The subtitle of this excellent book says it all: our brain has a deeply secret life that is beyond our conscious reach. This is mysterious and also very, very fortunate for us because most of the traits that are essential for survival are apparently hard wired into our bodies, beyond the reach of any conscious meddling we might attempt. Our brains quietly click and whir away, unceasingly keeping us going throughout our lives.
Author David Eagleman presents the latest research about the human brain in an engaging way that is understandable to the general reader. And he illustrates complex ideas with everyday examples that help explain not just how the brain works, but why it may work the way it does. Many of the reasons are evolutionary, having been built up over eons through natural selection. Eagleman presents some perplexing puzzles and also reveals newly discovered reasons for some of the brain’s mysterious characteristics.
Here’s an example: It appears that the two hemispheres of the human brain, connected by a strong band of nerve tissue called the corpus callosum in ‘normal’ people, can each operate independently if that connecting band is severed. People whose brain hemispheres are no longer connected can actually do completely different activities with their right and left hands, such as draw two different geometric shapes at the same time, one with each hand. This is something that a connected brain cannot do. It’s as if we have two different brains in our heads, which is why some people can recover function even if they have experienced traumatic injury to one hemisphere of their brains. The healthy, undamaged brain tissue simply learns to take over the tasks that were once done by other areas of the brain. This is called brain plasticity and it is a wondrous characteristic indeed!
Sometimes books about the brain annoy me because their authors hold a reductionist view of the mind, claiming that who we are is merely a bunch of firing neurons, no more, no less. Eagleman refrains from doing that, although he presents the biological evidence for that point of view. However, he also allows as how there is much, much more to be learned and that the idea of a human soul (for lack of a better term) is not out of the question. I am not particularly religious, but I do believe that it’s arrogant to proclaim that, on the one hand, the human mind is a miracle of nature and, on the other, that it can be explained as a blob of elements that came together through chance.
There are many other absorbing stories and facts in this concise and well written book and I urge anyone with an interest in how our minds work to read it. I think (therefore I am?) that you will find yourself reflecting on its contents long after you’ve read the final page.
--Bonnie McEwan