Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a thoroughly fascinating journey into some of the latest research & findings on the workings of the human brain. But, even with the great advances made in this field in the last couple hundred years, there is still so much mystery left uncovered & unresolved--and not comprehendible. Why? Because the human brain--which has so much in common with many/most animal brains--is so much more stinking complex in what it does and produces and experiences than anything else like it. And, though some of its " inner secrets" have been better understood lately--there is still a universe within each human brain that is not understood and that goes beyond the "bits & pieces" and the chemicals and neural synapses & networks. As Eagleman states: "while it’s true that we are tied to our molecules and proteins and neurons—as strokes and hormones and drugs and microorganisms indisputably tell us—it does not logically follow that humans are best described only as pieces and parts. The extreme reductionist idea that we are no more than the cells of which we are composed is a nonstarter for anyone trying to understand human behavior. Just because a system is made of pieces and parts, and just because those pieces and parts are critical to the working of the system, that does not mean that the pieces and parts are the correct level of description."

I think the author does a pretty good job of showing that the reductionist viewpoint on the human condition--materialism that is only the result of chemicals & atoms/molecules randomly interacting & evolving over millions of years--is not the answer and probably never will be. There is too much complexity and unexplained depth that shows up in the most careful human studies & observations: "Arthur C. Clarke was fond of pointing out that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I don’t view the dethronement from the center of ourselves as depressing; I view it as magic. We’ve seen in this book that everything contained in the biological bags of fluid we call us is already so far beyond our intuition, beyond our capacity to think about such vast scales of interaction, beyond our introspection that this fairly qualifies as “something beyond us.” The complexity of the system we are is so vast as to be indistinguishable from Clarke’s magical technology. As the quip goes: If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn’t be smart enough to understand them.
In the same way that the cosmos is larger than we ever imagined, we ourselves are something greater than we had intuited by introspection. We’re now getting the first glimpses of the vastness of inner space. This internal, hidden, intimate cosmos commands its own goals, imperatives, and logic. The brain is an organ that feels alien and outlandish to us, and yet its detailed wiring patterns sculpt the landscape of our inner lives. What a perplexing masterpiece the brain is, and how lucky we are to be in a generation that has the technology and the will to turn our attention to it. It is the most wondrous thing we have discovered in the universe, and it is us." Well put...think on that for a bit, or for a few hundred years...No wonder God says in His revealed Word to us: "Who is like unto Me?"


View all my reviews