The Brain: The Story of You
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Average rating4.6
"The dramatic story of the brain's role in creating our world, our experience of it, and ourselves; the basis for a PBS television series by the bestselling David Eagleman. How does a three pound mass of biological matter locked in the dark, silent fortress of the skull produce the extraordinary multi-sensory experience that comprises us, while also constructing reality and guiding us through the endless need to make decisions and determine our judgments and into a future that we are convinced we are shaping? David Eagleman compares the brain to a cityscape with different neighborhoods where neural networks vie for supremacy and determine our behavior in ways we are not always aware or in control of. At the same time, he suggests that the brain works as a storyteller--creating a narrative that allows us to navigate and make sense of a world that it is busy constructing for us"--
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This must be the only non-fiction book till now, that I finished in a day.
The book is about as it says everything about the brain. A combination of simple physiology, experiments, theories, hypotheses and philosophy. It never gets boring and the language is simple. Very often I felt that this book isn't telling me anything new, atleast in the beginning, but that changes as the book progresses. He only lays a foundation describing the magnificence of “This hunk of tissue in our cranium” in the first half of it's book, and I'm sure, for someone completely new to brain physiology this will be mind blowing. Even if you have put some thought and effort in to know about this stuff earlier, this book is comprehensive. It neatly scoops out everything (basic) we can know about the brain and arranges it beautifully in 6 chapters.The earlier chapters are about the intricacies in the development of our brains, how a child picks up new information, forms new memories, the fallibility of our memory. The questionable ‘realness' of reality. The huge underground don of our existence - the unconscious which rules everything, though we dont realize it. The later chapters focuses on how the brain decides, the constant battle between our basal instincts and our wiser decisions, and the social component of our neural system. It also touches upon the property of the brain that could assist the visually impaired or hearing impaired to actually see and hear, if our brain can be replaced by a computer?, How prosthetic limbs can listen to our thoughts, and so on. It is not an academic text. It's a fun as well as informative quick read.
“No one is having an experience of the objective reality that really exists; each creature perceives only what it has evolved to perceive. But presumably every creature assumes its slice of reality to be the entire objective world. Why would we ever stop to imagine there is something beyond what we can perceive”
Ha! My Science Book Club picked this (mostly because I suggested it and they're too lazy to come up with other ideas!) Maybe telling the gang that this book was short got it picked. And it IS short. Just over 200 pages of large print on small pages. But what an interesting 200 pages it was! Filled with anecdotes that illustrate the points the author was making, I learned so many cool things about the brain as I zipped through this book in three days (that's fast for me). It's told in a breezy, perfect-for-laymen fashion and has only further piqued my interest in this subject. It also poses some ideas that will linger with you. It's a great introduction to this subject.
