Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain

June 1, 2020

A University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, Barrett (How Emotions Are Made) gives us Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, explaining the origin, structure, and function of that blobby gray mass (50,0000-copy first printing). In This Is the Voice, New Yorker staffer Colapinto, author of the New York Times best-selling As Nature Made Him, explains how this most efficient means of communication defines humans individually and as a whole (75,000-copy first printing). The Dalai Lama's Our Only Home calls on politicians--and encourages the younger generation--to save our planet (50,000-copy first printing). Cambridge historian Falk's The Light Ages shows that the so-called Dark Ages were actually lit up by a keen scientific culture, as universities, eyeglasses, and mechanical clocks got their start. The Kolokotrones University Professor and chair of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard University, public health giant Farmer offers an account of the 2014 Ebola crisis that should be especially revealing for us today; as suggested by the title, Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds, there's sociopolitical context here (20,000-copy first printing). Fung follows up his internationally best-selling The Diabetes Code and The Obesity Code by discussing not just the origin and treatment of cancer but its prevention in The Cancer Code (100,000-copy first printing). Having explored the mental life of octopuses in Other Minds, Godfrey-Smith, a scuba-diving professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney, now looks more deeply into animal consciousness in Metazoa. Barnard astrophysicist Levin, a PEN/Bingham Prize-winning novelist and director of sciences at the arts-and-sciences center Pioneer Works, has the wherewithal to provide a Black Hole Survival Guide explaining the cosmos.

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September 15, 2020
An excellent education in brain science in seven short chapters and an introduction. Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern who also has appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, clearly knows her neuroscience. However, like in How Emotions Are Made (2017), the author deftly employs metaphor and anecdote to deliver an insightful overview of her favorite subject. Until a few decades ago, scientists divided the brain into three layers. The core consisted of the "lizard brain," controlling basic drives such as feeding, aggression, and mating. Around 100 million years ago, mammals evolved. A mammal experiences emotions, so evolution added a layer, the limbic system, to govern them. A few hundred thousand years ago, humans acquired an outer layer--the neocortex, or grey matter--that keeps lower levels in check and allows us to be creative, rational, and highly social. In reality, Barrett writes, our brain contains no new parts, and its neurons operate no differently than those of a fish or flea. It is not even the most highly evolved--only superbly evolved for what humans do. Humans are great thinkers, but the author maintains that brains did not evolve to think but to "control your body...by predicting energy needs before they arrive so you can efficiently make worthwhile movements and survive." Readers will agree that our senses provide essential information for prediction but may be surprised when Barrett explains that experience (i.e., memory) plays an equally vital role. A glass of water relieves your thirst immediately, but it takes 20 minutes for the water to reach your bloodstream. Your brain, predicting correctly, turns off your thirst. The narrative is so short and sweet that most readers will continue to the 35-page appendix, in which the author delves more deeply, but with no less clarity, into topics ranging from teleology to the Myers-Briggs personality test to "Plato's writings about the human psyche." Outstanding popular science.

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October 15, 2020
What about that three-pound blob between your ears ? In seven essays about the brain and a half-size one about its evolution, neuroscientist Barrett (How Emotions Are Made, 2017) clearly explains how and why the human body's command center works the way it does. Its primary purpose is to run a complicated body, predicting and preparing to meet needs before they arise. Barrett uses many helpful metaphors. For example, she explains that just as the aviation system is organized around hubs, neurons are organized into clusters. Remarkably flexible, the brain, in a process called plasticity, changes its own wiring after new experiences or lack of new experiences (hence, babies raised in socially impoverished conditions in Romanian orphanages developed smaller-than-average brains). Humans live longer, healthier lives if they have close, supportive relationships with other people, and being warehoused in rows of cribs, with little interaction, prevented healthy brain development. The center of the human nervous system is capable of what Barrett calls the five C's: creativity, communication, copying, cooperation, and compression (reducing redundancy). Barrett has crafted a well-written tribute to this wow-inducing organ.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)