And, yet, we still don’t fully understand how the brain works, and much of what we do know is the result not of studying fully functioning, normal brains, but, rather, examining those unfortunate individuals whose brains have been damaged as a result of traumatic injury or illness, resulting in bizarre behavior ranging from extreme personality changes to an inability to identify vegetables-and only vegetables (this latter brain deficiency seems particularly useful to me, actually, as it would make it much easier to continue my lifelong quest to consume as few vegetables as possible). Part of the reason brains are so fascinating is that they operate with such prodigious levels of speed and processing power that even the most powerful supercomputers can’t replicate everything that they do (they also look kind of like something Scots would boil in a sheep’s stomach with neeps and tatties, so they’ve got that going for them). Sam Kean writing about brains leads, perhaps unsurprisingly, to a fascinating (and sometimes funny) book.

Sam Kean is a funny, and fascinating, writer. What about you?īrains are funny, and fascinating, things. Whether to persist with them or just give them up? I always feel that I am missing something crucial. I never know what to do with books I don't like that everyone else does. But it has an average of over 4, so perhaps I'll just put it to one side for now and come back to it. I would say I'd given this book up as it never engaged me. Then on to the dreaded glia and the author's absolute delight in the structure of the brain that I do not share. The chapters I read had mostly centuries-old anecdotes - Philippe of France - and were told in a very loose way. I am not keen on slang being used to entertain, it just strikes me as loose writing. But there were too few anecdotes and too much glia in the book for me. I recently read Oliver Sacks Hallucinations and VS Ramchandran's Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind and I was hoping for something more in that vein.

It is the telling of anecdotes about people that illustrate disorders, malfunctioning and occasionally extraordinary abilities and talents that I relate to. I just can't get excited about glia, synapses, astrocytes and all the other bits that are of interest to neurologists. I am a lot less interested in the normal working of the brain. I like to know how our our behaviour changes when something goes wrong.

The tale of two dueling neurosurgeons