BVBook Verdict

Nonfiction

Understand Your Own Mind

Psychology that actually changes how you see yourself and others.

14 books · ranked

  1. 1

    Thinking, Fast and Slow

    Daniel Kahneman · 2011 · Psychology

    How the mind's two systems lead us into predictable errors; the definitive popular book on cognitive bias.

  2. 2

    Man's Search for Meaning

    Viktor Frankl · 1946 · Psychology

    A psychiatrist's survival of the camps and the meaning he drew from it; brief, profound and enduring.

  3. 3

    The Body Keeps the Score

    Bessel van der Kolk · 2014 · Psychology

    How trauma lives in the body and how people heal; a landmark that reached far beyond therapists.

  4. 4

    Flow

    Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi · 1990 · Psychology

    The psychologist who coined the concept of 'flow' — the state of complete immersion in a challenging activity — presents his research on optimal experience and argues that happiness comes not from leisure but from deep engagement with work and activity that stretches our abilities.

  5. 5

    The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

    Oliver Sacks · 1985 · Psychology

    Strange, humane case studies from the edges of the brain; neurology as storytelling.

  6. 6

    Influence

    Robert Cialdini · 1984 · Psychology

    The six levers of persuasion and how to resist them; essential reading on why we say yes.

  7. 7

    Mindset

    Carol Dweck · 2006 · Psychology

    Why believing abilities can grow changes everything; the book behind the 'growth mindset'.

  8. 8

    Quiet

    Susan Cain · 2012 · Psychology

    The hidden strengths of introverts in a world that prizes talking; validating and well-argued.

  9. 9

    Outliers

    Malcolm Gladwell · 2008 · Psychology

    What actually makes high achievers; the book that popularised the idea of deliberate practice.

  10. 10

    A cognitive psychology of mass communication

    Richard Jackson Harris · 1994 · Psychology

    "With this third edition of A Cognitive Psychology of Mass Communication, Richard Jackson Harris continues his examination of mass media's influences on our perceptions of ourselves and the world arou

  11. 11

    Alexander's Bridge

    Willa Cather · 1912 · Psychology

    Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at the head of Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a man of taste who does not very often get to Boston. He had

  12. 12

    Artificial general intelligence

    Ben Goertzel · 2007 · Psychology

    This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, AGI 2012, held in Oxford, UK, in December 2012. The 34 revised full papers presen

  13. 13

    Behind that curtain

    Earl Derr Biggers · 1928 · Psychology

    This book is a murder mystery set in San Francisco. Charlie Chan the Chinese detective, on his way home to Honolulu, is persuaded to help with the investigation of the murder of a retired Scotland Yar

  14. 14

    Between the Acts

    Virginia Woolf · 1941 · Psychology

    "Virginia Woolf's extraordinary last novel, Between the Acts, was published in July 1941. In the weeks before she died in March that year, Woolf wrote that she planned to continue revising the book an

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