“The Psychology Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained” by Nigel Benson, Joannah Ginsburg, and Voula Grand
This is a complete big-picture book about psychology.
First, it provides the context of the evolution of psychology, from ancient Greece to modern era. It shows its many different branches and the many thinkers with different approaches and even conflicting ideas. Then it explains the many overlaps with other disciplines, such as with medicine, physiology, neuroscience, computer science, anthropology, sociology, education, politics, economy and the law.
The book then goes down straight to business. It covers a wide range of topics in psychology, such as multiple personality disorder, Pavlovian conditioning, the fascinating world of the unconscious mind, the inferiority complex and superiority complex, the psychology of adopted child, on self hatred, conditions of worth, on giving meaning to suffering, on accepting our negative emotions rather than repressing them, understanding schizophrenia, Stoic-based therapies, or how unfinished tasks have different status in memory.
Moreover, there is the implementations of psychology in advertising, the magic number 7 in memory, the filter theory, memory retrieval clues, how events and emotion are stored in memory together, on flow state, the fascinating forensic psychology, the benefits of mindfulness meditation, nature vs nurture in behaviour, flashbulb memory, just-world hypothesis, cognitive dissonance, the now famous Stanford Prison experiment, the contextualisation of trauma, the pros and cons regarding catharsis effect, on violence on video game and TV, on autism, introvert-extrover spectrum, and back to multiple personality disorder at the end of the book to make it a full circle.
Along the way, it answers some of the key questions on psychology, such as how ordinary people are capable of cruelty when under pressure to conform, is intelligence hereditary, how a cat and a mouse can live peacefully if conditioned from babies, the explanation behind obsessive compulsive behaviour, how our preference is not rational but can be conditioned, what happens when you put good people in an evil place, the association between genius and psychotic temperament, and of course the analysis of the marshmallow test that has been cited in almost every self help books.
The book generates all of this from the best of the best minds in the field, from Sigmund Freud, to Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, Viktor Frankl, Daniel Kahneman, Steven Pinker, Stanley Milgram, to the influential Carl Rogers, Albert Ellis, Virginia Satir, Bluma Zeigarnik, Endel Tulving, Donald Hebb, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Albert Bandura, to the controversial ones like Timothy Leary, non psychologists such as Alan Turing and Noam Chomsky, to my new favourites Fritz Perls and Erich Fromm.
All in all, this is a book about theses of the human minds, that have been tested, re-tested, debunked, few buried and got resurrected, others debated and still inconclusive, while some became world changing. And this book shows them all in a concise manner.
THE CHAOS THEORY 