The question of what it means to be human is something we've explored before, and something humanity has grappled with for eons. Now, a compelling new answer may be before us.

V.S. Ramachandran is one of the most influential neuroscientists of our time, whose work has not only made seminal contributions to the understanding of autism, phantom limbs and synesthesia, among other fascinating phenomena, but has also helped introduce neuroscience to popular culture. The fact that he is better-known as Rama – you know, like Prince or Madonna or Che – is a fitting reflection of his cultural cachet.

Today, Rama releases his highly anticipated new book: The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human – an ambitioius exploration of everything from the origins of language to our relationship with art to the very mental foundation of civilization.

You can sample Rama's remarkable quest to illuminate the brain with his excellent 2007 TED talk:

Both empirically rooted in specific patient cases and philosophically speculative in an intelligent, grounded way, with a healthy dose of humor thrown in for good measure, The Tell-Tale Brain is an absolute masterpiece of cognitive science and a living manifesto for the study of the brain.

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What al-Quaeda has to do with ancient Egyptian morality and Ronald Reagan's liberalism.

BBC's The Century of the Self , an ambitious documentary on the history of consumerism, is one of our most read and shared pieces. Commenter Jeremy recently brought to our attention another excellent documentary by the same British documentarian and writer, Adam Curtis : The Power of Nightmares – a provocative three-part miniseries subtitled The Rise of the Politics of Fear, exploring the origins of radical Islamists and Neo-Conservatives through archival footage and Curtis' characteristically insightful narration.

Much of this threat [of international terrorism] is a fantasy, which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It's a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, security services and the international media. This is a series of films about how and why this fantasy was created." ~ Adam Curtis

The documentary, timely and necessary as we head into another year of "the war of terror" and all the political propaganda that propels it, is available on YouTube in 18 parts, six per episode, which we've conveniently compiled into 3 playlists: Part 1: Baby Its Cold Outside , Part 2: The Phantom Victory, and Part 3: The Shadows in the Cave.

If quality is your thing, a digitally restored version with imporoved sound and picture quality is available on Collectors Edition DVD.

Ultimately, The Power of Nightmares is an investment in your informed global citizenship – a compelling, controversial and thought-provoking exploration of some of the most fundamental building blocks of our present media reality and sociopolitical landscape.

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The evolution of education, particularly as filtered through the prism of emerging technology and new media, is something we're keenly interested in and something of increasing importance to society at large. Now, from authors Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown comes a powerful and refreshing effort to approach the subject with equal parts insight, imagination and optimism, rather than the techno-dystopian views today's cultural pundits tend to throw our way.

A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change makes a compelling case for a new kind of learning, one growing synchronously and fluidly with technology rather than resisting it with restless anxiety – a vision that falls somewhere between Sir Ken Robinson's call for creativity in education paradigms and Clay Shirky's notion of "congitive surplus."

We're stuck in a mode where we're using old systems of understanding learning to try to understand these new forms, and part of the disjoint means that we're missing some really important and valuable data." ~ Douglas Thomas

The book touches on a number of critical issues in digital learning, from the role of remix culture to the importance of tinkering and experimentation in creating, not merely acquiring, knowledge. Central to its premise is the idea that play is critical to understanding learning, something we can get behind.

Sample the content with some excellent talks by the authors on the book's site and grab a copy of A New Culture of Learning – you won't regret it.

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What Victorian novellas have to do with higher mathematics, optical illusions and illustration.

Vi Hart has a rare gift: Making math cool . She distills mathematical concepts in clever, engaging, relentlessly creative ways using visual metaphors like balloons , doodling, beadwork and food to illustrate anything from Platonic solids to hyperbolic planes to binary trees.

In this fantastic 7-minute video, two months in the making, Hart takes the iconic 1884 satirical novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions , which applies Victorian knowledge of higher mathematics to a witty story about a fictional two-dimensional world and a humble square who tries to wrap his mind around a third dimension, and adapts it to a Möbius strip, a non-orientable looped surface that only has one side and one boundary component, with lovely hand-drawn illustration.

(For the definitive resource on the fascinating Möbius strip, do check out The Möbius Strip: Dr. August Möbius's Marvelous Band in Mathematics, Games, Literature, Art, Technology, and Cosmology.)

Hart's work reminds us of Robin Moore's string math portraits from the 1980s and Kevin Van Aelst's edible science, a living testament to the power of playfulness as a gateway to learning.

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In 1935, British publisher Sir Allen Lane found himself on a train platform at Exeter railway station, looking for a good book for the ride to London. Disappointed with the limited and unseemly options available, he eventually founded Penguin Books, famously declaring that "good design is no more expensive than bad." He revolutionized the publishing industry in the 1930s with its affordable and beautifully designed paperbacks, and Penguin eventually went on to become the world's largest publishing empire, overtaking Random House in 2009. Best known and loved for its paperback covers, the iconic publisher has become a living record of the evolution of contemporary design.

In Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005, graphic designer Phil Baines charts the development of Penguin's iconic legacy, from the evolution of the Penguin logo itself to the seminal introduction of Romek Marber's simple cover grid in 1962, which reined in a new era of cover design.

In more than 250 glorious pages, the book features over 600 gorgeous, vibrant illustrations that tell the story of the most monumental testament to the power of graphic design in packaging and disseminating culture.

As a wonderful companion to the book, you won't go wrong with Postcards from Penguin: One Hundred Book Covers in One Box – a lovely collection of exactly what the title promises, featuring 100 different Penguin book jackets spanning 70 years of iconic literature, from crime to classics.

And we'd be remiss not to remind you of Coralie Bickford-Smith's remarkable classics covers, by far our favorite Penguin designs of all time.

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