Human traits are a product of natural selection—and the story of how we have evolved explains many of our psychological quirks today. Chris Paley, author of Unthink and Beyond Bad, recommends five of the best evolutionary psychology books—and explains how experimental data might finally get to the bottom of the question of free will.

Not every culture has a word for ‘fear.’ Smiling was an invention of the Middle Ages. There’s a lot that will surprise you about the way we process emotions, says the neuroscientist and psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett. Here she picks five books that illustrate our understanding of how emotions work.

The ‘hard problem’ of consciousness – of how the physical matter of the brain produces the psychological phenomenon of consciousness – has dogged psychologists and neuroscientists for decades. But what if we’ve been posing the question incorrectly all this time? The psychologist Susan Blackmore discusses five key texts that tackle this quicksilver concept.

Neuroscience has banished the problem of dualism—the ‘ghost in the machine’ mulled over by philosophists since the time of Descartes, says the renowned cognitive neuroscientist Professor Dick Passingham. Here, he chooses five books that signified major breakthroughs in this fast-advancing field.

“Time is an illusion,” wrote Douglas Adams. “Lunchtime, doubly so.” It is certainly a subjective experience, agrees the psychologist and author Marc Wittmann—as any drug user or meditation expert can tell you. Here he picks five books that unpick our perception of the passage of time.

We live at a time of unprecedented insight into the workings of our own minds. We can use this knowledge to improve both ourselves and humanity, argues the neuroscientist.

Existential anxiety drives our lives but most of us are too frightened to think about it, says psychologist and author Sheldon Solomon. He chooses the best books to get a better understanding of our fear of death.

The linguist argues that all language has a basis in culture and explains how Chomsky is like Freud: crucial, but crucially wrong. He chooses five of the best books on linguistics.

Neuroscientist Sebastian Seung introduces us to the concept of the connectome, the ever-changing map of connections between the brain’s neurons that makes each of us who we are.

Our TV screens may be full of news about war and crime, but this masks a fall in historical terms in the number of violent deaths that’s nothing short of astonishing, says Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. He tells us how and why this happened. (This interview was updated 17 December, 2020, to include books that have come out since it was published in 2011)

Autism expert Simon Baron Cohen tells us about the links between empathy and language, and says our acts of cruelty to one another have at their root a failure to empathise.

The Research Fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL, discusses aspects of the relationship between the mind and the brain. Recommends books on autism, the allure of neuroscience, consciousness and maths