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

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life. To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...

The Giant Leap - Caleb Scharf ****

This is surely Caleb Scharf's most personal work - and certainly quite different from some of his earlier output, such as his excellent Gravity's Engines. In part this is a technological exploration of space travel, not unlike Final Frontier , but it is also about the future of humanity, more reminiscent of The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire , but with a more positive outlook. Overall, it was fascinating reading. Let's take those two aspects separately. As always, Scharf gives us plenty of meat in an approachable fashion, whether it's delving into the rocket equation, considering the pros and considerable limitations of Mars as a destination for humans (the chapter is pointedly called The Red Siren), or taking on the possibilities of asteroids. And even in the semi-technical aspect of the first Moon landing we get some more personal detail - I hadn't realised until reading this that Scharf was English by birth (being bathed in a sink at a key moment). Althou...

Search This Blog