Skip to main content

How Your Brain Works - Greg Gage and Tim Marzullo ***

As soon as you see the cover of this book, it feels like it's going to be light hearted and super fun (or at least it seems the authors want it to be this). In practice, it's not. It might have big, Joy of Sex style line drawings and an odd shape with cheap feeling paper, but the content is fairly straightforwardly serious. 

In the introduction Greg Gage and Tim Marzullo tells us that 'There are many examples of how amateur scientists add to our collective understanding of nature.' This feels a dubious statement at best - it's obviously true historically when professional scientists didn't exist, but these days amateur contributions are distinctly niche. If you think of any of the really big scientific breakthroughs of the last 100 years, there isn't a lot of amateur input. And using this book certainly won't add anything.

Once we get into the book proper, it delivers on at least part of the subtitle 'neuroscience experiments for everyone' - the whole book is driven by home neuroscience. The very first item is an introduction to neurons. After a little text we are told to immerse a (live) cockroach from 'your container' in ice water to anaesthetise it before pulling off one of its legs. (I'm already feeling a touch queasy.) We then put pins through the leg with wires attached, then 'connect the wires to the SpikerBox.' Hang on, the what? It turns out we need a complex bit of electronic gubbins to do these experiments. To be fair to the authors, they provide circuit diagrams to build your own, which could be used by anyone who could build a basic computer from components - i.e. hardly anybody. Or you can buy one from their online store - as indeed you can a box of cockroaches.

We go on to be taken through a range of cockroach-based neuronal experiments, from exploring different senses to the speed of neurons and the impact on them of drugs. We then move on to the human brain with another set of equipment used as a basic EEG. Finally we take on the human nervous system, employing more tech: both EEG and EMG equipment. There's no doubt that there's a lot to explore here, and the reader will find out a lot about the basics of neurons, human brains and the human nervous system - though it is arguable how much benefit is gained from doing the experiments.

We do have a bit of a problem with that claim of neuroscience experiments 'for everyone'. If you don't live in the US you probably won't be able to obtain live cockroaches from Gage and Marzullo's store (though a quick internet search will probably bring up a local supplier). But their SpikerBoxes are not cheap - we're talking a minimum of around $200 to get a mid-range bundled neutron kit sent to the UK, while the human SpikerBox will set you back $350. This isn't DIY experiments with stuff you find in the kitchen drawer.

There's also a slight concern that doing these experiments truly benefits anyone. Of course it's useful for would-be scientists to learn how to do experiments - that's one of the reasons they go to university. But pulling legs of cockroaches at home, for example, to perform an experiment that could easily be described and that adds nothing to scientific knowledge seems an unnecessary step. The human parts are less of an issue - you don't have to pull off any human limbs, for example.

This is an interesting idea, and I'm sure it will appeal to some, just as doing chemistry experiments at home appealed to me in my teens. But as a book, this isn't one I enjoyed reading or would give to an enthusiastic teen.

Paperback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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). ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...
Post a Comment
Read more