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Highlighting the grey matter
An attempt to answer the perennial questions of neuroscience.
What Makes You Tick? The Brain in Plain English by Thomas B. CzernerWiley: 2001. 228 pp. $24.95, 16.50 Steven P. R. Rose
Neurobiology may be the fastest growing of contemporary sciences, but interpreting for a lay audience the complexity of what we are discovering about the brain remains a major challenge not least because the questions that rightly concern those outside the field, classically those of the relationship of mind and brain, and of neural processes and conscious experience, are just those that we neurobiologists have the greatest trouble with ourselves.
A few years ago, I agreed to write a book for children about the brain, jointly with a 12-year-old friend. Asked what he wanted to know about the brain, my co-author polled his classmates and came back with a list of 13 questions, the last two of which read: how does your brain make you happy or sad? and are you the same as your brain, or different?. We were allocated 32 pages, plus some fine illustrations, in which to try to answer these abiding philosophical questions for kids. Thomas Czerner has rather more space, but minimal and somewhat impoverished visuals, in which to do the same for adults. His book has a slightly breathless style, which is sometimes hyperbolic with enthusiasm.
As all neuroscientists know, the questions we ask about the brain range from the molecular to the systemic. And in the gulf between our lab practice and coffee-room talk, we oscillate between a simplistic reductionism and a naive dualism. We divorce our personal, subjective experience from the objectivity of analysing the cells and molecules we manipulate. Czerners book exhibits this tension nicely.
Early on, he distances himself from Francis Cricks claim that youre nothing but a pack of neurons by insisting that in fact, you are not merely a pack of cells of any kind. By this he seems to claim a sort of dualism: a person is an entity containing a hundred billion neurons and trillions of synaptic impulses; and this pack of neurons produces a peculiar music that you can hear, feel, taste and smell. Elsewhere, he argues that subjectivity is an emergent property.
But...