David EaglemanReseñas

(Extremely) short stories that seemed to merge together when read as a series. I lost interest in the author's inventiveness about different varieties of afterlife about 2/3 of the way through.½

A quick read that covers almost everything you would need to know for a cursory overview of contemporary neuroscience (and psychology) in 2018.

If you are a reader in the field, or looking for depth, the book may frustrate you because the author does not go into the complexity of the subject matter rather presents an initial design of the area, a key experiment and then moves on.

The most unfortunate side effect of this writing style is, in some cases, it can misinform, or allow people to persist in bad ideas: the simulation hypothesis one example, which is completely unnecessary for a discussion of future of neuroscience and is a scientifically useless philosophy, but prominently ends the book.

Conceptual flips turned into stories about other possible after lives. Not a perfect fiction but exciting enough when discovering a new potential truth.

I loves the type of book and language.

It took me rather a long time into reading this before I realised that this was an author with whom I was already acquainted. A few years ago, I read Eagleman’s fictional short story collection: ‘Sum’. So, as I started to thoroughly enjoy ‘Incognito’ the puzzle pieces fell into place and I found myself being led through his equally masterful (yet this time nonfictional) work.

I love learning about the brain, be it neuroscience or psychology and I have been lucky enough to read some great books on both subjects - this, another to add to the list. 'Incognito' is concerned with consciousness and in particular, the misconception people have of how responsible it is in governing the rest of the brain, how we 'are not the ones driving the boat'. Eagleman serves up astounding evidence in the form of patient histories, science experiments and case studies that illuminate how the hidden depths of the brain and our subconscious are responsible for far more than we can imagine. One investigation he recounts, involved playing a sort of reveal and reward card game, complete with an underlying pattern built into it. The test subject is anticipated to decipher the pattern after a certain amount of goes. What was incredible however, was that in monitoring brain activity, the scientists were able to show that the subconscious had spotted the pattern in substantially fewer moves than the consciousness had.

Towards the end of the book, Eagleman’s ideas culminate in an advocation for reform of the criminal justice system, in such that neuroscience should be used as a tool to aid successfully rehabilitating criminals. This isn’t to absolve them of wrongdoing but rather to understand the mind that perpetrates the crime so that effective strategies can be put in place to better support reintegration into society (and conversely the awareness that incarceration has limited success in retraining brains with criminal desires or indifference to common laws, to behave in a more socially acceptable manner). For example, instead of locking people away for drug addiction, there are current technologies which can isolate and visualise your brain’s desires. With this visualisation, you can learn, through trial and error, to affect the desire - to want it less - having instant feedback on the effectiveness of what you were trying. In essence, addicts can teach themselves techniques to curb their desires using neuroscience technology empowering them to stop reoffending.

It's books like this that you hope everyone reads, that you hope are on curriculums around the world and most importantly in the read pile of people who have sway in the world’s affairs. What I got from it is that consciousness is not to be trusted, that looking deeper is always better and taking time to understand the behaviour not react to the behaviour is paramount. As a teacher, I'd find it so helpful to scan the brains of kids we were teaching - in essence, to see the barriers to their learning, look for lack of development, have a better idea of how best to provide and nurture the children. Current technology is far, far, far away from being able to provide anywhere near as close a picture as this so for now, books like this will suffice. 5/5

'Sum Tales From the Afterlife' is a compendium of imagined, posthumous existences, skilfully written and impressively powerful seeing as most barely stretch to three pages in total. The stories are strong from the outset, the opener a clever twist on the organisation of the events of life - an afterlife consisting of all the events of your life relived but in a new order, where all the events that share a quality grouped together.

'You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes.'

These stories are poignant comments on facets of life that we perhaps take for granted or see too banally, Eagleman is very astute and inventive and he constantly delivers satisfying twists or sentences that hit you with a pithy revelation or reminder. It is a strong short story collection which encourages reflection on what really could be waiting for us (if anything) in a life after this.

Really interesting. He took a few liberties of glossing over points that could have been addressed or defined, but overall it was very interesting.

It's a journey that will take you into the world of extreme sports, criminal justice, genocide, brain surgery, robotics and the search for immortality

This book felt like visiting the science center when I was in 6th grade: the vase/face image, zigzag illusions, and discussion of the blind spot in everyone's field of vision.

This felt very much like Alan Lightman's "Einstein's Dreams", except that this book's theme is death while Lightman's theme is time. Very good read, some of the stories I will need more time to mull over, while others pop into my head throughout the day and make me smile.

Trippy as hell. Loved it.

Good review of this stuff. One of those books with optical illusions that explains why you are little better than a monkey with pants on, and have no free will. The author's interviews on the BBC's Start the Week were quite good, also - available as a podcast.

OK so when I said I liked Incognito better than Livewire, it ended up being not by that much. It certainly held my attention for more of the book and I spent less of my time being irritated by it, but there was a tiresome amount of ableist language (the R-word, for one, and talking about people being “confined” to wheelchairs, and inspiration-porn-style phrases like “he didn’t let being blind stop him from climbing Mount Everest”) and author spent a lot of time near the end advancing a position, then saying saying “I’m not saying that Blah”. On the one hand such careful summarizing demonstrates scrupulousness about ensuring that his position is crystal clear, but on the other it shows that the position is at risk of being misinterpreted. Also, this book was published in 2011, and I’m sure there is much more recent information about the brain that’s even more exciting. I’ll test this theory by reading The Emotional Brain, by Dean Burnett (published 2023).

I read this book, or most of it anyway, a couple of years ago. Would have given it a 3 star at that point, but a recent Scientific American article, "Designing Life", made me want to dig it out again. This time I felt better about it-- it's real, it's happening, there is flexibility and continuity in our brains and senses, and work done to understand this is important. both for bioengineering and for personal life. Yes, the book is maybe over popularized, but I'll try to keep up with this.

I found this book really interesting. Especially at the beginning, whereas the information became more and more specialized towards the end with a focus on criminals and punishment. I was hoping it
would stay more along the lines of personal behaviors we can all relate to but I would recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about behavior and how incredible our brains are.

Good short review of current thinking about the brain, and implication for society. Didn't seem like there was much here that was original though- these topics have been covered by many other books in the last few years.

The leading erdge of neuroscience is discussed in this explanation of the world of cognitive science and the brain. Recent discoveries and the new ways of looking at the brain are presented in a readable fashion. I found this a fascinating overview of the way the brain works and how we are continuing to discover new aspects of its nature.

Mielenkiintoinen, joskin vähän pintapuolinen katsaus siihen kuinka jännä elin aivot on, ja kuinka vähän ihmiset oikeasti tiedostaa omaa ajatustenjuoksuaan. Mitään uutta tässä ei itselle ollut, mitä ei olisi Behavessakin tullut vastaan, mutta tosi selkokielisesti ja kansantajuisesti kuitenkin kerrottu asiasta ilman että lukijaa kuitenkaan aliarvioidaan.

The human brain has evolved to be exceptionally adaptable, at least for a while. Once the nerve patterns are laid down and much of the capacity has been committed, then we're less able to learn. In the strictest cases, the implications can very from a lifelong accent to not being able to see. I found this whole book fascinating, such that I kept reading it in lieu of my more typical vacation reads.

This book is mostly about how what’s inside your head makes sense of what isn’t, about the relationships between brain and world. For instance:

   * You never experience the outside world directly, but are seeing your brain’s simplified and stylised portrayal of it—map rather than territory, a cartoonised version of reality. We’re never quite seeing the present moment either, there’s always a lag (which the brain edits out to give the impression that we really are “in the moment”).
   * Colours, sounds, tastes and so on are not features of the world itself, but of your brain’s simplification of it—map rather than territory again.
   * There’s nothing special about what are, to us human beings, the five familiar senses; we see, hear and so on only the tiny fraction of what is out there that’s most useful. Most useful to us, that is; other species see the fraction most useful to them, or use different senses entirely.
   * Central to all this, and to your experience of being “you” as well, is memory. This is not even remotely like a film camera passively recording and storing; your brain edits, heavily and continually, reconstructs and even fabricates outright.

Neuroscience is a fashionable subject at the moment, and Eagleman’s The Brain follows the fashionable line: the human brain as the most complex object in the known universe, the pinnacle of…(you get the idea). As an antidote to all that I’d recommend Idiot Brain by Dean Burnett, which takes a refreshingly irreverent (and arguably more realistic) approach.
   To anyone with enough curiosity to have read and thought about all this stuff already, Eagleman’s book doesn’t really add anything new. It is very well written though, in plain language, and would make a decent introduction.

Like a bumblebee flitting from flower to flower, Eagleman jumps from topic to topic spending sufficient time to generate an interest but insufficient time to really satisfy it. This is clearly a book accompanying a TV series without any incremental information to make this book a truly satisfying read in itself.

The last chapter was the saving grace to what otherwise would have been just a superficial grazing of the surface of the interesting topic of the brain.

I started off enjoying this book. The breezy first couple of chapters introduced the subject of brain plasticity well, even if it was illustrated with all-too-brief examples and a dearth of comparative analysis. But sixty pages in, those paragraph-long anecdotes about brain research and snippets of case histories had morphed into equally selective descriptions of techno-fixes to compensate for vision and hearing loss. The author is based at Stanford, the academic origin of Silicon Valley, and among the fixes being described most positively are those of the author's own company. This book has the taste and scope of an extended infomercial. There is an interesting factual thread of physiology to follow, but readers will have to pursue it via other sources alongside the self-satisfied and blinkered Californian world-view of the better life (and better humans, too) through technology.½

Not my typical NF read...I started at the beginning and read it all the way through! It was very good and informative. I learned many new things about our amazing brains! I need to find the PBS series....

Forty meditations on a question which will never have a definitive answer: what happens to us after we die?

A lot of the stories seemed throwaway-ish, but there are also those which can be a starting point for further contemplation. Nothing revolutionary but still neat. Some of the stories I liked: Metamorphosis, Mary, Circle of Friends, Mirrors, Subjunctive

A pretty good review of the latest science of the brain. Questions like how do we think, why do we think, and why we do the things we do are explored. Eagleman's conclusion from the research he reviews is that we (the part of us which seems to be conscience) is pretty much powerless. Our brain goes about it's business, letting us know what's going on after the fact. Taking this to it's conclusion he speculates on a court system which somehow apportions guilt based on taking our seeming powerlessness into account. At that point, I lost interest.

It was inevitable that a book with as high a concept as David Eagleman's Sum would have a reach that exceeded its grasp. Subtitled 'Tales from the Afterlives', it is a collection of short stories or vignettes (each no more than 2 or 3 pages), each with a different take on what form the afterlife might take and sometimes with a slight twist at their end. Neither entirely mystical nor rational, the tone of Eagleman's book has a good balance between faith and reason, between physics and metaphysics. Some of the vignettes are clever – I particularly liked 'Quantum' – but most move you only for a moment before you move on to the next one and forget them entirely.

To match its high concept, Sum needed to possess writing of profound genius. But – perhaps inevitably – it does not. I first heard about the book after reading Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey, which is a similar collection of vignettes that provide clever twists and perspectives on Greek mythology. But whereas Mason's book had a laconic style that matched its Greek source, and could rely on those ancient stories as an unspoken hinterland, Eagleman's proposals for an afterlife must start from scratch. He introduces 'Creators' or 'Programmers' to various stories in Sum, but the stories are far too short to construct these concepts convincingly, and while some of them generate a brief frictional warmth from their twist, too often the reader is left cold.

There are some flaws in the pared-back writing (for example, God is regularly referred to as a 'she', which can only be a self-conscious affectation, especially for a male writer), but the main problem is that the stories are between a rock and a hard place. Keep them short and they have no time to root deep; extend them and you lose the laconic quality that makes them thought-provoking in the first place. Rather than ascending, Eagleman's tales from the afterlives get stuck in this conceptual purgatory, and there are as many misfires as sparks. Sum is fertile ground, but you're left wishing some of the seeds had been sown.