SEVEN AND A HALF LESSONS ABOUT THE BRAIN by Lisa Feldman Barret
Author: Lisa Feldman Barrett is a psychologist and neuroscientist who teaches at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on how the brain constructs emotions, challenging traditional views of emotions as fixed and universal. She has written several influential books on the subject and has received numerous awards for her work.
Book: The book explores the latest discoveries in neuroscience and debunks some of the common myths surrounding the brain. Each chapter covers a lesson, ranging from the brain's evolution, the debunking of the triune brain paradigm, the brain's network, and how newborn brains adapt themselves to the world. The book also delves into the brain's ability to predict behavior, the brain's social interactions, and the unique minds created by different brains. The epilogue offers a brief overview of the misunderstandings we have about ourselves and reality and concludes that the brain's structure and function make us simply, imperfectly, gloriously human.
Opinion: I found the book quite interesting and easy to read. The author clearly masters the subject, and makes neuroscience accessible for all kinds of readers through constant analogies and metaphors. To compensate for that level of simplification the book has a long appendix where she justifies her ideas in a more rigorous way. I guess that this format may be optimal for some people (beginners mostly), but it was quite annoying for me, especially because there were no references from/to the original text. Besides, I think that some of the claims of the author are still dubious in the neuroscience community (e.g., emotions not being hardwired, the brain not being modular, anti-triune brain theory, etc.). I do not have an informed opinion of any of the topics, but I think that the author should still treat some of the lessons as hypotheses...
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