What are the 100 best books to help humanity prepare for the challenges of the human future? Which can best train our minds—showing the problems, the possibilities, the hope—as we try to build a world that we’ll be proud to pass along to our children and grandchildren?
Books have a power to help shape the mind. When writing, an author leaves a trace of their neural activity encoded in words. Readers then decode the words—re-hydrating this “freeze-dried” form of thought and producing fresh patterns of neural activity in their own minds as they accept, reject, or modify ideas gleaned from the text. In this way, written words let ideas jump across continents and millennia, allowing us to commune with some of the great minds in human history and with great minds all over the planet.