The Science Times Book of the Brain

(1998) Edited by Nicholas Wade. Published by the Lyons Press.

21 March 2007

The curse of the popular science reader is that you have to read the same explanations over and over again in book after book, article after article. Whether you’re trying to bone up on physics, evolution, genetics or the subject of how the human brain works, you’ll inevitably start to feel like you’re just being fed the leftovers of a predigested meal. There’s only so much that you can explain about hardcore science without having to learn hardcore math. To me there seems to be a middle ground. Some authors, like Rudy Rucker of David Foster Wallace, have been able to translate complex mathematical ideas into prose that’s fun to read, but most pop sci authors don’t take that risk, they just regurgitate the same set of interesting teachable moments that have been found to work in science classes.
One refuge for the pop sci reader is to specialize. There’s a book called “Foam” about the different manifestations of foam in different scientific disciplines that’s actually pretty good. Sue Hubbel writes great books about insects and arachnids.
Another alternative is to turn to a book like this one, that chronicles the scientific developments as they occur from a layman’s point of view. “The Science Times Book of the Brain” is a collection of about two dozen articles published in the “New York Times” during the 1990s about new ideas developing in the charting of the brain. In a sense, the authors and the scientists they’re covering are all in the same boat, trying to draw conclusions from brand new studies, trying to evaluate the significance of theories and models hot off the presses.
Is it worth reading? Maybe. Depends what you’re looking for. If you want to learn how to be a scientific journalist, this book should serve as a great role model. The “Times” style is never too flashy nor too technical, and there are only a few of the groaner puns that science writers often resort to.
And if you want a historical snapshot of a science right at the outset of a revolution, this is also your bet. The real story of this book is the story of the cornucopia of possibilities that opened to brain researchers with advancements in imaging technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography. These techniques have allowed scientists to get very detailed visions of how the brain shunts blood flow while human or animal subjects are engaged in various thinking tasks. A theme that comes up again and again is that age-old theories about the brain are finally becoming testable, and old presumptions challenged.
The problem is that the snapshot is taken a little too early. What we really see in this book is a set of creative and inquisitive scientists who are just starting to play with a new set of toys. They’re throwing ideas out on the table, ideas that might one day contribute to a comprehensive understanding of how the brain works. But there is no groundbreaking masterstroke to compare with Crick and Watson’s elucidation of DNA's function.
Brain science is so dynamic and so fluid that this book, less than 10 years old, already seems a little dated. If you want an introduction to the science, this might be a reasonably good place to start, but you’d be better advised to tune into a show like NPR’s “The Infinite Mind,” in which the same questions are being addressed in something more like real time.