David Brooks & Five Neuroscience Books

He was the one who nudged me into reading neuroscience. Growing up, I wasn't fortunate enough to be under the tutelage of a great teacher and I guess, psychologically I have been longing to find one. I feel like poor man's Ekalavya, finding and embracing  teachers where ever I could. I am so grateful for Brooks for opening up new epistemological doors in my life.

Here's is in an old interview with him, explaining his reasons for reading neuroscience and the five books he recommends will help re-wringing the circuits under the skull.

"So how does a political commentator end up at neuroscience?

It grew out of my normal day work, which obviously involves politics, but also human capital development. Why, for example, 30 per cent of high school students in the United States drop out, why we got Iraq so wrong. A whole series of policy failures which, in my view, grew out of getting human nature wrong. So I began studying the issue of why so many people drop out of high school, when all the economic incentives are in favour of going to high school. And that took me into the work of an economist called Jim Heckman, at the University of Chicago, who focuses on the first few years of life. And it turns out that already, at age four, you can predict with about 77 per cent accuracy who is going to graduate from high school – based on childhood patterns and things like that. So that got me involved in how these childhood patterns form, which got me involved in brain science, which got me involved in cognitive science…
So, as it’s the one that got you into all this, do you want to tell me a bit about Heckman’s book?

It’s called Inequality in America and it’s by James Heckman and Alan Krueger. Krueger is an economist at Princeton, and presents an opposing point of view. But Heckman’s focus is on what he calls non-cognitive skills. And, basically, cognitive skills are things like IQ, things we’re used to counting. What he calls non-cognitive skills are what the rest of us would call character or personality. And the name non-cognitive is very misleading, because they are cognitive, they are just not conscious, and also not easily quantifiable. So one of the things he looks at is people who, instead of going to high school get GED degrees, which are high school equivalency degrees, degrees that people take if they haven’t been able to go to high school. And often they get test results that are just as high as people who do get high school degrees. But they do much worse in life. In fact, they do no better than high school dropouts. And that’s because they don’t have persistence, they don’t show up at jobs, they don’t have self-control – this is on average, of course. And so his main point, which is obvious to everybody – but not so much to economists – is that having things like persistence and self-control are really important. So where do those things come from? They’re sort of a black box."