This book will particularly appeal to a certain class of person (that certainly includes me) - science fiction fans with an interest in psychology and the history of science/pseudo-science. The subtitle 'an unnatural history of technology in the brain' makes it clear that, though the book is definitely about using technology to influence and access the brain, it's not about medical interventions, but rather the weirder stuff that resides as much in science fiction and the human imagination as anything that is real or practical. Although the book is not about SF per se, it's a constant thread particularly in literature, TV, and film from the mid-sixties onwards and inevitably with a strong link to cyberpunk, which is timely given the Apple TV adaptation of Neuromancer due in 2027. However, there are plenty of surprises in the real world examples from the remarkable story of James Tilly Matthews, encarcerated in Bedlam (the Bethlem Royal Hospital) in the early 1800s who ...

As Tania Lombrozo makes clear, we have been bombarded over the years with ideas of what makes humans special (if anything at all) - this new suggestion is that it is about eliciting explanations. Having made the case for story as our definitive behaviour in Brainjacking , I can't entirely agree with Lombrozo's assertion that explanation trumps story because 'many of our explanations take the form of stories, and often we seek stories when we want to answer why. So an even better characterisation might be this: humans are the primates who explain - distinctive amongst the world's flora and fauna in our drive to understand .' Given we are told that explanation is a subset of story (which does a lot more in its unique nature), this hardly seems a good explanation of why explanation is a better characterisation. Along the way, Lombrozo makes powerful use of case studies (stories) to make her points, though sometimes these backfire a little when she repeatedly comes bac...

In the past I've found Steven Pinker's books hypnotic - I drift along enjoying the words and feeling I'm getting something deep from it without anything much sinking in. This one was different - it was sometimes a little harder to get your head around the underlying concept, descending as it tends to into infinite regression, but overall I did feel I'd gained a lot.  Pinker's focus here is 'common knowledge' which is when not only do we both/all know something, but we know that the other(s) know as well and the implications this has for human interactions. One entertaining thing to emerge from this is the ability to get into infinite loops of the 'I know that you know that I know that...' variety. Although we aren't mentally equipped to deal with more than a handful of iterations, we are told that a simple but limited interaction like a text exchange strictly needs the full infinite set to be definitive. For example, if you and a friend are tryin...

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, ...

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...

At first glance a book about imaging technology sounds like one of those promotional titles that technology companies make about themselves that no one will ever read - but with a light, approachable touch, Daniel Sodickson takes us from the imaging mechanisms of nature, through the early technology to the present and the potential future - featuring both benefits and risks - with aplomb. It wouldn't have struck me to include eyes in a history of imaging, but Sodickson successfully does so, going back even further to the first biological cells developing. As he asks in his opening '"OK, wait just a second!" I hear you cry. "What does imaging have to do with the first cells?"' - this chatty approach pulls the reader in very effectively. (You'll have to read the book to get the answer.) We then get on to the first augmentation of nature, using lenses to modify the flow of light.  As always there's the potential for a non-historian to distort histor...

It might seem odd to review a book on ghost hunting as popular science, but the book's blurb says it is 'A social, historical and scientific exploration of ghost-hunting' - and over the years, ghost hunters have, more often than not, made use of scientific (and pseudoscientific) methods in their attempts to undercover whether there is any reality behind hauntings. As long as you don't look for hard science in this book, it's genuinely interesting. Alice Vernon is not a science writer, she's a lecturer in creative writing, and has a loose feel for history of science: she describes William Crookes as a chemist, a somewhat limited view, and calls Eleanor Sidgwick 'an eminent physicist' - as far as I can tell, Sidgwick only briefly assisted with some experiments at the Cavendish in her youth, spending far more time on psychic research. Vernon always seems surprised that those looking into hauntings should use methods similar to science, at one point commenti...

In his introduction, James Kimmel tells an attention-grabbing story that surely could only have originated in America. After years of bullying, when he was 17 the local kids thought it would be funny to come over in their pickup one night and shoot his dog. A couple of weeks later, they blew up his mailbox. In Kimmel's words 'I grabbed a loaded revolver from my father's nightstand, jumped in my mother's car and tore off [after them] into the night.' He corners the evil kids, grabs the gun and is about to get out of the car to kill them when the realisation of what he's about to do and its implications hit him. He might have suppressed his immediate urge for revenge, but he claims it then grew in a general driving force of his life, the reason he became a lawyer. 'Within a decade, my revenge addiction had nearly destroyed me and my family.' It wasn't just his work but 'I threatened retribution against just about anyone for the slightest offense - ...

If we are to believe the media we are bombarded with misinformation and disinformation - there's certainly a lot of it out there and Alex Edmans sets out to give a guide to the many ways that information can be badly or misleadingly presented, and how we can defend ourselves from it. At the heart of his argument are two biases. I'm so glad he limits it to two - I get totally lost trying to keep on top of all the biases that psychologists introduce, so sticking to confirmation bias plus black and white thinking as the key errors to look out for, both in how we receive information ourselves and how others present it, is very helpful. At the heart of the book is a ladder of levels of something like quality of information. These are statement, fact, data, evidence and proof. Edmans goes into plenty of detail on each rung - how we get, for example, from statement to fact, or data to evidence. Most of all, he demonstrates brilliantly how both those undertaking studies and those inter...

This is a weird one with a capital W. It really is about auras - or should that be aurae? (The plural surely isn't 'aura' as the title seems to suggest.) I was highly doubtful when someone mentioned this as a popular science book, but they argued 'Plenty of phenomena have been treated with gravity by the sciences without being deemed real in any kind of empirical sense. For example, today we wouldn’t implement any medicine based on the model of the four humours – but it’s important to reckon with that history as part of the history of biology.' Okay, so were this about the dodgy history of the concept that people have auras - invisible coloured glows around them that can be seen by sensitive souls and captured on camera, it arguably is about psychology and history of science. But I'm not sure the book really does this. What does it even mean, for example, to photograph an aura? Jeremy Stolow tells us that when he had his aura photographed, 'expert' Guy ...