"A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind" by Robert Burton

2013-07-18 : previous : next : index : [books]


"A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind" by Robert Burton.  The title is fairly accurate: it's about being skeptical of possibly hyped research results, and it's about the mind and not the brain.  This book contains some insights on the mind, and arguments on why methodologies on studying the brain might not apply to the mind.

First half of the book contained details on how we think, where each chapter focused on a particular aspect of the mind and how they relate to the brain.  This is the part where you will find strange observations and weird patient stories typical of neuroscience texts, along with many insights that are fresh and non-obvious before reading this book.  This is the more entertaining half.

Remainder of the book are mostly observations on previous research, and why most of those conclusions were hyped.  This is the bitter skeptic part, where the author attacked many studies to neuroscience, comprehensively covering all topics that have any chance of making news headlines.  After reading through the latter half of the book, readers are left with the sense that a lot of theories were wrong, and there isn't necessarily anything that is correct.  This is the less entertaining half, because there wasn't the same feeling of knowledge gained from the first half of this book.  In this sense, the subtitle was not as accurate as the title: "What neuroscience can and cannot tell us about ourselves."  It was more just "cannot".

Throughout the book, the writing style is easy to digest with occasional humor, and not much jargon at all.  My favorite passage would be "you must admire the pure ingeniousness of scientists being able to use a single measurement [...] the research team has pulled off the neurophysiological equivalent of having your cake and eating it too".  Even with the slightly disappointing latter half of the book, snippets like that made the text worth reading.

Overall, this book was worth reading at least once.  Or you can listen to the author's one hour talk instead, which summarizes most of the important topics in the book.
Robert Burton: "A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind", Talks at Google


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