A list of books that have had an impact on my life

Fiction
Isaac Asimov: I, Robot, The End of Eternity, Foundation Series
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange
Arthur C. Clarke: 2001
Michael Crichton: The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man, Congo, Sphere, Jurassic Park, Rising Sun, Disclosure, Air-frame, Timeline, Prey, State of Fear, Next
A.C. Crispin: Yesterday's Son, Time for Yesterday
Greg Cox: The Eugenics Wars
Charles Dickens: Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities
Diane Duane: My Enemy, My Ally
Alexandre Dumas: The Three Musketeers
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
William Golding: Lord of the Flies
Joseph Heller: Catch-22
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon
Steven King: The Stand, Secret Windows
Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird
C.S. Lewis: Out of the Silent Planet, The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia
Herman Melville: Moby-Dick
George Orwell: Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Chuck Palahniuk: Survivor, Invisible Monsters, Choke, Rant, Diary
Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens: Memory Prime, Millennium
John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men
William Shatner: Tek Series
Jules Verne: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Kurt Vonnegut: Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Sirens of Titan, The Breakfast of Champions
John Vornholt: Genesis Wave
H. G. Wells: The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man

Non-Fiction
Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex
Maxwell Bennett: Neuroscience and Philosophy
Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion, The Greatest Show on Earth
Norman Doidge: The Brain That Changes Itself
David Epstein: The "Sports Gene"
Cordelia Fine: Delusions of Gender
Betty Friedan: The Feminine Mystique
Michael S. Gazzaniga: Who's in charge
Henry Gee: The Accidental Species
Malcolm Gladwell: David and Goliath
James Gleick: Chaos
Brian Greene: The Elegant Universe, The Hidden Reality
Stephen Hawking: A Brief History of Time, The Grand Design
Sam Harris: The Moral Landscape, Letter to a Christian Nation, Lying, Free Will
Christopher Hitchens: God Is Not Great, Arguably, Mortality
bell hooks: Feminism Is for Everybody
Friedrich Nietzsche: The Antichrist
Steven Pinker: The Blank Slate, The Stuff of Thought
Matt Ridley: Genome
Carl Sagan: Pale Blue Dot, The Demon Haunted World, Cosmos
Kim Sterelny: Dawkins vs. Gould

"Cognitive control" in older adults has been shown to be malleable through a series of video game based assessments

A study published today in Nature, "Video game training enhances cognitive control in older adults", has shown that age related deficits in neural signatures of cognitive control can be trained and changed through multitasking training.

"These findings highlight the robust plasticity of the prefrontal cognitive control system in the ageing brain, and provide the first evidence, to our knowledge, of how a custom-designed video game can be used to assess cognitive abilities across the lifespan, evaluate underlying neural mechanisms, and serve as a powerful tool for cognitive enhancement."

The study which contrasted the effects of this training between a control group of 60-85 year old and 20 year old adults, showed gains that lasted up to 6 months.

In some ways this helps us better understand how neuroplasticity can be used in changing certain cognitive functions of the brain, even late in life. In the past it was shown that cognitive function may "peak" at specific points in a person's life, normally 20 - 29, and begin to decline at around age 70, as found in "Executive functions and the frontal lobes : a lifespan perspective". This study shows that even late in life it is possible for some to develop better cognitive skills, with practice. This also adds to the hypothesis that many cognitive functions are not hardwired, and can be changed through environmental interaction.

Recently a friend showed me the TED talk by video game designer Jane McGonigal, "Gaming can make a better world", in which she described how gaming helped her recover from a serious concussion, and how others can use gaming to improve their lives. Another such instance of gaming that utilizes plasticity is Luminosity, which boasts the ability to help those who use their online game increase both in memory and attention. In the past neuroscience has been used to help patients recovery from neurological disorders, or even helped the blind read braille much more quickly than normal. It is clear that neuroplasticity is a very important tool that can be utilized to better shape how we consciously interact with the world.

Peer reviewed study on PLOS ONE confirms through fmri of whole-brain lateralization (as compared to past studies of local specialized areas which this refutes) that the Left-Brain vs. Right-Brain Hypothesis is false - including between genders.

According to the study, "An Evaluation of the Left-Brain vs. Right-Brain Hypothesis with Resting State Functional Connectivity Magnetic Resonance Imaging", there is no hemisphere specialization when tested by fmri of whole brain lateralization, including left brain right brain orientation between genders. This means that we as humans do not have specialized usage from either hemisphere of the brain. While major functions tend to be found in specific areas, there is no bias as to which side has more connectivity through lateralization.

This also means that women are no more "left brain oriented" than men are "right brain oriented", which has been suggested and supported by past studies of local specialized areas in each hemisphere.

"...[W]e saw no differences in functional lateralization with gender. These results differ from prior studies in which significant gender differences in functional connectivity lateralization were reported. This may be due to differing methods between the two studies, including the use of short-range connectivity in one of the former reports and correction for structural asymmetries in this report. A prior study performing graph-theoretical analysis of resting state functional connectivity data using a predefined parcellation of the brain also found no significant effects of hemispheric asymmetry with gender, but reported that males tended to be more locally efficient in their right hemispheres and females tended to be more locally efficient in their left hemispheres."

"...[W]e demonstrate that left- and right-lateralized networks are homogeneously stronger among a constellation of hubs in the left and right hemispheres, but that such connections do not result in a subject-specific global brain lateralization difference that favors one network over the other (i.e. left-brained or right-brained). Rather, lateralized brain networks appear to show local correlation across subjects with only weak changes from childhood into early adulthood and very small if any differences with gender."

I saw this in the news a few days ago and didn't realize the significance of it until finishing chapter two in Michael Gazzaniga's book "Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain" where he describes the first study he conducted on left brain right brain localization in patients who had epilepsy, whose seizures were alleviated by the severing of the corpus callosum. The Wikipedia page on "Split-brain" lists that more research is being done on hemisphere specialization to confirm left brain right brain theories, and the Wikipedia page for "Lateralization of brain function" claims that men are "more lateralized" than women. I'm trying to make a list of Wikipedia pages that probably need to be updated, and I'm working on re-writing sections on both "Split-brain" and "Laterlalization of brain function".