Skip to main content

The Brain Supremacy – Kathleen Taylor ***

I really enjoyed Kathleen Taylor’s previous book Brainwashing, commenting that it was that rarest of species, a book that was both academic and readable, so I picked up her new title, The Brain Supremacy, with some enthusiasm. That enthusiasm proved to be partially justified.
The good news is that there is a whole lot in here we ought to know about our current best knowledge of the brain and the various fascinating bits of technology that are used to study it. If you read any human science/brain books these days you can expect to come across fMRI, but not only is Taylor one of the first to explain to me what the point of the ‘f’ is, she also takes in PET, MEG and more.
Unfortunately, though, this isn’t a book I could enthuse over as much as Brainwashing, for a couple of reasons. Firstly it’s far too long. At 368 pages it doesn’t sound enormous, but it really did seem to go on for ever. This isn’t helped by rather too much description of bits of the brain. Secondly it lacks focus. It meanders from mind reading (with some very handwaving speculation about future tech) to brain function to genetic enhancement – I found it difficult to get a feel for what the overall thrust of the book was. The writing, while fine, doesn’t give that ‘having a conversation with a real person’ feel of Brainwashing. And there was rather too much apologetic ‘this physics stuff is really complicated’ type comment.
On the minor quibbles side, Taylor perpetuates the hoary old myth that in the olden days people died in their forties. She comments ‘My grandmother, passing her 88th birthday, was unusual. Life expectancy for girls born at the beginning of the twentieth century was just 49 years, for boys 45.’ No, no, no! This was indeed the average life expectancy, because of very high infant mortality. But it doesn’t mean adults typically died in their forties. If you made it to adulthood you would most likely make your 60s and quite possibly your 70s.
Overall, then, worth reading to find out lots about brain scanners and such, but skip the first chapter (a tedious introduction) and be prepared to tread lightly elsewhere.

Hardback 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

We Are Eating the Earth - Michael Grunwald *****

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...