Author : David J. Linden
What is it about : Brains, brains, brains ! All you had ever wanted to know about what actually went on upstairs. The book would present the on-going quest to understand how come human childhood took so long, how come our dreams almost always depicted fear and anxiety and how our brains made up stories in its automatic ways. The book started off with hard balls biology on the neurons and whats-not which were constantly being fired around in our grey matter; the book would then move on to depict our brains as scoops of ice cream layers with the bottom-most, sharing common grounds with the likes of frogs and dolphins; the final chapters contained explanations of how the brains affected our behavior in sleeping, dreaming, sexual orientation, religion, memory and learning.
Some thoughts after having read the book : The parts of the book explaining the nuts and bolts of neurons and stuff were way beyond my league but I did gain a certain level of comprehension of the goings-on by reading between the lines of what the Author was trying to put across. The Author did brilliantly in covering topics related to human behavior as a result of our brain's functions and these coverage were all enlightening and interesting; I was particular fascinated in how the brains constantly "made" things up, so as to help us to make sense of this world. The Author stressed that the "Middle Thing" was still missing - on a molecular level, things had been cleared up a bit with the technology making progress on DNA, Genome and so on; on a behavioral level, psychiatrists and scientists made great progress in analyzing our dreams, memory and general intelligence; BUT the "Middle Thing" linking these two levels were still very much unknown before a more complete picture could be made out, on the detailed functioning of our brains.
Would I recommend this book to you : The biology parts were pretty hard going but overall the book was well presented and many interesting topics were succinctly covered. I enjoyed the read and was fascinated by the insights and I would recommend the book to readers of all levels.
0 comments:
Post a Comment