Neuroscience

Peter Godfrey-Smith

In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how subjective experience crept into being?how nature became aware of itself. As Godfrey-Smith stresses, it is a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared. Tracking the mind’s fitful development, Godfrey-Smith shows how unruly clumps of seaborne cells began living together and became capable of sensing, acting, and signaling. As these primitive organisms became more entangled with others, they grew more complicated. The first nervous systems evolved, probably in ancient relatives of jellyfish; later on, the cephalopods, which began as inconspicuous mollusks, abandoned their shells and rose above the ocean floor, searching for prey and acquiring the greater intelligence needed to do so. Taking an independent route, mammals and birds later began their own evolutionary journeys.

Business

Gabriel Weinberg & Justin Mares

Most startups don't fail because they can't build a product. Most startups fail because they can't get traction. Startup advice tends to be a lot of platitudes repackaged with new buzzwords, but Traction is something else entirely.

As Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares learned from their own experiences, building a successful company is hard. For every startup that grows to the point where it can go public or be profitably acquired, hundreds of others sputter and die. Smart entrepreneurs know that the key to success isn't the originality of your offering, the brilliance of your team, or how much money you raise. It's how consistently you can grow and acquire new customers (or, for a free service, users). That's called traction, and it makes everything else easier - fund-raising, hiring, press, partnerships, acquisitions. Talk is cheap, but traction is hard evidence that you're on the right path.

Traction will teach you the 19 channels you can use to build a customer base and how to pick the right ones for your business. It draws on interviews with more than 40 successful founders, including Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Alexis Ohanian (reddit), Paul English (Kayak), and Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot). You'll learn, for example, how to:

- Find and use offline ads and other channels your competitors probably aren't using
- Get targeted media coverage that will help you reach more customers
- Boost the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns by automating staggered sets of prompts and updates
- Improve your search engine rankings and advertising through online tools and research

Weinberg and Mares know that there's no one-size-fits-all solution; every startup faces unique challenges and will benefit from a blend of these 19 traction channels. They offer a three-step framework (called Bullseye) to figure out which ones will work best for your business.

Neuroscience

NeuroTechX

The Neurotech Primer is an effort of the NeuroTechX community to provide an introduction to the world of neurotechnology and the surrounding ecosystem. Readers will get the opportunity to learn about a variety of different devices and how they are able to either stimulate or read the brain. This book covers 11 different types of technologies, as well as its history, companies and key players that have helped to drive this field forward.

Neuroscience

Tan Le

Brain science is at the dawn of a new era—and the technologies emerging as a result could forever alter what it means to be human.

Welcome to what tech pioneer and inventor Tan Le calls "the NeuroGeneration." It will blow your mind.

The human brain is perhaps the most powerful and mysterious arrangement of matter in the known universe. New discoveries that unravel this mystery and let us tap into this power offer almost limitless potential—the ability to reshape ourselves and our thought processes, to improve our health and extend our lives, and to enhance and augment the ways we interact with the world around us. It may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but it is quickly becoming reality.

In The NeuroGeneration, award-winning inventor Tan Le explores exciting advancements in brain science and neurotechnology that are revolutionizing the way we think, work, and heal. Join Le as she criss-crosses the globe, introducing the brilliant neurotech innovators and neuroscientists at the frontiers of brain enhancement. Along the way, she shares incredible stories from individuals whose lives are already being transformed by their inventions—an endurance racer paralyzed in a fall, who now walks thanks to neural stimulation and an exoskeleton; a man who drives a race car with his mind; even a color-blind "cyborg" whose brain implant allows him to "hear" colors.

The NeuroGeneration reveals the dizzying array of emerging technologies—including cranial stimulation that makes you learn faster, an artificial hippocampus that restores lost memories, and neural implants that aim to help us keep up with or even outpace artificial intelligence—that promise to alter the brain in unprecedented ways, unlocking human potential we never dreamed possible.

Le also explores how these futuristic innovations will impact our world, disrupt the way we do business, upend healthcare as we know it, and remake our lives in wondrous and unexpected ways. As fascinating as it is timely, The NeuroGeneration offers a thrilling glimpse of the future of our species, and how changing our brains can change human life as we know it.

Life / Philosophy

Kenneth O. Stanley, Joel Lehman

Why does modern life revolve around objectives? From how science is funded, to improving how children are educated -- and nearly everything in-between -- our society has become obsessed with a seductive illusion: that greatness results from doggedly measuring improvement in the relentless pursuit of an ambitious goal. In Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, Stanley and Lehman begin with a surprising scientific discovery in artificial intelligence that leads ultimately to the conclusion that the objective obsession has gone too far. They make the case that great achievement can't be bottled up into mechanical metrics; that innovation is not driven by narrowly focused heroic effort; and that we would be wiser (and the outcomes better) if instead we whole-heartedly embraced serendipitous discovery and playful creativity.

Controversial at its heart, yet refreshingly provocative, this book challenges readers to consider life without a destination and discovery without a compass.