a visual illusion, or believing the dream you happened to be trapped in, or experiencing letters in colour, or accepting a delusion as true during an episode of schizophrenia, we each accept our realities however our brain accepts them.

Despite the feeling that we’re directly experiencing the world out there, our reality is ultimately built in the dark, in a foreign language of electrochemical signals. The activity churning across vast neural networks gets turned into your story of this, your private experience of the world: the feeling of this book in your hands, the light in the room, the smell of roses, the sound of others speaking.

Even more strangely, it’s likely that every brain tells a slightly different narrative. For every situation with the multiple witnesses, different brains are having different private experiences. With seven billion human brains wandering the planet (and trillions of animal brain), there’s no single version of reality. Each brain carries its own truth.

So, what is reality? It’s like a television show that only you can see, and you can’t turn it off. The good news is that it happens to be broadcasting the most interesting show you could ask for: edited, personalized and presented just for you.”

These are just few snippets of the amazing book. It is a must read for everyone who wants to know about truth, or who believe their truth is the real truth and other’s truth are lie, or who wants to know why someone behaves the way he/she behaves or the people like me who are simply curious to know about the most mysterious thing in the world; human brain. 

You can buy the book from Amazon following this link The Brain

As any Post Graduate in Marketing, core of my focus for the professional reason was always on consumer behaviour and their decision making process, which gradually took the shape of interest in Neuroscience, Neuromarketing, Neuroconsumerscience, Behavioural Science and Behavioural Economics.  

Latest in the series of books which I just finished reading is “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions” by Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioural Economics at Duke University. Though this book was published twelve years back, but I became serious about this topic for last four years and I am taking one book and course at a time and I am glad I picked this book. 

Divided in thirteen chapters, this book is masterpiece which helps us to sneak behind the façade of rational mind and tells that there is nothing called ‘rational mind’ when it comes to decision making and that also financial decisions. We all are construct and reflection of our memories as we have perceived them, loosely tagged with each other defining our narrative and we don’t make any rational decision. Our decisions are captive of our biases and heuristics which are formed over a period of time by our gender, social, educational, economical and demographical set up and can be primed and anchored in one direction.  

All thirteen chapters, namely The Truth about Reality, The Fallacy of Supply and Demand, The Cost of Zero Cost, The Cost of Social Norms, The Influence of Arousal, The Problem of Procrastination and Self-Control, The High Price of Ownership, Keeping Doors Open, The Effect of Expectations, The Power of Price, The Context of Our Character Part I, The Context of Our Character Part II and Beer and Free Lunches having my experiments and findings conducted by Dan himself. 

This is a must read book for anyone interested in Behavioural Economics. You can buy book from Amazon following this link Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

First time I read any book on behavioural economics was “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Nobel award winning Psychologist Daniel Kanheman around six years back and I got blown over by it. Having spent better part of my life in food retail, understanding human behaviour through historical data collected through weekly or monthly sales was quite a task, because the element of biases, heuristics, noise etc. are something I had just assumptions but no authoritarial backing. Many a times, standing on the floor of the store, I could sense the consumer behaviour but could not call it a behavioural pattern of financial decision making due to not being exposed to psychology part of human decision making. Nature of the job was to achieve the sales numbers, so academic aspect of conclusions coming from data never became a topic of discussion among peers and colleagues.

As my curiosity increased in this subject, I pursued many online courses available across different platforms and read many books on it along with neuroeconomics, neuromarketing and neuro-consumer Science. In this pursuit, I recently found a book “Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics”, written by Richard H. Thaler and published in 2015. Mr. Thaler is known as father of Behavioural Economics and won Nobel Prize for Economics in 2017.

This books describes his journey of exploring, experimenting, understanding, consolidating and presenting the role of different human behaviour behind economic decision making more famously known as “biases and heuristics”, the names given by famous Daniel Kanheman and Amos Tversky.

Written in eight blocks (Beginnings, Mental Accounting, Self-Control, Interlude, Working with Danny, Engaging with the Economics Profession, Finance, Welcome to Chicago, Helping Out) divided in thirty three chapters, this book is a revealation of a completely new dynamics of human financial decision making and revelation to read for anyone who is even not conversant with the idea of either psychology or economics.

From Endowment Effect to The List to Value Theory to The Gauntlet to Bargains and Rip-Offs to Sunk Cost to Buckets and Budgets to The Willpower to The Planner and The Doer to Misbehaving in the Real World to What Seems Fair to Fairness games to end with Save Money Tomorrow, Going Public and Nudging in U.K, this book is the journey of Behavioural Economics with the father of very concept himself.

I simply love the concept of “Endowment Effect”. We overvalue what we have regardless to what is its market value. If we are asked to pay surcharge to facilitate credit card transaction cost, we frown over that, but if that surcharge is included in the product cost, we don’t mind because that’s not obvious to us. While two are one and the same thing, but not getting discount is just a lost opportunity cost for the consumers while paying extra for credit card transaction looks like direct cost. This is not only true for the economic decisions but for ideological view points as well. People value their opinion more over others and they go out in public just to confirm their opinion. “Endowment Effect” coupled with “confirmation bias” becomes “myside bias”, the reason behind big ideological divides.

Mental accounting is another topic which I find fascinating. Recently I bought a laptop for Rs.39.450/- for multitasking of a little lesser known brand. I got a Rs.1500/- instant discount due the tie-up between my credit card issuing bank and seller. Few days later, another Rs.1250/- cash back was credited to my wallet. Along with the features, company offered two years service warranty as against of one year given by other known brands and I got one year Microsoft 365 subscription free as well. I had done good two weeks research before buying the laptop and had seen umpteen videos and read thousands of reviews of different brands before making this decision. Laptop of known brands with similar features and warranty were at more than Rs.65,000/-. So when I made this decision, got this product, set up my device and Microsoft account, I found it very smooth in operation. It proved to be great bargain for me. After that whomsoever I told about the purchase, I not only explained the discount and cash back, but also the cost of one year Microsoft 365 Subscription, cost of 1 TB storage on cloud, and cost of one extra years’ warranty. Before that, I was against the idea of having cloud storage space, because I not only found it costly but leaving the responsibility of my data on someone else. Hard Drive Storage meant complete control over my data to me. But after getting it along with Few days back, I had almost made the decision to buy a laptop for Rs.61,000/- with the same features but somehow I ended up not buying it. So, my satisfaction level from making the purchase decision which I made is like absolute bargain.

This book is full of real life experiments and examples and is a must read for everyone who wants to know the science behind financial decision making.

You can buy the book following this link Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics

“The Cave” is spiritual journey of super successful internet entrepreneur Alok Kejriwal. Starting with selling and exporting socks, which was his family business, he started his digital journey with www.contest2win.com and now runs www.games2win.com and www.koimoi.com. He sold China arm of his another successful venture www.mobiles2win.com to Walt Disney. His two companies www.contest2win.com and www.mobile2win.com pioneered the digital gaming and digital promotions in India. His first book “Why I stopped Wearing My Socks” is bestseller and won him C.K.Prahlad Best Business Book award.

Along with being a super successful entrepreneur, he is devotee of “The Great Mahavatar Babaji” and “Art of Living” teacher as well. He is trained “Sudarshan Kriya” expert. 

“ The Cave” is about his spiritual journey, from the foundation of spiritualism being laid in him in early childhood to his devotion to Mahavatar Babaji.

 Every chapter of this book (Eighteen chapters) is a revelation in itself and it is a guide to understand and make best use of divine guidance or subtle cues institution throws in front of us. This is not a religious or spiritual book, this is a life guide and emotional wellness book.

While reading the book, I was reminded my own journey of spiritualism which made me understand that science doesn’t mean laughing at what we don’t know, but accepting the fact that our collective knowledge is still a droplet in the ocean and we shall strive to know what we don’t know. When I was badly stuck in so far the worst challenge of my life, I found the successes I achieved at different points were completely dependent on someone else’s mercy and were defying the “Law of Small Number”. I was just playing my small role in something very big happening in my life. I am witness to many such events in my life which goes beyond the word ‘fluke’ or a ‘coincidence’ and establishes the presence of bigger power. 

This book is replete with many such examples of the life Alok Kejriwal. Each chapter is followed by “Connecting the dots” and “Exercise”, which will help you to use the subtle cues of life and make best use of it to achieve success in life.

I strongly recommend to buy this book. You can buy this book following this link The Cave- An Internet Entrepreneur’s Spiritual Journey