Michael O'Shea (3) (1947–)

I feel like I did learn some things, even though I was vaguely aware of a few things about the brain before and despite not knowing nearly enough to follow most of it. I can’t believe I ever thought I’d make a good psychologist; I’m really not cut from this cloth, and the brain biology backing really is what people expect, I think.

Still, it’s nice to come into contact with a different affective strategy; sometimes gushing love/hate/fear can be exhausting.... I think it’s interesting that we can’t think—or compute, rather—as well (or as quickly, I think he said, technically) in certain ways as the higher machines, implying that we can’t find the bulk of our worth there. Our degree of commonality of mind, in certain aspects, at least, with the lower animals is also grounds for humility. And I liked ‘From the Big Bang to the big brain’; I felt like I understood it....

But I don’t understand most of it and I could never debate the value of a technical paper in this field. I think I’ll now go back to painting stick-figure deer on the walls of the cave here with my Cro-Magnon buddies.… (more)

What this book needs is a time machine.

It's obviously unfair to ask a science book from 2005 to reflect opinions from 2015, but even from a 2005 perspective, there were some holes -- e.g. its discussion of antidepressants could have been written around 1985, before the SSRIs (Prozac, etc.) came on the market; neither they nor their mechanism of action is discussed. It was wrong then, it is even more wrong now.

My guess is that this is because the author isn't really a student of abnormal psychology. There is a lot here about how the brain works, but not much about the various ways in which it doesn't work. I can't help but think that this is wrong. If you can't fix it, you don't understand it.

There are some other areas where time really has changed the situation -- e.g. we know that neurons in the brain do regenerate, and all the discussion on that point is simply wrong. We know more about organic brain conditions like autism -- and the book doesn't even lay much groundwork for those discoveries.

All this would be understandable if it were just a matter of the book being too short -- after all, it is a "very short" introduction! But the last section is basically speculative fiction about organic/cybernetic brain interfaces. Very little of this has come to pass, and there was never any real reason to think that it would. So this material was, in effect, several dozen pages of waste paper that could have been used for other things.

This isn't a bad book. The Very Short Introduction series is of consistently high quality, at least in the sciences (the ones I usually read). But, in this case, I really think you'd do better to get something newer -- newer in copyright date, and newer in the references it to compile the book.… (more)

Perhaps very short, but very informative, as well. O'Shea gives us a tour de force of the state of knowledge about the brain, and does so in an extremely accessible fashion. This is what one expects from Oxford University Press, however, which has always maintained high standards in their texts. Includes a very nice list of further readings (sorted by chapter subjects, making it easy to find additional readings on a particular topic of interest).

Highly recommended, and well worth the price (I read the Kindle version).… (more)