The Idea of the Brain: A History

I thoroughly enjoyed the first part of this, on the history of neuroscience, which I wasn’t previously familiar with.

Unfortunately the second part gets quite scattered. Many chapters list a string of research findings that are interesting on their own, but never put into much of an overarching framework. It also often goes back and forth between talking about understanding “micro”-level function (how does this or that component of the brain work, physically speaking) and “macro”-level emergent properties/functions (what does this whole bunch of neurons do, exactly). But this distinction is only brushed up against repeatedly, and I wish the author had made a bit more of an effort to explicitly deal with it.

I also found this part lacking in any sense of what the big conceptual breakthroughs over the period were vs. what was interesting but not that big for progress of our overall understanding, but I’m not familiar enough with neuroscience to tell whether that’s a failing of the book or just where the field has been during the time period.

I was positively surprised by the last chapter, “future”, which I’d expected would be the obligatory lofty speculation you put at the end of a book like this, but actually turned back to more conceptual and theoretical questions. I do wish this had been better connected with the findings rattled off in the middle part, though.