In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

Brian Clegg's Brainjacking is a captivating exploration of the subtle and pervasive ways our minds are manipulated in today’s world, offering readers a blend of scientific insight, cultural commentary, and even speculative fiction. Clegg deftly tackles a wide range of topics, from artificial intelligence and deepfakes to psychological nudges and subliminal messaging, weaving them into an engaging narrative that prompts us to rethink how much of our thinking is truly our own. One of the book’s standout strengths is Clegg’s ability to make complex and often unsettling topics accessible and engaging. Whether he's discussing the dangers of AI-generated deepfakes or the psychology behind targeted advertising, Clegg brings a clear, conversational tone to subjects that might otherwise feel daunting. His approach to brainjacking  -  the subtle art of influencing thoughts and behaviours  -  bridges scientific facts with everyday examples, showing how we’re often nudged or ma...

In their book, Andrew Simms and Leo Murray tell us that ‘the enabler of [a] great shift in expectations and attitudes has been the advertising and marketing industries. Advertising is selling us an imagined lifestyle – the premise is that we can only we feel we are all living our best lives by flying around the world, driving ever bigger SUVS [sic], eating beef from cattle raised on cleared rainforest, and enjoying a vast array of consumer goods like there was no tomorrow.’ This book covers two of my interests, climate science and influencing the brain, so I thought it would be right up my street, but I found it depressingly bad. It's a polemic by enthusiasts that isn't really science driven. I don't like advertising, I think it can be manipulative - but the whole story was wildly overplayed here. I am certainly not aware, for example, of advertising making me eat beef from cattle raised on cleared rainforest, I have rarely seen advertising for beef per se, and only buy Bri...

Consciousness provides what is the arguably biggest gap we have in our scientific knowledge. Unlike quantum physics or the detail of cell biology, this is a subject we all experience directly in our everyday lives. We know that we appear to be conscious. But what consciousness really means, if it exist at all and how it can be studied scientifically are all issues that science bumps up against repeatedly. John Parrington starts us of with some basic background to the history of consciousness 'science' from Artistotle, through Descartes to the modern distinction between the understanding of mechanisms for how we sense, remember, react to stimulus and so forth and the 'hard problem' of explaining the subjective sense of being us and our feelings. Parrington argues that our human-style consciousness, which he suggests is different from that of other animals, is a consequence of our use of language and our ability to use tools to radically transform our environment, combin...

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 ...

The first seventy-odd pages of this book are absolutely phenomenal (pun intended, though still true). We start with a near-stream of consciousness prologue - very appropriate for a book on sentience - and then go on to have a description of the early part of Nicholas Humphrey's career in a wonderfully approachable fashion with a writing style somewhere between a deep conversation and a thought process. I particularly loved Humphrey's description of his heading off to Elba to investigate the paranormal claims of the eccentric Hugh Sartorius Whitaker and his experiences with Dian Fossey (not always pleasant) when visiting to study the 'natural psychologist' ability of gorillas. The book then takes a change of tack, signified by the author heading the next chapter 'To work', as he sets out to build for us his theory on the nature of sentience and 'phenomenal consciousness'. This too is very interesting, but lacks the same storytelling verve. It's also a...

Not everyone would class this as popular science, but it concerns an attempt to take a scientific approach to paranormal abilities - notably premonitions (aka clairvoyance) and as such, it fits the category. Writing in the typical dramatic storytelling style of a US magazine, Sam Knight brings to life the remarkable tale of the work of two British figures from the 1960s. The central one is psychiatrist John Barker, with a supporting role given to newspaper and TV science reporter Peter Fairley. Barker had a long interest in extra sensory phenomena - the story takes off when he was inspired by a number of people claiming to have foreseen the Aberfan disaster (which terrible tragedy Knight covers movingly). As a result of the Aberfan premonitions, the pair were responsible for London's Evening Standard newspaper setting up a long-running experiment in the form of 'The Premonitions Bureau.' Aware that the Aberfan predictions were only reported after the event, and hence flawe...

It's fitting that this book on the nature of minds should be written by the most cerebral of the UK's professional science writers, Philip Ball. Like the uncertainty attached to the related concept of consciousness, exactly what a mind is , and what makes it a mind, is very difficult to pin down. Ball takes us effectively through some of the difficult definitions and unpacking involved to understand at least what researchers mean by 'mind', even if their work doesn't not necessarily enlighten us much. A lot of the book is taken up with animals and to what extent they can be said to have minds. Ball bases his picture of a mind on a phrase that is reminiscent of Nagel's famous paper on being a bat. According to Ball, an organism can be said to have a mind if there is something that is what it is like to be that organism. (You may need to read that a couple of times.) At one end of the spectrum - apes, cetaceans, dogs, for instance - it's hard to believe that t...

Like most genres, popular science goes through phases - for the last couple of years, neuroscience has been the in thing, to the extent that I tend to think 'not another brain book' when I see one - but for someone who has always sung, the idea of finding out more about the relationship between the brain and sound, especially music, was attractive.  Nina Kraus is certainly enthusiastic about her topic and generally the book is well-pitched (appropriate given the musical connotations) and readable. However, Kraus does occasionally fall for a classic academic's failing of making use of unnecessary jargon. For example, she defines two terms 'afferent' and 'efferent', apparently adjectives for direction of travel. Kraus even points out how easily confused they are - so why use them? This isn't a textbook - there's no need to load the reader with all the jargon. Some sections worked particularly well for me. The chapters on language and sound were very in...

The trouble with experts is they often don't know how to explain their subject well to ordinary readers. Reading Anil Seth's book took me back to my undergraduate physics lectures, where some of the lecturers were pretty much incomprehensible. For all Seth's reader-friendly personal observations and stories, time after time I got bogged down in his inability to clearly explain what he was writing about. It doesn't help that the subject of consciousness is itself inherently difficult to get your head around - but I've read plenty of other books on consciousness without feeling this instant return to undergraduate confusion. There are two underlying problems I had with the book. One was when complex (and, frankly, rather waffly) theories like IIT (Integration Information Theory) were being discussed. As the kind of theory that it's not currently possible to provide evidence to support, this is something that in other fields might be suggested not to be science at ...