Further Reading — Chapter 3: Perception and Consciousness

Annotated resources for deeper exploration. Items marked with ★ are especially recommended as starting points.

Accessible Books on Perception

★ Chabris, C., & Simons, D. (2010). The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us. Crown Publishers. By the researchers who conducted the original gorilla experiment, this book explores inattentional blindness, change blindness, and other perceptual limitations in accessible, engaging prose. Demonstrates how confidently wrong our intuitions about our own perception are. A very enjoyable read with significant practical implications.

Ramachandran, V. S., & Blakeslee, S. (1998). Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind. William Morrow. Ramachandran's exploration of neurological curiosities — phantom limbs, visual neglect, anosognosia — that illuminate how the brain constructs experience. Beautifully written and full of insight into the constructive nature of perception and the flexibility of the brain's models of reality.

★ Eagleman, D. (2015). The Brain: The Story of You. Pantheon Books. Eagleman's accessible, richly illustrated account of how the brain constructs experience. The opening chapter on time perception and the final chapter on consciousness are particularly relevant to this chapter's themes.

On Attention

James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology (Vol. 1). Henry Holt. [Chapter 11: Attention] William James's famous treatment of attention — "Everyone knows what attention is..." — is still one of the best introductions to the concept. Available free online in many formats. Remarkably readable for 19th-century writing.

Posner, M. I., & Petersen, S. E. (1990). The attention system of the human brain. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 13, 25–42. The foundational neuroscience paper on attention networks. Technical but influential; the conceptual framework remains central to attention research.

On Consciousness

★ Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200–219. The paper that named the "hard problem" of consciousness. Dense philosophy but accessible enough for a motivated non-specialist. The distinction between easy and hard problems is made with unusual clarity.

Dehaene, S. (2014). Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts. Viking. A leading cognitive neuroscientist's account of consciousness from a "global workspace" theoretical perspective. Less philosophical than Chalmers, more neuroscientific. Engages seriously with the question of how conscious vs. unconscious processing differs, with elegant research.

★ Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row. The original account of flow states — complete absorption, effortless action, altered time perception. Csikszentmihalyi's own research and accessible writing. We return to this extensively in Chapters 27 and 28, but it is worth beginning early.

On Social Perception

Ambady, N., & Rosenthal, R. (1993). Half a minute: Predicting teacher evaluations from thin slices of nonverbal behavior and physical attractiveness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(3), 431–441. The foundational thin-slices paper. Accessible empirical work demonstrating that brief behavioral samples contain surprising amounts of predictive information — but also (by implication) that first impressions carry real consequences.

Todorov, A. (2017). Face Value: The Irresistible Influence of First Impressions. Princeton University Press. Princeton social psychologist Alexander Todorov's research on how faces shape our perceptions — of competence, trustworthiness, and character — in ways that are fast, automatic, and often inaccurate. Directly relevant to the halo effect and social perception limitations discussed in this chapter.

On Unconscious Processing

Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist, 54(7), 462–479. A landmark review paper on how much of everyday social behavior is automatically — unconsciously — driven. Well-written and accessible. Some specific findings have been subject to replication challenges, but the general framework remains influential.

Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (1995). Implicit social cognition: Attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes. Psychological Review, 102(1), 4–27. The foundational paper on implicit cognition — mental processing that operates without intention or awareness. Introduces the concept of implicit attitudes that may differ from explicit (stated) attitudes. Foundational background for Chapter 36 (Prejudice and Stereotyping).

Philosophical Perspectives

Metzinger, T. (2003). Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. MIT Press. A rigorous, challenging philosophical account of consciousness as a representational process — the brain's model of itself. Dense but rewarding for readers who want to go deeper into the philosophy of consciousness.

Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435–450. The famous philosophical paper that crystallized the "hard problem" before Chalmers named it. Accessible to non-philosophers; 15 pages. A classic of philosophy of mind worth reading in full.