Brain and Behavior: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective by David Eagleman

Brain and Behavior: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective Reviews

• 
  Brett Williams

  As an introductory neuroscience college text, this book is pricey if new. But at school-year end, you can find used copies for around $40. And it’s well worth the months of jaw-dropping thrills. The introductory writing is dynamite: “Take a close look at yourself in the mirror. Beneath your dashing good looks churns a hidden world of networked machinery. That machinery includes a sophisticated scaffolding of interlocking bones, a netting of sinewy muscles, a great deal of specialized fluid, and a collaboration of internal organs to keep you alive. A sheet of high-tech, self-healing sensory material that we call skin seamlessly covers your machinery in a pleasing package… And then there’s your brain: three pounds of the most complex material discovered in the universe. This is the mission control center that drives the whole operation, gathering dispatches through small portals in the armored bunker of your skull… [all parts] connected to one another in a network of such staggering complexity that it bankrupts language.”
  
  Terrific. I was ready to dive in.
  
  What I learned was immense. Our nerve system is segmented, as were our very distant centipede-like ancestors. Each segment along our length responds to pain automatically, from the vertebrae, before our brain even gets the notice, reducing injury risk waiting for the brain to react from a longer distance. Stretching any muscle causes it to contract robotically. So how do we lift a spoon with our bicep as our tricep stretches? Because for every pair of “polysynaptic” muscle groups, inhibitory neurons shut off one side or the other. A similar process of chemical neural inhibitors activates or depresses regions of the brain responsible for sleep or wakefulness. Without the inhibitor, once one side started, it would never turn off. Stuck in the awake state, for some reason, we would die. The prefrontal cortex in the front of our head is where we do all our abstract thinking, like science and religion, but it also makes use of the motor cortex at the top of our head, which is responsible for movement. So, this is weird: that coupling makes us better able to concentrate and solve hard problems if we’re physically fit! What does this imply for the unhealthiest, overweight nation on earth? Are their implications for our political paralysis? Which dovetailed nicely with my original intent to read this book: How, neurologically, can so many American minds betray everything they once stood for? And for that, the gray-matter reasons seem too many and too uncertain to list. There are, however, massive synchronization and balancing acts between interlacing networks and competing sectors of the brain and a variety of inputs can throw them temporarily or permanently out of whack.
  
  Sadly, what I didn’t learn was even more expansive. Turns out my hope for complete answers is a century or two premature. What good is sleep? Not sure. What is memory? Can’t say. The authors note conflicting hypotheses, theories, models—sometimes for long stretches and with such persistence, one begins to wonder if they know anything. Of course, this is precisely the field ambitious young minds would dare to enter as countless discoveries are just waiting to be made.
• 
  Joshua

  Great book. Gets through the material. Little dense at times, but, for the most part, I loved this as an ebook online, the little segments added, the tests between sections, really good way to get through it.