tion id="ua5857021-18a7-5d15-8205-6ecf87decdcf">
William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017
Text © Robert Newman 2017
Cover design by Jonathan Pelham
The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780008228651
Ebook Edition © April 2017 ISBN: 9780008228699
Version: 2017-04-11
For Yana and Billy
LIST OF CONTENTS
Copyright
Introduction
1 Voxel & I
2 On Rafts Across the Sea of Okhotsk
3 Humouring the Chameleon
4 When You’re Snarling
5 Phineas Gage and the Myth of the Supermax Brain
6 Robot New Man
7 I’m Looking Through You
8 Pavlov’s Disobedient Dogs
9 ‘Scientists Discover the Love Spot’
10 The Neurobiology of Guilt
11 Why the Long Face?
12 Like Yesterday
13 The Myth of the Stone Age Brain
14 ‘Found: The Brain’s Centre of Wisdom’
15 The Death of Allegory
16 The Body’s in Trouble
17 The Fabergé Brain
18 A Strange Kind of Realism
19 Too Much Monkey Business
20 How Mind Makes Brain
21 The Origin of Mind
22 Attack of the Killer Sci-Fi
23 The Neurobabble and the Damage Done
Thanks and Acknowledgements
To read the current crop of brain science books and articles is to discover that we live in ‘a colourless, odourless, tasteless, silent world’,* where ‘smiling evolved from an aborted snarl,’† where ‘Japanese people struggle to tell the difference between fear and surprise,’‡ and where ‘there is nothing special about human brains that a sufficiently complex computer couldn’t do just as well’.§ So much so, in fact, that some suggest we will soon be able to ‘upload consciousness, escaping the biological wetware from which we have arisen’.¶
* David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You, 2015.
† V. S. Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain, 1998.
‡ Dick Swaab, We Are Our Brains, 2014.
§ Brian Cox, interview by Hannah Devlin,The Times, 6 September 2014.
¶ David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You, 2015.
This sort of talk slanders and libels us but it is also very funny with its runaway extrapolations that leave science far behind. In fact this book grew out of a stand-up comedy show called The Brain Show, which toured for a hundred gigs, and then developed into a BBC Radio 4 comedy series.
My argument in this book is that brainless interpretations of brain science are doing our heads in more than we know by giving us a dehumanising and pessimistic picture of ourselves. This picture, I argue, derives not from science at all but from philosophical stowaways. Indeed if we look at what the latest neuroscience actually tells us, then a very different picture emerges.
‘But who are you to talk about any of this?’ was one interviewer’s opening question to me on live national radio. I opened and closed my mouth like a roach on a riverbank. Minutes passed. I just didn’t know what to say. I never did come up with a reply. Who am I indeed to trespass on the brain scientist’s bailiwick?
In
