Explore more in Culture, Values, and History

Book excerpts

What is the Patterning Instinct? Is it unique to humans?​

How culture sculpts our brains – before we even know it

Are we "ensnared in an inescapable web" of culture?

Videos

The Conundrum of Admiral Zheng He and Christopher Columbus

Humanity's Changing Metaphors of Nature

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Culture, Values, and History:
 Recommended Further Reading

Perspectives on History

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years (London: Vintage, 2005).
Highly Recommended: A ground-breaking book that broke through disciplinary barriers to transform conventional thinking about history.

Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: Harper, 2015).
A highly popular overview that covers the entire array of human history, exploring big questions about the human experience..

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2009).
Perhaps the first cognitive history: a broad narrative of history seen through the lens of cognitive science, based on the theory of the right/left hemisphere divided brain.

Robert N. Bellah, Religion In Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic To the Axial Age (Harvard University Press, 2011).
This magisterial work embraces an interdisciplinary and science-based approach to history, weaving cognitive science, anthropology, and evolutionary psychology into a narrative of how early cultures tried to make sense of their world.


Perspectives on Culture and Values

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003). 
Highly Recommended: Pioneering the field of cognitive linguistics, it shows how virtually all abstract ideas are formed as metaphors from the scaffolding of more tangible experiences.

Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: Norton, 1997).
Highly Recommended for its analysis of the central role of the prefrontal cortex in the evolution of human cognition and symbolic thought.

Patricia K. Kuhl, “A New View of Language Acquisition,” PNAS 97, no. 22 (2000): 11850–11857.
Recommended for its powerful insights into how the human patterning instinct develops in pre-linguistic infants.

Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010).
A modern reassessment of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis incorporating the latest research findings.

Hajime Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: India-China-Tibet-Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1964).
An insightful comparison and contrast of different Asian styles of thought from a rare scholar with deep and extensive cross-cultural expertise.
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Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why (New York: Free Press, 2004).
A fascinating exploration of the roots and current manifestations of the contrasting thought patterns of East Asia and the West.
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