Reading is like a workout for the mind.

Each month, reading books helps me explore new ideas, people, and perspectives, from the present and the past. There is no time-bound in human wisdom.

This April, I read into AI in healthcare, cognitive biases, and thesis writing.

1. The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond

by Peter Lee, Carey Goldberg, and Isaac Kohane

AI is touching all aspects of life.

Some books, like Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave, offer a wide view of this technological shift. Others, such as Ethan Mollick ’s Co-Intelligence, give practical advice for working with AI.

The AI Revolution in Medicine zooms in on one vital area: healthcare — a concern central to all human lives.

If you’re curious about how generative AI might transform daily medical practice, this book offers valuable insights. Written collaboratively by a physician, a computer scientist, and a medical journalist, it explores AI’s potential from multiple perspectives.

The authors examine how AI might assist doctors — helping summarize patient notes, support diagnoses and treatment planning, or write insurance authorization forms. It could aid nurses with dosage calculations and patient monitoring. It might even respond to patients’ questions more quickly than they would be answered during clinic visits. These are all possibilities — not yet fully integrated into clinical practice, but promising.

The authors agree on a key principle: all tasks completed by generative AI should be verified by humans. They also suggest to categorize tasks into low-risk and high-risk, starting by applying AI to low-risk tasks such as drafting insurance authorization requests.

It’s a concise and thought-provoking read.

2. Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

This well-known book by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman introduces us to two primary ways humans think and make decisions.

• System 1: Operates automatically and quickly, with little effort. It’s intuitive but prone to biases and often substitutes easier questions for harder ones. It cannot be turned off.
• System 2: Involves slow, deliberate, and effortful mental activities. It’s responsible for complex calculations and logical reasoning, but it can be “lazy” and often defaults to System 1.

Kahneman explains how these two systems interact and influence our choices, judgments, and susceptibility to cognitive biases.

I found the second part of the book especially interesting, where he explores economic utility theory and prospect theory. Utility theory suggests that humans make decisions rationally to maximize benefit. Prospect theory, by contrast, emphasizes loss aversion — the idea that losses loom larger than equivalent gains.

As someone researching health economics, this gave me a fresh perspective on foundational theories behind economic evaluations, such as cost-effectiveness and cost-utility analysis, which are grounded in utility theory.

Reading this book made me more aware of my own thinking processes and inspired me to seek out other works referenced by Kahneman to deepen my understanding of decision-making.

3. How to Write a Thesis

by Umberto Eco

Originally published in Italian in 1977 (and translated into English in 2015), this book was written by the influential Italian writer, philosopher, and semiotician Umberto Eco. He shares his philosophy and practical advice on writing a thesis.

In this book, “thesis” refers to an undergraduate thesis, not the master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation common in the US system. Eco outlines the key components of a thesis and reflects on what the process means for a student’s intellectual development. He also introduces his index card system for managing knowledge — a method similar to the Zettelkasten system by Niklas Luhmann (Read How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens to know more about Zettelkasten).

Reading Eco offers thoughtful glimpses into how scholars approached research, science, and academic life in the past.

I wrote a whole review of what I learned from Eco’s book here: What Umberto Eco’s How to Write a Thesis Taught Me About Research — and Myself

They are three books I read in April. Hope you can find your good reads this month.