Review by Booklist Review
What about that "three-pound blob between your ears"? In seven essays about the brain and a half-size one about its evolution, neuroscientist Barrett (How Emotions Are Made, 2017) clearly explains how and why the human body's command center works the way it does. Its primary purpose is to run a complicated body, predicting and preparing to meet needs before they arise. Barrett uses many helpful metaphors. For example, she explains that just as the aviation system is organized around hubs, neurons are organized into clusters. Remarkably flexible, the brain, in a process called plasticity, changes its own wiring after new experiences or lack of new experiences (hence, babies raised in socially impoverished conditions in Romanian orphanages developed smaller-than-average brains). Humans live longer, healthier lives if they have close, supportive relationships with other people, and being warehoused in rows of cribs, with little interaction, prevented healthy brain development. The center of the human nervous system is capable of what Barrett calls the five C's: creativity, communication, copying, cooperation, and compression (reducing redundancy). Barrett has crafted a well-written tribute to this wow-inducing organ.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
The brain's primary job is to maintain allostasis by anticipating and fulfilling energy needs in order to survive. This is just one of several scientific concepts Barrett (psychology, Northeastern Univ.; How Emotions are Made) presents in this collection of short and concise essays. Barrett explains how our brains decipher incoming sense data in order to know what action to take and how our brains function in tandem with other organs. Perhaps the most interesting ideas emerge in the last chapter, where Barrett discusses the human brain's unique ability to construct social reality. Collectively we humans create a social reality that organizes the physical; we develop customs, rules, and civilizations. Barrett suggests that with the ability to create social reality comes a responsibility to construct a more humane world. The appendix includes copious notes that further illuminate the science in each chapter. VERDICT This is valuable popular science. Barrett deftly explores how the physical workings of the brain influence human nature. The essays don't prescribe what to think about human nature; rather, they invite readers to think about the kind of human they are or aspire to be.--Ragan O'Malley, Saint Ann's Sch., Brooklyn
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An excellent education in brain science in seven short chapters and an introduction. Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern who also has appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, clearly knows her neuroscience. However, like in How Emotions Are Made (2017), the author deftly employs metaphor and anecdote to deliver an insightful overview of her favorite subject. Until a few decades ago, scientists divided the brain into three layers. The core consisted of the "lizard brain," controlling basic drives such as feeding, aggression, and mating. Around 100 million years ago, mammals evolved. A mammal experiences emotions, so evolution added a layer, the limbic system, to govern them. A few hundred thousand years ago, humans acquired an outer layer--the neocortex, or grey matter--that keeps lower levels in check and allows us to be creative, rational, and highly social. In reality, Barrett writes, our brain contains no new parts, and its neurons operate no differently than those of a fish or flea. It is not even the most highly evolved--only superbly evolved for what humans do. Humans are great thinkers, but the author maintains that brains did not evolve to think but to "control your body…by predicting energy needs before they arrive so you can efficiently make worthwhile movements and survive." Readers will agree that our senses provide essential information for prediction but may be surprised when Barrett explains that experience (i.e., memory) plays an equally vital role. A glass of water relieves your thirst immediately, but it takes 20 minutes for the water to reach your bloodstream. Your brain, predicting correctly, turns off your thirst. The narrative is so short and sweet that most readers will continue to the 35-page appendix, in which the author delves more deeply, but with no less clarity, into topics ranging from teleology to the Myers-Briggs personality test to "Plato's writings about the human psyche." Outstanding popular science. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
