Books to go further

The core book on the theory of constructed emotion: why emotions are constructed rather than set off.

Short and accessible for parents: the brain predicts, manages the body’s budget and is shaped with others.

How the predictive brain shapes what we see, feel and do, with many everyday examples.

Experience as a ‘controlled hallucination’: the body and world perceived from predictions.

Why most people recover, and what flexibility looks like in practice.

Grief and loss through research: more resilience than people thought.

How memory and thinking work, and what that changes in teaching and studying.

The best accessible introduction to complex systems.

Two ways of seeing human nature, and why they change everything that is proposed.

Trade-offs, incentives and ‘and then what?’, explained without formulas.

How to study and learn from what is known about memory and attention: retrieval, spacing and the trap of familiarity.

Thought, emotion, motivation and body as one interacting system.

The technical textbook on active inference, for those who want the formal model.

Attachment and internal working models across life, written for professionals.

The fullest account of predictive processing, with body and action at the centre.

How the mind works if the brain is a machine for reducing prediction error.

Allostasis explained by the person who coined the term: the body regulates by predicting.

Self-organisation and attractors applied to brain and behaviour.

Development as a dynamic system, not a programme that unfolds.

Culture, body and brain together, against reductive accounts of distress.

A case study of how psychological categories change the people they describe.

The foundations of complexity science, by the president of the Santa Fe Institute.

How constraints create coherence, from the body to society.

Tipping points and the signs that come before them.

The extended mind: thinking with the body, tools and other people.

How dispersed knowledge and feedback make decisions better or worse.

Includes ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’: knowledge is spread across many people and no one holds all of it. A reasoning tool for teams.