Do you worry you might be a psychopath? If so, then you’re almost certainly not one. This is just one of the interesting findings Jon Ronson presents in his new book, which looks at psychopathy from a variety of angles. With training from one of the world’s leading experts on the topic, Ronson seeks out psychopaths of different stripes—from a terrorist to a prominent CEO—to see what makes them tick. Despite the disturbing topic, Ronson manages to make the reader laugh, cringe, and learn all at once.

Often, we think of our conscious thoughts as the major players in our brains. But in Incognito, neuroscientist David Eagleman makes the case that our conscious minds are out of the loop in most of what we do. Our instincts, our desires, our motor functions—many of the things we think, feel, and accomplish happen in neural sub-routines outside our conscious control. “We are not at the center of ourselves,” Mr.

In Braintrust, Patricia Churchland, a pioneer in the emerging field of neurophilosophy, examines the biology of the brain to find the roots of morality. She argues that moral values derive from the human impulse to preserve people allied to them, beginning with their children and reaching out from there. According to Churchland, creating these allies is facilitated by oxytocin, a brain (and body) chemical that allows for trust by inhibiting the stress response.

In The Mind's Eye, Oliver Sacks's eleventh book, he delves into issues of perception, illustrating his points with a mix of case stories, personal experiences, and essays. As with his previous books, he examines a handful of rare and fascinating disorders, exploring how profoundly they affect the patients—and the creative ways in which they work to adapt to living with them.

Want to learn how to improve your memory from a man who made it a life goal? Check out Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein. In the book, you'll find out how Foer went from being an average Joe to a finalist in the U.S.A. Memory Championships. With great content on the history of memorization, insights into how memory works in the brain, and techniques memory masters use, the book provides a wealth of fun, compelling information you'll remember long afterward reading it.

We usually feature nonfiction books in this newsletter, but this time it's a pair of fiction books: Still Alice and Left Neglected by neuroscientist Lisa Genova. Each centers on a character with a life-changing cognitive impairment. In Still Alice, it's a 50-something woman with early onset Alzheimer's disease. In Left Neglected, it's a young executive and mother with hemispatial neglect.

In The Tell-Tale Brain, world-famous neurologist V.S. Ramachandran draws on compelling cases of strange and unusual brain function to shed light on how a normal brain works. He does so as a mechanism for ruminating on his central question: what is it about the brain that has driven humanity's unique evolutionary trajectory, that separates man from beast? It's a big question, and each reader will have to decide how well Ramachandran answers it.

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In this fun, easy-to-read-even-for-a-nonscientist book, Lawrence Rosenblum explores the ways in which our five senses interact and commingle. We don't just taste flavors, we also see, touch, and smell them. Nor do we need sight for things like biking and baseball—blind athletes can use hearing in its place. Drawing on great stories of people who use their senses in seemingly unusual ways, Rosenblum makes the case that understanding the science of perception can help us enhance our own ability to take in all the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and touches in the world around us.

In Sleights of Mind, neuroscientists Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde take a look at magic to explore human attention and perception. Why magic? Magicians are master manipulators of how we perceive what's happening.

In Origins, science journalist and mother-of-two Annie Murphy Paul examines the new science of "fetal origins"—understanding how the prenatal environment influences the development of the baby far beyond infancy. Careful to position fetal origins an emerging science with many unknowns, Paul discusses the ways in which the human brain and body can face long-term consequences—both good and bad—by conditions in fetal life.