There are some lessons on how our brains work that have been emerging from neuroscience over the last 10 or more years that are extremely useful for understanding communication. There are easy-to-digest books like Malcom Gladwells "Blink" (intuition, a subject for another day) and many less easy to digest (but OK if you have a scientific background in something relevant. Still gives me headaches tho'). Antonio Damasios book "Looking for Spinoza" I think is one of the more accessible of his books. I'm just working my way through another of them, Descarte's Error, and having a hard time. I read a fair bit of neuroscience at University but focussed on other things after that. Problem is that he's far too good at the English language and his sentences get very long and abstract. Almost poetical, but it doesn't help much. (that's another interesting aspect of communication: blocking out your listeners/readers with complex language).
"How the mind works" by Stephen Pinker is very well written, as all his work, but quite heavy in parts too.
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/books/index.html
His book "The language instinct" is one of my all time favourites.
One of the very very best though, that's not only focussed on cognition, and that's extremely easy to read is "Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals About How We Become Who We Are". By Steven R. Quartz, Terrence J. Sejnowski.
Short reviews of these and more books are on my LinkedIn profile.
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