© The Author (2007). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Book Review |
Not all in the Brain
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
At first glance, Chris Frith's brilliant short book is just the thing for a favourite niece wondering about a career in medicine or neuroscience. It is written with wit and charm and a good deal of rueful humour: ‘Psychologists and neuroscientists have studied working memory intensively, but have yet to reach agreement about precisely what it is they are studying’ (p. 4) is a characteristically acerbic observation. Little prior knowledge is required of the reader; for example there are line diagrams of synapses, explaining basics such as ‘how one nerve cell communicates with another’. My initial impressions were deceptive. I would still recommend it to the beginner—not least for its wonderful bibliography—but it has even more to offer the cognoscenti, in particular those who have not yet given up thinking about the larger problems of the relationship between the brain, the mind, consciousness, knowledge and human freedom.
Frith's central
Emeritus Professor of Geriatric Medicine
University of Manchester