(Part 2) Best psychology books according to redditors

First of all, webmd or whatever blogs you're using as sources are worthless.

> we actually have direct proof of immense differences in male and female brain anatomy.

It's not "immense". The average differences within each sex are larger than the average differences between sexes.

What's different is that male brains are about 10 to 15% larger than women's brains on average... even when corrected for body size (Allen, et al. 2004). However, this does not confer or imply greater intelligence (Solms and Turnbull, 2002; LeVay, 1997; Pool, 1994)

Male brains have about four billion more neurons in the cerebral cortex, however female brains have more synapses (Pakkenberg and Gundersen, 1997).

Female sensory processing is much more acute than male sensory processing. Hearing is better, sight is better, smell and taste are better. Touch shows the most disparity, with the least sensitive woman being more sensitive than the most sensitive man.

> In fact, it has been shown that males have 6.5 times as much grey matter as females while females have 9.5 times as much white matter as males.

And actually this is factually incorrect:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12725764

For all structures, male volumes were greater than female, but the gray/white (G/W) ratio was consistently higher across structures in women than men.

So actually, according to this study, female brains have more gray matter than white matter.

>Now, the research is still young, but neuroscience is currently correlating grey matter with both IQ and STEM-type problem solving and white matter/frontal lobe organization with language.

lol... so according to YOU, women should have higher IQs and more STEM-type problem solving ability then?

> It's inconceivable that given such different structures, we wouldn't see a measurable difference in both average interests and performance. Here's an interesting collection of graphs with male vs female degrees in stem fields -- note how women are least frequent in the sciences closest to physics.

And there is absolutely zero evidence that this has anything to do with the ratio of brain structures or really anything to do with neurology. And you probably know this too which is why you didn't present any.

Let's be honest here, there are cultural factors at play here, which is why we don't see a consistent percentage of gender distribution across cultures when it comes to fields of study. And we also see the gender distributions changing over time...

>Yet, this is despite the fact that because of societal affirmative action, women earn 57% of all bachelor's degrees.

Women earn more bachelor's degrees because more women go to secondary education in the first place. And the reason behind this is because women have less opportunities for higher-paying jobs right out of college, especially since a lot of those career paths have severe penalties for women due to high rates of sexual harassment (such as the armed forces).

>We also know that IQ is 75% heritable, so from the very start we can tell the issue is largely a genetic one.

You might want to read the article you linked:

>>"We should note, however, that low-income and non-white families are poorly represented in existing adoption studies as well as in most twin samples. Thus it is not yet clear whether these studies apply to the population as a whole. It remains possible that, across the full range of income and ethnicity, between-family differences have more lasting consequences for psychometric intelligence."[7]

And in fact, due to the feminization of poverty, this difference in IQ between sexes can be accounted for using this factor alone.

>Testosterone is linked to risk taking. I believe this is what's usually referred to as "aggression."

Risk taking =/= aggression. Besides, it's not enough to show that testosterone increases aggression. You have to show that the testosterone difference is significant enough to cause aggression that cannot be attributed to social or cultural factors that encourage male violence and aggression.

>There's also evidence that transgender people have different brain makeup than their original sex.

??? This statement doesn't make any sense. People who are transgender do not have an "original sex", any more than cisgender people have one. Transgender people are the same sex throughout their whole lives.

>transgenderism is a physical condition and not a mental one,

Transgenderism is a social movement for acceptance and equal rights for people who are transgender.

>and 2, that male and female brains are different enough that you can tell one from the other.

If you're a trained neuroscientist with special equipment that can detect the minor differences, yes. But you can't tell with the naked eye, because the differences aren't that much. Again, there is more variation within sexes than between sexes.

>I'm adding my example here after. The case was for David Reimer. He was, at 8 months, given a sexual reassignment surgery after a circumcision accident. His parents were told to treat him as a girl. Despite this, he always identified as male, wanted to act like a boy, and ultimately committed suicide due to this. Biology has a role, as if society molded a person, David would have identified as female.

That was one person, it doesn't mean you can conclude that therefore nobody's sexual orientation or identity is influenced by their environment. There is a reason why biological twins only have about a 50% chance of both being homosexual if at least one is homosexual... it's because there are environmental factors that contribute to sexual orientation and identity.

There are other things to consider such as the fact that our understandings of the hormones and social treatments necessary for a successful transition were incomplete at the time and the doctor there did some very bizarre and unethical things such as forcing the brothers to interact with one another and perform simulated sex acts on each other.

**

Initial parts are from [Brain, Mind, and Behavior* by Alfred Ernest Jones](http://www.amazon.com/Brain-Mind-Behavior-Introduction-Biopsychology/dp/0536352054).

Seriously though, I can strongly recommend the book Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology by Prof. Robert C. Richardson. It's a thorough, good-faith, and apolitical dissection of how evolutionary psychology as a field lacks evidence and rigorous methodology: https://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Psychology-Maladapted-Life-Mind/dp/0262514214

> Emasculated fairies? Seriously, you guys need to stop with these comments. For people who believe in evolution, you really don't take it into consideration much. Evolution is not just scientific, it's also social and cultural.

Have you read this book? It explores this type of thinking quite a lot (i.e. modern man has evolved in social/cultural terms to be "less masculine" than, say, a caveman, or even a bronze age man).

If you're more of a non-fiction type, he lists this as the main inspiration for that strand of "emasculating evolution" in the acknowledgements. I haven't read that yet (it lurks on my bookshelf waiting for me to stop reading novels).

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Downvoted for offering pointers to books on subjects pertaining to the parent author's comment? WTF? How is that not adding to the discussion? ffs.

I have access to most of my resources at my practicum, but here are a few:

https://www.amazon.com/Evidence-based-Practice-Biofeedback-Neurofeedback-3rd/dp/0984297960
https://www.amazon.com/Biofeedback-Fourth-Practitioners-Mark-Schwartz/dp/1462531946/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1526672020&sr=8-1&keywords=Biofeedback%3A+A+Practitioner%27s+Guide

I also use some of the scripts from the Mayo Clinic. Autogenics is evidence based and the recommended approach for migraines, relaxation training and CBT-CP are both the recommended approaches for other types of pain.

Here is APA's policy:

https://www.apa.org/about/policy/biofeedback.pdf

Additional resource:

https://www.aapb.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=3678

I'm biased because this book was written by my aunt and uncle, but I would recommend Evolutionary Psychology: The Ultimate Origins of Human Behavior.

Check this book out:

Biological Psychology (Critical Thinking in Psychology Series) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0857256939/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_EZsbzbDNPK6RW

It's a really quick and easy read, covers most areas of neuroscience and will let you know if you're interested in this as a possible career or not. If you'd like to talk sometime, feel free to PM me! I'm a grad student in cognitive neuroscience right now

Principles of Behavior- Malott. It's just a text book about behavior analysis, but it changed my entire world view.

Science and Human Behavior- Skinner

Verbal Behavior

Walden Two- Skinner

A few more Skinner books that just added to my love for behavior analysis.

Short answer: don't.

EP has serious issues as a science. For why, I refer you to:

http://www.amazon.com/Adapting-Minds-Evolutionary-Psychology-Persistent/dp/0262025795

and:

http://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Psychology-Maladapted-Life-Mind/dp/0262182602

I actually quite enjoyed the trippy squishy brains and drainpipe reverb [6]. I also like that he went into as much detail as he did spelling out his logic. I found his arguments generally clear and that made it easy to spot where exactly I disagreed with him, which happened early and often.

We would have peace in the Middle East before I could write a rebuttal to all of his points, but...

>There is only pure darkness within the skull. The redness is nowhere to be found.

Like every party to this debate, the materialist must distinguish between the first-person perspective (I'm seeing red) and the third-person perspective (Joe is seeing red). I can't see Joe's red, I can only see Joe's brain. We find ourselves in very different causal relationships with his experience, as any sane materialist would expect. This doesn't speak to the question of whether materialism can explain qualia (short answer: not entirely yet, but neither can any non-materialist alternative).

>The mind transcends the brain.

He really likes the word "transcends" but I never know quite what sense he means that in. The seemingly innocent assumption that we can speak intelligibly of something called "the mind" merits questioning, for reasons mentioned by Bob Garrett in Brain and Behavior.

>At the risk of sounding provocative, I will say that there is no such thing as mind. It exists only in the sense that, say, weather exists; weather is a concept we use to include rain, wind, humidity, and related phenomena. We talk as if there is a weather when we say things like "the weather is interfering with my travel plans." But we don't really think there is a weather. Most, though not all neuroscientists believe that we should think of the mind in the same way; it is simply the collection of things that the brain does, such as thinking, sensing, planning, and feeling. But when we think, sense, plan, and feel, we get the compelling impression that there is a mind behind it all, guiding what we do. Most neuroscientists say this is just an illusion, that the sense of mind is nothing more than an awareness of what our brain is doing. Mind, like weather, is also just a concept; it is not a something; it does not do anything.[<-typed that shit out of a book!]

It very much is still a debate, just not in the classical sense. For the most part, the home(parental) environment has not shown a signifcant effect on life course behavioral outcomes. But, genetic makeup as well as the environment as a whole do shape people throughout their lives. The story about these twins is from a study examining identical (Monozygotic, genetically identical) twins that grew up separately. The researcher behind OPs picture discovered several more stories like this, with this one being the most prominent.
And an ongoing field of research, biosocial criminology continues to examine the genetic and behavioral contributions to behavior in an anti-social context. Both in a behavior genetic context ( which is the point of the research mentioned) and in a gene/environment interplay context examining the effect of genes at large and the effect of specific genes on lifecourse behavioral outcomes.

Any good psych teacher wouldn't wholesale write off something that is still relevant and worth discussing.

Also, this book does an excellent job at discussing this form of research as well as many more twin designs and behavior genetics in general. http://www.amazon.com/Genes-Behavior-Nature-Nurture-Interplay-Explained/dp/1405110619

Thanks for the links. I haven't had time to read them front to back, but from reading the first page or so of each, they look to me like reductionists.

The Crick and Koch paper says early on that "Our own view is that it is a plausible working assumption that some activity of the brain is all that is necessary to produce consciousness, and that this is the best line to follow unless and until there is clear decisive evidence to the contrary (as opposed to arguments from ignorance)." They are saying that conscious awareness is a brain process or the result of a brain process (depending on how they would parse the semantics).

Ramachandran and Hirstein say that "all our thoughts, feelings, emotions, even what we regard as our intimate self—arises exclusively from the activity of little wisps of protoplasm in the brain." Later they say that "Our theory should be seen as complementing rather than replacing a host of other recent biological approaches to the problem..." and they go on to list a number of authors, some of whom I know to be taking reductionist viewpoints (Churchland, Llinas, Damasio). They also say that qualia might be transferable between brains - an exciting idea, but one that sounds pretty reductionist to me.

Is there something these authors say later in their papers that suggests a non-reductionist viewpoint?

>I am of course an amateur in matters of neuroscience as well, but I don't think you can claim much knowledge of whatever consensus exists, if you didn't know that both Crick and Ramachandran took subjectivity as being real.

Wait, hang on. You seem to be attacking a straw-man here. Reductionists do take subjectivity as being 'real'. They just think it will be explained by underlying neurological mechanisms. To illustrate with a couple historical parallels, when the phenomenon of light was reduced to the theory of electromagnetism, we didn't stop believing in light; we just understood it better. When heat was reduced to mean molecular energy, we didn't become heat-skeptics. A successful reduction actually vindicates the higher level phenomenon, showing that it's a "real thing" after all, by explaining it as a case of the application of more general principles. Those who think subjectivity is not real would be eliminativists, though I can't think of many serious philosophers or scientists dealing with this subject who take this position (possible exception: Susan Blackmore?). It is commonly thought that Paul and Pat Churchland are eliminativists with respect to conscious awareness, but this is dead wrong - they are eliminativists with respect to the propositional attitudes but reductionists when it comes to consciousness. Paul has done quite a bit of work on the neural mechanisms of qualia.

With respect to the neuroscientific consensus, I'll quote from a fairly standard textbook, Brain and Behavior by Bob Garrett. "Most, thought not all, neuroscientists believe that we should think of the mind...[as] simply the collection of things that the brain does, such as thinking, sensing, planning, and feeling. But when we think, sense, plan, and feel, we get the compelling impression that there is a mind behind it all, guiding what we do. Most neuroscientists say this is just an illusion, that the sense of mind is nothing more than the awareness of what our brain is doing." This viewpoint does not eliminate awareness, but seeks to reductively explain it as a brain process.

>I think that you are mistaking the search for the neurological correlates of consciousness with reductionism.

These tend to go hand in hand. If one thinks that qualia are brain processes, one wants to know how these processes work in the brain.

>To find such correlates is not to reduce and is perfectly compatible, even complementary, with a whole host of positions including dualism, pansychism, and even idealism.

Logically compatible? Sure. They're also logically compatible with the possibility that the mind is operated by the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But the sense among reductionists and the neuroscientific community is that positions such as dualism and idealism are explanatorily unhelpful. To take another historical example, people used to believe that the planets were pushed through the sky by invisible angels (seriously). This is no longer believed because we now have laws of planetary motion that account for what we observe. What do you say to the philosopher who says that the laws of planetary motion are perfectly compatible with the angel theory? Probably just that we have no need for the angelic hypothesis. It is arguably non-falsifiable, and clearly gratuitous. Once you figure out how things work, magical theories just become uninteresting.

Well I gave you a link. I suppose it flew over your head because:

> requires the neural network itself to grow

That's not how a brain works. Where did you hear about a neural network, because you seem a little confused about what a neural network is. A neural network is a computer model based on how a brain might form ideas. It is not a human brain.

When you say "Brain cells are like that to network & become able to recognize faces, etc." (sic) it's hard to tell what you are saying because you are so inarticulate. I suppose you are trying to make some statement on how neural pathways are formed?

Your statement doesn't take into account how hormones like adrenaline, testosterone or estrogen influence the formation of neural pathways. It doesn't talk about dopaminergic projections that control the formation of neural pathways based on pre-existing inherited structure.

Neural pathways are guided by the design of the brain itself. For example Brocca's area in the brain is where the human brain conjugates language. In your simplistic statement -there would be no need for the brain to compartmentalize because apparently there is no pre-existing influence of genes on brain development.

I've provided several links now.

> where have YOU been getting your information from?

I already gave you several links. It's obvious that you don't know anything about this. So here's several books that you should read before you show your general ignorance of the topic:

http://www.amazon.com/Human-Brain-Book-Rita-Carter/dp/1465416021/

http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Human-Behavior-Darwinian-Perspectives/dp/0262533049


http://www.amazon.com/Not-Genes-Alone-Transformed-Evolution/dp/0226712125/

I'm a very rational person myself, so this should be a fruitful conversation. While culture plays an important in the development of many characteristics, it lacks the ancestral ties that determine who we are and how we react to such a culture. I'm sure you're familiar with nature vs. nurture debates and the heritability of traits such as intelligence for instance.

Scientific studies show that siblings adopted at birth, raised in the same environment, have no more similarity in IQ than that of strangers. It's genetic. Personality traits are very easily studied in identical twins switched at birth, even though each of the twins are raised in very different environments they maintain an astonishing similarity. If we have studies that scientifically prove the relationship of intelligence, personality, creative ability etc.. to genetics, how do you find the disposition to a certain spirituality not genetically linked?

There are many well-written psychology books out there that discuss behavioral genetics, you can buy this one shipped to your door for under 15 bucks.