Read widely, deeply and regularly. Read weird things.

Important advice by Sam Gershman

Everyone wants to work on topics that are cool using methods that are cool. This means those topics and methods are going to be crowded. You’ll worry about getting scooped. People are less generous with one another when they’re competing.

It’s hard to find puzzles that people care about but nonetheless aren’t working on. One heuristic is to look at areas where people aren’t using strong inference because their theoretical ideas aren’t well formulated. A well-formulated theory is worth a million experiments.

Being uncool requires courage and creativity. Read outside your specialty. Read poetry, novels, philosophy, history. Take long walks and talk to madmen wherever you can find them.

Keeping track of the literature

Keep track of what you read, and make notes; I strongly recommend Zotero for managing both pdfs and references. If you login with your Leiden FSW account, Zotero has unlimited free storage space for PDFs.

This is a useful framework for using RSS feeds to collect journal feeds and custom keyword feeds. I use a similar approach, with a combination of journals, blogs and keywords going to my Feedly (this keeps my email inbox relatively free of endless newsletters).

Here is a useful overview by Cameron Brick on how to stay on top of the literature.

The Leiden University Library has useful tools to easily access the literature.

I here share a small selection of my favorite books and papers. I am always happy to lend out books (some are in my office, some at home): talk to me about what you’re reading and share your favorites with me!

Scientific life & organizing your work

  • Newport C (2016) Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. New York. Read the first half with a grain of salt, but see how you can implement the second half’s practices in your own life.
  • Gawande A (2010) The checklist manifesto: how to get things right, 1st ed. New York: Metropolitan Books. Must-read for running experiments.
  • Schwartz MA (2008) The importance of stupidity in scientific research. Journal of Cell Science 121:1771–1771.
  • Choosing a scientific project: read Alon (2009) and consider taking 3 months to scope the project, before starting!
  • Allen D (2003) Getting things done: the art of stress-free productivity. London: Penguin Books. Staying organized, not overwhelmed.

Climate action and environmental psychology

See essential readings in Anne’s climate psychology MSc course.

  • Gurtner LM, Moser S (2024) The where, how, and who of mitigating climate change: A targeted research agenda for psychology. Journal of Environmental Psychology 94:102250.

Systems thinking

  • Meadows DH (2008) Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Chelsea Green Publishing.

Social tipping points

  • Milkoreit M (2023) Social tipping points everywhere?—Patterns and risks of overuse. WIREs Climate Change 14:e813.
  • Pizziol V, Tavoni A (2024) From niches to norms: the promise of social tipping interventions to scale climate action. npj Clim Action 3:1–8.
  • Lenton TM et al. (2025) A method to identify positive tipping points to accelerate low-carbon transitions and actions to trigger them. Sustain Sci Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-025-01704-9 [Accessed August 18, 2025].

Neuroscience

Perceptual decision-making

  • Siegel M, Donner TH, Engel AK (2012) Spectral fingerprints of large-scale neuronal interactions. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 13:121–134.
  • Summerfield C, de Lange FP (2014) Expectation in perceptual decision making: neural and computational mechanisms. Nat Rev Neurosci 15:745–756.
  • O’Connell RG, Kelly SP (2021) Neurophysiology of Human Perceptual Decision-Making. Annual Review of Neuroscience 44:null.
  • Carandini M (2024) Sensory choices as logisitic classification. bioRXiv

Statistics

  • Aarts E, Verhage M, Veenvliet JV, Dolan CV, van der Sluis S (2014) A solution to dependency: using multilevel analysis to accommodate nested data. Nature Neuroscience 17:491–496.

Behavioral analyses

  • Padoa-Schioppa C (2022) Logistic analysis of choice data: A primer. Neuron

Theory and philosophy

  • Teller DY (1984) Linking propositions. Vision Res 24:1233–1246.
  • Glimcher PW (2005) Indeterminacy in Brain and Behavior. Annual Review of Psychology 56:25–56.

History of science

  • Gleick J (1988) Chaos: Making a New Science. Penguin.
  • Lindsay G (2021) Models of the Mind: How Physics, Engineering and Mathematics Have Shaped Our Understanding of the Brain. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Electrophysiology

  • Donoghue T, Haller M, Peterson EJ, Varma P, Sebastian P, Gao R, Noto T, Lara AH, Wallis JD, Knight RT, Shestyuk A, Voytek B (2020) Parameterizing neural power spectra into periodic and aperiodic components. Nature Neuroscience 23:1655–1665.
  • Cohen MX (2014) Analyzing Neural Time Series Data: Theory and Practice. MIT Press.
  • Humphries M (2021) The spike: an epic journey through the brain in 2.1 seconds. Princeton: University Press.
  • International Brain Laboratory et al. (2025) A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour. Nature 645:177–191.

Learning scientific skills

As a scientists you’ll develop many other skills. Via Mark Humphries, see Dan Larremore’s lab guides to: