Incognito

I really enjoyed the first half of this book. It delves into neurodevelopment and neurochemistry in fascinating, readable ways. Unfortunately (for this reader), the 2nd half of the book is something akin to a treatise on criminal law for the neurologically impaired. That's a worthy subject, it's just not really what I expected to be reading and it was a marked difference from the first half of the book. My interest really waned.

This one has been living unread in my bookshelf for too long, so i thought i'd power through it. Which was rather easy as most of what it talks about i've read elsewhere before. The major part of the book establishes the always astonishing facts (that ‘you' are no in control, and that there is a team of rivals inside your brain). The last two chapters then depart from this, and Eagleman talks about what we are now meant to do with that information. How to move the legal system from rating blameworthiness to rating modifyability, how to look at nature and nurture as never being independent, and how the scientific belief in reductionism has its limits. He ends stressing that science's stance of today - that the final discoveries about consciousness and mysteries of the mind are just around the corner - is an illusion.

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.