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.... ( )

“We are the collective of our neurons and synapses.”
قد تبدو خلاصة راديكالية، لكن الشخصية البشرية وما يطرأ عليها من تغيرات هي نتيجة مباشرة لرد فعل الدماغ والتغيرات التي يجريها على نفسه وعلى المشابك العصبية بين خلاياه كاستجابة للتجارب التي تواجهنا في الحياة اليومية.

هو ثاني كتاب أقرأه لـ إيغلمان بعد (Incognito). ممتع جداً كسابقه. ( )

This really was a fascinating journey through the human brain, what it means to be human, and what it means to be sentient. I loved the way the author considered what we have and what we might be able to achieve, and what that might mean for us. Such a huge amount of information, well considered and clearly set out. It was also great to hear how enthusiastic the author was about the subject in his reading of it.

Listened to on Audible ( )