Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To

  • Sian Beilock
Free Press 304 pp. $26 (2010)

When the pressure's on, we've all 'choked' — hit the wrong note, flunked an exam or messed up an interview. Cognitive psychologist Sian Beilock explains why. Describing how memory works, she shows that experts whose minds brim with facts are more likely to freeze than novices. Social stereotyping also leads us to underperform. Beilock's solutions for big occasions are simple: reaffirm your self-worth, write away your worries and keep practising. If the worst happens, pause and refocus.

Genetic Twists of Fate

Stanley Fields and Mark Johnston. MIT Press 240 pp. $24.95 (2010)

Minuscule inherited changes in our DNA can have major effects on our lives. Geneticists Stanley Fields and Mark Johnston explain how genes affect our health, from conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, cancer, diabetes and depression to rare genetic disorders. Giving the science a personal twist, they relate how a mother was wrongly accused of killing her son when the cause of death was in fact a rare inherited condition, and how former US president Dwight Eisenhower's hereditary heart disease was treated with an anticoagulant derived from rat poison.

Science is Culture: Conversations at the New Intersection of Science and Society

Edited by:
  • Adam Bly
Harper Perennial 368 pp. $15.99 (2010)

Science is often divorced from mainstream culture. This collection of conversations between 44 top scientists and thinkers from the humanities, first published in Seed magazine, aims to blur the boundaries. Entomologist E. O. Wilson discusses evolution with philosopher Daniel Dennett; linguist Noam Chomsky and sociobiologist Robert Trivers debate war and deceit; and astrobiologist Jill Tarter muses on alien life and reality with Will Wright, designer of the computer game Spore.

Neutrino

  • Frank Close
Oxford University Press 176 pp. £9.99 (2010)

By the time you have read this paragraph, some 50 trillion neutrinos will have passed through your body. Formed in stars and through radioactivity, these enigmatic particles rarely interact, travelling through matter almost unseen. Particle physicist Frank Close explains how it took 26 years for the neutrino — 'little neutron' in Italian, as named by Enrico Fermi — to be detected in the lab after its prediction by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930. Close describes ongoing attempts to capture neutrinos, to determine their mass and to understand their significance in the Universe.

Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation

  • Simon LeVay
Oxford University Press 432 pp. $27.95 (2010)

The theory that sexual orientation has a biological basis receives support in neuroscientist Simon LeVay's book. Relating evidence from genetics, neuroscience and developmental biology, he suggests that prenatal interactions between hormones and the developing brain influence adult sexuality. LeVay, who published a 1991 Science paper on brain differences in gay and straight men, believes we should accept that homosexuality in humans is biologically hardwired, as it may be in other species such as geese.