I don't think it's an overstatement to say that this one of of the most important books of this century.  Certainly for people who have opened themselves to the developing worlds of voice science, sports/body science, and neuroscience, Bessel Van Der Kolk's research, insight, and profound practical life experience as heard in these pages serves as a beacon for the influence that these new fields of study offer. His primary topic focuses on people who have experienced deep trauma ("Big T" trauma, as we've begun to call it).  With little effort, however, a reader can see that the mental and emotional challenges that effect people who are living with "Big T" trauma, occupy similar spheres to those who are not. Everyone has important things to learn from how those who experience tragedy find ways to live fully. The voice world, in particular, is full of enough "Big T" and "little t" trauma to complete an encyclopedia set. On the topic of trauma itself, Van Der Kolk helps the reader find immediate and deep compassion for people who have experienced excruciating life situations.  In often just a few sentences, he is able to capture overwhelming emotion, and engage the reader in story after story of people who have found meaningful realignment of their minds and bodies such that they can live a more fruitful life free from inner torment.  Since statistically so many people in the world suffer from this "Big T" trauma, this book is essential for the compassion that it generates in its readers, particularly those who will be helping people to guide their voices and identities through voicing.  The second important reason that this book holds place as essential reading revolves around his measured and clear explanation of body-centered, mind-engaging treatments for trauma.  Treating trauma has been a long-standing challenge for the medical profession, and, their record includes more failure than success. Van Der Kolk shows through practical experience and research how approaching the brain through the body has power, and how that power overshadows every attempt at "take two of these and call me in the morning."  All of life, he suggests, is a process that requires meaningful, compassionate engagement.  For the voice world, this message remains our abiding truth. For all that voice science tells about muscles and acoustics, the brain/body connection has always and will always be the intersection of greatest yield.  Like "Big T" trauma survivors, vocalists who spend their time honing brain/body connections that help to sharpen access to emotion, neuron chains, and focused brain activity are vocalists who find the combined success of technique and joyful engagement with their art.  Mostly, though, page after page, Van Der Kolk invites the reader to dream through his deeply creative, artistic prose. "Imagination" he tells us in the first chapter, "gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities–it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true.  It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships."  Imagination is the launchpad of science and art alike, and we are reminded through this heart-opening book that new opportunities are waiting for us to dream them and put them into action.

Some of my favorite books are written by journalists, and Zach Shonbrun's The Performance Cortex has risen to the top of that pile.  This book has all the nuance and joy of listening to a top-tier sports caster mixed with the clever juxtaposition of rich, lively characters, all through the lens of a researcher who has devoured a body of knowledge so thoroughly that he can talk about it with summer-afternoon ease.  For anyone who uses their bodies and brains professionally, this book needs to be on your shelf within reaching distance.  Schonbrun creates new opportunities for practitioners to appreciate motor learning within the context of a century-and-a-half history of motor-learning neuroscience.  At the heart of the book lies an exploration of how the brain accomplishes the incredibly difficult task of hitting a 100MPH fast ball.  One can assume that the motor coordinations found in specialized singing are nearly, if not more, difficult.  Through his approach, Schonbrun opens doors for new questions for all kinds of motor learning in ways that sometimes only powerful story telling can.  He also aptly provides predictions for the future of motor learning that is all but here in the present for those who would see it.  As an added bonus, the book is about baseball (and basketball, and football, etc.), so sports nuts will dive in and come out with a new-found love of neuroscience.   If you're not a sports fan, you might just become one when you are finished with this book, and at least, you'll appreciate the brain and body in new, enlightened, exciting ways.

This is a beautiful book, and essential reading for anyone who teaches, communicates, and/or simply enjoys asking interesting new questions.  Sousa is as focused in his communication of a significant body of information as he is clever in his approach.  The book excels at explaining how the brain learns, but its greatest strength lies in Sousa's ability to create the learning experience in book form that he hopes to inspire in others' classroom leadership.  He provides copious, current, and well-documented information about the brain, and immediately helps the reader apply that to their own experience.  He then helps the reader create their own structures within which they can begin to share their new-found knowledge and processes.  Further, it reads easily, and can be digested in small chunks, or read in a concentrated sitting.  If you are a lover of learning or science, or just want to read a really well-written book, pick this one up.

Charlotte Selver belongs with voices like Alexander, Feldenkrais, and Elsa Gindler as a pioneer who explored the positive impact of the body on brain function.  Waking Up is a collection of conversations written down by Littlefield and Roche from classes that Selver taught.  She never took the time to write her own book, but this one suffices to communicate some of her core ideas.  The bulk of Selver's work happened before science caught up with her.  Her guru-like approach requires the patience of experience, and a willingness to get on the mat and listen.  The core premise of the book, that allowing our sensory awareness to occupy a larger part of our working memory, and that by doing so, we will open ourselves to the world in new, exciting ways, has significant support from the neuroscience community. That people struggle to accomplish these goals attests to the continued importance of voices like Selver's today.   For performance artists, focusing on sensory awareness can make enormous differences to learning, and sustainable practice.  By drawing our attention to sensory intelligence, Selver reminds us that our conscious minds, the so-called "higher order" thinking, represents only a small portion of brain function, and that by attempting to rely solely on the conscious mind for understanding leads to unhappiness and inefficiency.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow has achieved such an iconic status that people use the concept regularly, often, one might presume, without knowledge of the research and insight that went into its creation.  It comes from the 1980s, a time when budding neuroscience and an ever-eager drive to redefine psychology and learning spawned new interest in humanity's finer points, among them, the search for happiness.  It's an important book for these reasons.  It also struggles to hold up to the piles of new research that Csikszentmihalyi, and others in his era, helped to inspire.  The core concept (spoiler alert), that Flow occurs when "skills" and "challenges" are essentially balanced, seems lithe and crisp at first. As Csikszentmihalyi attempts to support its application as a way to explain human happiness, the argument breaks down.  The preponderance of human-interest stories that make up most of the book are interesting, though, function more as a means of establishing the reality that people the world over are happy for different reasons than as a support for his premise.  As a launching point for others, however Csikszentmihalyi does create an outline of meaningful questions for us to ask about human happiness, an area of research that has become as respected and essential in the psychological community as it is influential on the day-to-day life of people outside the sciences.

Kay Peterson and David A. Kolb are well known in the learning theory world, and prolific authors.  One of their best-known contributions is "The Nine Learning Styles", which is a prominent feature in this book.  How You Learn Is How You Live is a compact approach to learning theory that seems to be tailor made for corporate retreats and middle managers hungry for a way to get through to their people. The learning styles conversation, began in the 1980s as a counterbalance to the predominant lecture-hall teaching approaches that are themselves deeply challenged, has obtained a pop-culture status through any of a great number of attempts at redefining it.  Each of them suffers from the same challenge of summing up all human learning into a very few categories, often with little science to back up assertions. Peterson and Kolb do their best to overcome this by offering a modicum of  neuroscience, and expanding on the "each person has one way of learning" to include "we can all learn in all 9 ways with intention and practice."  This is much appreciated, as it allows for the reader/practitioner to step outside of their narrow identity bubbles to realize that learning is a broad, complex, expansively gorgeous activity. Although there are more interesting ways to discuss learning, How You Learn Is How You Live has the potential to do what it is created to do, which is provide context for a narrow exploration of communication patterns within an intimate group.

There is no doubt that Johan Sundberg's "The Science Of The Singing Voice" stands out as among  vocology texts.  Sundberg brought us, in a particularly important moment in the development of the field, new clarity, a greater collection of studies, cunning insights, and a litany of new and newly-phrased questions that opened doors for countless explorations, many of which have played out over the thirty years since its publication.  Reading it again recently I was struck by how this text did what a science text wants to do, in that it gave us the best understanding at the time, inspired new questions, and eventually became less current due to new discoveries that answered the questions it asks.  In the decades since its publication, institutional bias has begun to shift, opening our imagination to the great wealth of vocal opportunities available to us.  More and more people have taken up the vocology challenge, and put Sundberg's ideas to the test.  Some of his assertions have stood up, and others haven't, but with his good natured approach and curiosity-focused book, he created a catalyst that inspired a new generation of vocalists to want to know more.

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is iconic in art circles for  its creative transference of neuroscience into the arts classroom.   Over the last four decades, Betty Edwards has deepened into what she discovered even before she fully understood what she had found, and has brought countless people's creative minds to life through the power of the brain and drawing.  In the book she not only teaches you how to draw (and it really works!), but also carefully walks the reader through an introduction to the cognitive elements of the brain that the arts awakens.  This book translates easily into the voice curriculum, offering avenues for vocalists to begin to realize how to help guide their brains for their own needs, and, in the meantime, you get to draw, which is always worth the time. Edwards underscores over and again that all people can draw, and that everyone approaches drawing through their own personality.  Her message is the perfect visual arts equivalent of VoiceScienceWorks' "Your Voice, Your Choice".

Stephen Chun-Tao Cheng's "The Tao of Voice" either captured some of today's more popular Western voice instruction techniques, helped to create them, or some combination of both.    This part of the book is interesting from a cultural development perspective, but what he does with deftness, and the real benefit of the book, is to bring concepts of body-mind development into clear focus including physical training exercises to align the body-mind, emotion-focused exercises, and an understanding of the "core" that has actual functional capacity.  His physical, body-mind exercises are some of the best out there, and beautifully translated from more complex body-mind practices into the voice studio.  By viewing Western singing instruction through an Eastern lens, Cheng succeeds in creating a full-brain approach to singing that opens doors for singers to experience the healing power of body-mind integration. In using the Western-based exercises, he outlines popular images and exercises like the "open throat", "maintaining good posture" discussions, the "two finger opening", the "open Ah vowel", the "yawn" and "siren", and several popular vocalise exercises that  expose the challenges that these Western instruction tools face.  Although there is value in each, they also contain elements of confusion, particularly in how their function tends to be explained. When he attempts to explain them, he often misattributes acoustic and laryngeal phenomena.  To his credit, the book was written before much of the understanding that rebuts his claims existed in common form.  It is well worth the read, and is a standard in voice pedagogy.

Written in 1978, Lewis Hyde's "The Gift" was an instant classic, and remains near the top of the critical reading list for those who relish creativity and believe in the power of community.   Hyde's storytelling capacity keeps the reader enraptured while he slowly opens our eyes to the life-affirming power of the arts, the manner in which artists relate to their craft and others within their communities, and how an understanding of these interactions can help communities create favorable conditions for all its members even within the context of capitalism as a driving economic force.  Hyde also establishes important contexts for understanding the challenges surrounding creativity and individuals who structure their lives around creativity, offering insight and encouragement for members of the creative class.  For voice users, this book  helps  to build  a case for working toward paradigms of sharing that can ultimately diminish the silo effects that the voice community's response to market forces has led to.