Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman
INCOGNITO is at its heart, a pop science book about neurology. I saw this in the bookstore and pegged it as interesting, but didn’t realize I’d read something else by this author until holding the book in my hands. Eagleman is the author of the fiction collection SUM: Forty Tales of the Afterlife, which I have also read and reviewed.
Since I’ve read more than one book about neurology, and more than one pop science book, I was pessimistic that Eagleman would offer insights I hadn’t already encountered. I’ve read about the curious incident of Phineas Gage’s head injury and the resulting discoveries about the nature of the frontal cortex. I’ve also read about the weird left-and-right brain selective blindnesses of people who’ve had the nerves running between their left and right cortecies severed. When the subject of the book is “cool stuff about people we’ve discovered in the last two hundred years,” it’s hard to come up with something that a rabid pop-science reader hasn’t encountered before.
But Eagleman surprised me. For example, he had a whole chapter about vision, and he said that apparently 15% of women have an extra type of photoreceptor cell, so there are some women who see colors that other humans just don’t see. I’d never read that before. (Maybe it was never considered important enough to mention in those other books because seeing a wider variety of colors is some silly useless girl thing, not something important and manly like being good at throwing sticks.) He also talked more about Charles Whitman, the lone gunman who killed a number of people from the top of a clocktower because he felt something in his brain had gone wrong and was making him do it. Turns out there was something wrong with his brain, a tumor in the amygdala.
Here Eagleman lapsed into a rather philosophical discussion of the nature of free will and guilt and blameability. Did someone who murdered his in-laws while sleepwalking deserve the same punishment as a murderer who did it while awake? If not, why not?
As Eagleman waxed more and more philosophical, the writing quality waned. Eagleman feels as though he is at heart a philosopher, and philosophers often have the tendency to write in abstract, sweeping terms instead of concrete facts and stories. Without specific examples to bring the writing back to reality, my mind drifted off. Sometimes I had to read a paragraph several times because my mind disengaged. I don’t like philosophy as much as most people, so maybe other people will find it less dry.
I recommend this book for people who are interested in neurology and philosophy, but not necessarily for people who liked SUM, because the two books have very little to do with one another.
1 comments
Nice review. Thanks!