A quick read that covers almost everything you would need to know for a cursory overview of contemporary neuroscience (and psychology) in 2018.

If you are a reader in the field, or looking for depth, the book may frustrate you because the author does not go into the complexity of the subject matter rather presents an initial design of the area, a key experiment and then moves on.

The most unfortunate side effect of this writing style is, in some cases, it can misinform, or allow people to persist in bad ideas: the simulation hypothesis one example, which is completely unnecessary for a discussion of future of neuroscience and is a scientifically useless philosophy, but prominently ends the book. ( )

It's a journey that will take you into the world of extreme sports, criminal justice, genocide, brain surgery, robotics and the search for immortality ( )

This book is mostly about how what’s inside your head makes sense of what isn’t, about the relationships between brain and world. For instance:

   * You never experience the outside world directly, but are seeing your brain’s simplified and stylised portrayal of it—map rather than territory, a cartoonised version of reality. We’re never quite seeing the present moment either, there’s always a lag (which the brain edits out to give the impression that we really are “in the moment”).
   * Colours, sounds, tastes and so on are not features of the world itself, but of your brain’s simplification of it—map rather than territory again.
   * There’s nothing special about what are, to us human beings, the five familiar senses; we see, hear and so on only the tiny fraction of what is out there that’s most useful. Most useful to us, that is; other species see the fraction most useful to them, or use different senses entirely.
   * Central to all this, and to your experience of being “you” as well, is memory. This is not even remotely like a film camera passively recording and storing; your brain edits, heavily and continually, reconstructs and even fabricates outright.

Neuroscience is a fashionable subject at the moment, and Eagleman’s The Brain follows the fashionable line: the human brain as the most complex object in the known universe, the pinnacle of…(you get the idea). As an antidote to all that I’d recommend Idiot Brain by Dean Burnett, which takes a refreshingly irreverent (and arguably more realistic) approach.
   To anyone with enough curiosity to have read and thought about all this stuff already, Eagleman’s book doesn’t really add anything new. It is very well written though, in plain language, and would make a decent introduction. ( )

Like a bumblebee flitting from flower to flower, Eagleman jumps from topic to topic spending sufficient time to generate an interest but insufficient time to really satisfy it. This is clearly a book accompanying a TV series without any incremental information to make this book a truly satisfying read in itself.

The last chapter was the saving grace to what otherwise would have been just a superficial grazing of the surface of the interesting topic of the brain. ( )

Not my typical NF read...I started at the beginning and read it all the way through! It was very good and informative. I learned many new things about our amazing brains! I need to find the PBS series.... ( )