That Neuroscience Guy - Neuroscience Books to Read in 2026

Episode Date: January 5, 2026

In today's episode of That Neuroscience Guy, we discuss the best books to read in 2026 to learn more about neuroscience. 

Hi, my name's Olyle Kirk Olson, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. I've done this once before on the podcast, and it's something I get asked a lot, which is, you know, what should I read? You know, like if you're interested in neuroscience, what should you read? And it's a tricky question, because if you want, you know, proper academic knowledge, and, you know, I want to air quote that, then you probably want to read textbooks. and academic papers. The problem with textbooks and academic papers is they're basically not that

readable. And in fact, a colleague of mine, Paul Zaire and I have had a quest for a long time to try to make academic papers more readable. Unfortunately, it's a quest that I don't know if we're winning. There's a small subset of academics that know that this is a problem, but I'd say the vast majority of my peers, think that we should keep writing the way we write, which is not great. But if you were going to get a textbook, there's one that I would have to recommend. Now, it's not perfect, but if you truly want the gold standard reference book for neuroscience, it would be Principles of Neuroscience by Candel. And that would be the book that I would say you should read. So on today's podcast, I'm going to give you Dr. Kay's Neuroscience Essentials

reading list, the 2026 version. So principles of neuroscience, Eric Candell, an amazing book. It's a textbook, but it's got everything. Like it literally, it's massive. When you see it, it's ridiculous. It's, you know, 1,000 plus pages, if not 2,000. It's this big, thing that it's look a massive brick it weighs a ton very hard to carry around but if you are looking for that go-to textbook to look things up principles and neuroscience candell all right now we're off textbooks and academic papers we'll go to things that are a little bit more readable the one that I've read recently and it's someone that I have a lot of respect for I've met chatted to is Matt Walker's

book which is why we sleep as you know from listening to the podcast I'm a big fan of sleep I believe and I don't believe I know or at least I guess I believe but based on data that we've collected in my own lab I believe that sleep is the single biggest predictor of brain health and brain function and Matt Walker does a great job of talking about the importance of sleep and how as a society we've really come to undermine sleep and the impact of undermining sleep so if you were going to read one book in 2026, that would be my recommendation, Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. And I would really listen to what he says, because we all struggle with sleep. Like,

you know, the percentage of people that actually are getting the correct amount of sleep and feel rested on any given day are amazing. And one of the things that he pointed out to me once was the gold standard test is you should be able to wake up about the same time every single day without an alarm clock feeling rested and not needing caffeine to jumpstart your day. Now, how many people is that a true statement? You know, I've struggled to try to go to bed the same time every night, and I largely successful, and I don't really consume caffeine, and I roughly do this, but not perfectly.

Matthew Walker, why we sleep. Kind of related to that. One I just finished reading the other day is Michael Pollan. I think he's a fantastic writer. In defensive food, it's not really a neuroscience book, but in defensive food, if you're interested in diet and food, I think it's a really fresh take on things because we live in an era where there's always a new diet.

Everyone's trying some kind of a diet, and that's been going on for a long time. But I think Michael Pollan takes a very refreshing look at it. That's not the book that's related to my reading list. His book, Caffeine, came out last year, I believe. It's interesting. And it's interesting from a neuroscience perspective, because he really walks you through the impact of caffeine on the brain.

What I find interesting with it is, you know, I finished the book going, is this guy really pro-cafine or anti-caffeine? And I'm not sure whether he, you know, whether he knows. But it's really, I found it very informative. You know, someone that doesn't drink coffee. Yep, true story. Never had a cup of coffee in my life. The, you know, there's parts of it I agreed with.

But, you know, I didn't realize all of the evidence that shows that caffeine has a positive impact on some aspects of brain function. The one that got it for me is it does, he does mention Matthew Walker, is the disruption that caffeine does to sleep. and I'll give you one bit of trivia that I didn't realize. I knew that you're not supposed to consume caffeine later in the day, but there is a claim in there, which I looked up, which is the half-life of caffeine is 12 hours. So basically, you should never consume caffeine because it's always going to impact your sleep.

Because we've been talking a lot about decision-making, I thought I'd run through three books, just to supplement decision-making podcast episode, The obvious one is Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow. He goes over the whole System 1, System 2 argument in a lot of detail. It's very well written. It is not everything you wanted to know about decision making, but it definitely does an amazing job of the high-level stuff,

and specifically with regard to System 1, System 2, our gut hunch in analytical systems. So thinking fast, thinking slow, consider that a must read for 2026 if you're interested in decision-making. There's two books that complement that. So I would say there's three books that you want to read if you really want to get a good take on decision-making. I'll give you the hard one first. It's a book by a guy named Paul Glimcher. He's an excellent researcher at New York University, and he's one of the founders of neuroeconomics. And I've talked about neuroeconomics. It's basically

the science of decision-making. It's an integration of theory from economics, neuroscience, and psychology, hence the name. But he has a book, Decisions Uncertainty in the Brain. If you want the sort of the more technical side of decision-making, I would strongly recommend you read that book. It's an excellent overview of the stuff that we've covered, you know, value systems, expected values, explore, exploit. He gets into the, you know, into the whole system one, system two stuff. He does touch on topics like risk and uncertainty. And it's a very good nuts and bolts book on the science of decision making. So it's called Decisions, Uncertainty and the Brain, the Science of Neuro Economics. It's by Paul W. Glimshaw. Don't get the

textbook. There's a textbook you'll find that he wrote that's purple. It's a good textbook, but it's a textbook. It's incredibly technical. Not a fan of it. Definitely. Well, I'm a fan of it if I was going to teach a graduate course in neuroeconomics, but it's in terms of a light read to introduce yourself to decision-making. The textbook is not that. The book I mentioned is that. Now, to give you the other side of decision-making, and it's also, I call it a bit of a classic, and it's definitely an easier read. A Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, I would tell you, with my professional opinion, take it with a grain of salt, because this is a book about systems. one effectively. The core thesis is that our gut hunch decisions sometimes are the correct ones.

So you could easily sort of say we should always listen to system two. Everything we do should be analytical. We should always review our choices that we are going to make and just go with the analytical system. Well, that's not what Malcolm Gladwell argues in blink. He talks about all of the times when your gut hunch system is possibly correct. And there are definitely times when you want to go with your gut-hunged system. One of the ones I always remember is Air France flight landing at Toronto, where the pilots were forced to just rely on what was hardwired, and they landed a plane where they had taken the time to think it through, the plane might have crashed.

So blinked by Malcolm Gladwell, it's getting a bit dated, but it's still a good overview of that system one, gut-hunge decision-making system. one I read recently, which I really enjoyed. There's a lot of books that try to cover it all, like, you know, a whole tour of the brain and all of the brain systems and what they do. But one that I thought was a good read, has the title of The Human Mind, A Brief Tour of Everything We Know, it's by Paul Bloom. I really enjoyed reading it. I thought it was well written, covers all of the major pieces. You know, when you do the survey kind of things, you never, you know, you sacrifice depth. That's just the way it works. You can't do both. But I thought Paul

Bloom did an excellent job of a tour of the brain. So the human mind, a brief tour of everything we know. Put that on your reading list. And the last one, I mentioned this the first time I talked about books, but I always bring it up because it's actually the book that really made me fall in love with cognitive neuroscience. Phantoms in the Brain by Ramachandran. It's getting harder and harder to find, but I just checked on Amazon, just to make. make sure I wasn't recommending something you couldn't find. But I would go with Phantoms in the Brain by Ramosandran. You know, it's an interesting book.

It's basically what he does is he walks you through these clinical cases of people that have some really interesting issues. You know, one of the best chapters I think I've ever read was about the Capgras delusion. And I've talked about it before, so I won't go there. And if you're interested in this, what's interesting is the BBC actually made us, series about Phantoms in the Brain a while ago and most of the patients in the book were interviewed and you can see their issues in, you know, in terms of video. So if you don't want to read Phantoms in the Brain, I would still recommend it. My only knock on this, and I'm sorry Dr.

Ramachandran, but the chapter on Qualia, I still don't understand and I've tried to read it about 30 times. But the rest of the book is outstanding. And of course there is this BBC video series that highlights these people. And to see these people, it's one thing to read about them, but to actually see them and interact with them is pretty crazy. Actually, one of the people in the video, Diane, I've actually met before and done some research with. And when you actually see these deficits right in front of you, they tell you a lot about the brain. And that's actually a big part of neuroscience. You find people that have damage to a specific part of the brain, and you find out what they can and cannot do, and you draw conclusions about the part of the

brain that's damaged and what it does based on what they can't do. These are called patient studies, and that's what this book is. It's a series of patient studies that inform us about different aspects of brain function. So there you go. A reading list for 2026. Hopefully you find those books interesting. I know they're ones that I treasure and I've enjoyed reading. Okay, don't forget the website, that neuroscience guy.com, links to Etsy, our merch, Patreon, where you can support us directly. Remember a dollar a week, $5 a week, it all goes to grad students in the Krig Olson Lab. They use the money to buy Kraft and Inche, man. That's all I can tell you.

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