FTS Library

Books

The Art of Thought

Graham Wallas

The first systematic model of the creative process — preparation, incubation, illumination, verification.

Books

Science and Method

Henri Poincaré

A mathematician's first-hand account of insight and discovery.

Books

The Act of Creation

Arthur Koestler

Bisociation — the collision of two incompatible frames of reference as the mechanism of every creative act.

Books

The Use of Lateral Thinking

Edward de Bono

Lateral thinking as a deliberate, learnable practice.

Books

Flow

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The psychology of deep absorption and peak performance.

Books

The Creative Habit

Twyla Tharp

Creativity as a daily discipline, not a gift.

Books

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

System 1 and System 2 — why habits form and why breaking them takes effort.

Books

Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman

Richard Feynman

A life of curious, undisciplined inquiry. The best case for stealing from other subjects.

Books

The Riddle

Andrew Razeghi

Where ideas come from and how to have better ones.

Books

On Creativity

David Bohm

Creativity as a question of the nature of thought itself — physics meeting philosophy.

Books

Phenomenology of Perception

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

We know the world through the body, not despite it.

Books

The Experience Machine

Andy Clark

How the predictive brain builds the world it perceives.

Books

Being You

Anil Seth

Consciousness as a controlled hallucination — the brain's best guess.

Books

Consciousness and the Brain

Stanislas Dehaene

The experimental science of how thoughts become conscious.

Books

Waking, Dreaming, Being

Evan Thompson

Consciousness across waking, dream and deep sleep — neuroscience meets contemplative tradition.

Books

The Other Brain

R. Douglas Fields

The glial cells — the long-ignored half of the brain.

Books

The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Joseph Campbell

The monomyth — the single story structure beneath myths across every culture.

Books

Storynomics

Robert McKee

Story as the engine of meaning and persuasion.

Books

Ogilvy on Advertising

David Ogilvy

A practitioner's wisdom on ideas, persuasion and craft.

Books

The Copy Book

D&AD

How the world's best copywriters think about language and ideas.

Books

Biomimicry

Janine Benyus

Nature as the oldest design firm on earth.

Books

Sensemaking

Christian Madsbjerg

Humanistic thinking as the highest form of intelligence.

Books

Frames of Mind

Howard Gardner

Multiple intelligences — we have far more ways of knowing than school admits.

Books

Emotional Design

Donald Norman

The visceral, behavioural and reflective levels of how we respond to things.

Books

The Gods Within

Subhash Kak

Vedic gods as constituents of consciousness — ancient cognitive science meets neuroscience.

Books

Epistemology, Logic & Grammar in Indian Philosophy

Bimal Krishna Matilal

Indian philosophy as rigorous analytical logic — dispelling the myth that critical thinking was unknown to the East.

Books

Education and the Significance of Life

J. Krishnamurti

What learning actually means beyond accumulation — a fundamental inquiry into education, freedom and the conditioned mind.

Books

On Education

Sri Aurobindo

Education as the drawing out of the soul — Aurobindo's integral vision of learning rooted in Indian philosophical tradition.

Research

Default Mode Network & Creativity

Beaty, Jung et al.

The brain network active during rest — the scientific basis for why insight arrives on walks and in sleep.

Research

Hemispheric Specialisation

Roger Sperry

The split-brain experiments — evidence that the two hemispheres can process information independently.

Research

Imagination & Association Networks

Neuroscience News

How the brain builds meaning by linking association networks.

Essays

Focusing

Eugene Gendlin

The body holds information before the mind has words for it.

Essays

Hearing Essay

Evelyn Glennie

How a profoundly deaf percussionist hears with her whole body — multisensory perception by a practitioner.

Essays

On Creativity

J. Krishnamurti / K Foundation

Krishnamurti's inquiry into creativity — not as a skill but as a state of mind free from the known, from conditioning.

Films & talks

Powers of Ten

Charles & Ray Eames

Nine minutes from a picnic to the edge of the universe. Scale as a way of thinking.

Films & talks

StoryTANK

YouTube channel

The craft and structure of storytelling.

Books

Sources of Power

Gary Klein

How firefighters, nurses and commanders make good decisions under pressure without analysing options.

Books

Where Good Ideas Come From

Steven Johnson

Why most inventions are recombinations of things that already existed somewhere else.

Essays

Attractive Things Work Better

Don Norman

How something makes you feel changes how well you can actually use it. Emotion is not decoration on top of function.

Essays

Spotting the Gaps

Gary Klein

On expert intuition — how people know something is wrong seconds before they can say why.

Essays

A Short History of the Web

CERN

What the first website looked like when there were no conventions yet to follow.