Neuroscientists need to be pretty smart people. Even smarter is the neuroscientist who can produce writing which is attractive and appealing to our less-informed minds. David Eagleman can. Incognito is a wide-ranging and entertaining look at the development of our thinking about thinking, and the current state of brain-science. He covers • how and why we have practically no conscious knowledge of what’s going on in the incredibly complex machinery of our brains, and why the “chief executive” (ou...

Sublime. Absolutely Sublime.I've said it time and time again that an outstanding book is one that leaves me speechless with incomprehensible gibberish being the only sounds you hear. After all, how can I summarize what is already so eloquently told by the book itself? It's an experience you must go through yourself. Most of us are aware that our brain can be split simply into two parts; the conscious and the unconscious. But beyond that, do we consider anything? Do we even care? Surely the most

29 Оct 2014: Just finished editing the Bulgarian translation. My inner selves--as is their wont at the end of a road--are still in a jumble. A more coherent review coming soon. ;)What I'd like to note right now is: this is another book I highly recommend to scientists and laymen alike. If you've ever struggled with questions such as "Telepathy? What do you mean, reading my mind? Am I supposed to have only one of them?" or "So who is the real me? The one who passionately believes in ahimsa and no...

Wow what a surprise this one was! A must read!

Disclaimer: I have not actually finished this book and do not know if I will.As someone who's very interested in neurology this book does have it's good moments, but they're largely eclipsed by a bunch of dumbing down. I don't blame Eagleman, I know it's people in the publishing industry who probably pushed this book to be like this. Following is my reaction to each element I found annoying. There's a summary at the end. Dumbing it down: Too much repetition and unnecessary metaphors. I do not kn...

Let me start with the easy stuff. On a literary note, this book is entertaining. However, it reads more like a series of interesting essays on neuroscience rather than a book. Let me move on to the more interesting stuff. This book is deceptive. Eagleman uses a "slight of hand" writing style. Just as he describes how magic tricks deceive the brain, Eagleman uses this entertaining little book to advocate for a social and justice system that disregards civil rights. How does he do this? He strings...

What intrigued me about this book were some of the questions it is going to answer: why is your foot on the brake faster than your brain at seeing danger? Why, no matter where your attention might be, you can always hear your name mentioned in a conversation even if you weren't involved in it? How can you get angry with yourself? Who is upset with whom? I'd never even thought of these things, let alone that that the answers were neurological.

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.Superstrings vs. The Brain: "Incognito - The Secret Lives of the Brain" by David Eagleman"Experimentation and transformation in both art and science spring from the same root - to understand, to encapsulate the world. This is why I've ever found reductionism (and scientism) drearily limiting and worthily pompous - that utilitarian speculation over what art 'is for', that misapprehension of art as a kind of elaborate trickery, only read...

Another hard one to review. If I were going by the first few chapters, it would have been not only five stars, but one of my personal 'Best Books of 2011'. However, in the last two thirds the content took a nose dive into absurdity. The author first attempts to prove that we have no free will, because much of our behavior is ruled by the subconscious. Um...last time I checked, my subconscious was still *me*. Then, the author puts forward a case that because criminals do bad things, they are clea...

This was a much better book than I thought it was going to be and a much better book than you might think from even flicking through it. You know, there are cartoons and while this isn't a guaranteed sign that things will be bad, it is the next best thing to a guarantee.And I listened to this as a talking book - and the author reads the book. This, too, is generally a mistake. But he did a reasonable job even here, although, to be honest, I think he would have been better served with a professio...

One of the most enjoyable audio books I've listened to. Eagleman has me thinking about the mysterious and various parts of the brain, about how slow and inefficient our consciousness is and about how much goes on unconsciously, deep in the brain, and about all the odd things that happen to people because of tumors, strokes and brain injuries, and about how complex the brain is, and about how little we understand it (his analogy is that it is like studying earth from orbit in space).He has anothe...

This very interesting and thought provoking book by neuroscientist David Eagleman is a little disorienting. After all, based on the numerous observations and scientific experiments he details Eagleman’s conclusion is that we have no freewill. I may think I am considering options, making decisions, and choosing, for instance, what book to read, but according to scientists who study these things I am not in charge, if by “I” what I mean is the “I” that I know--my conscious mind. It’s not surprisin...

Why can your foot move halfway to the brake pedal before you become consciously aware of danger ahead? Why do you hear your name being mentioned in a conversation that you didn’t think you were listening to? Why is it so difficult to keep a secret? How is it possible to get angry at yourself—who, exactly, is mad at whom? :DMr. Eagleman shows through examples how often our behavior is regulated by factors we don’t control. And, the answer to "Who/ What am I?" is a never-ending search process unti...

5★ from both sides of my brain The only David Eagleman book I’d read was my favourite book, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, a collection of extremely short extremely thought-provoking stories. So I really wasn’t sure what to expect from a book from his “day job” as a neuroscientist. I needn’t have worried.While this is a non-fiction book about the biology of the brain, it is just as intriguingly thought-provoking as Sum. There are footnotes and an extensive reference list and index, for th...

This is a must read! What a fascinating book. Not only full of interesting ideas, but also hugely readable.It's a mouthful, but relevant, to mention that the author is director of Baylor College of Medicine's Initiative on Neuroscience and Law, at Stanford University. As the book progresses, it can be seen as an argument for assessing and handling criminals differently. Eagleman thinks we should pay much more attention to the physical and psychological factors which may influence individual crim...

*I am required to disclose that I received this book as a freebie from the Goodreads first reads giveaway program, but don't worry, this doesn't obligate me to say only good things.Though I give the book four stars and have already recommended it to more people than any book I've ever read, I would strongly disagree with the first reviewer that the book is an "engaging romp" or "fun".The book is, and should be, profoundly unsettling, though for reasons which make it all the more important to con...

Very simply narrated neuroscience book that explains some of the interesting neuroscientific phenomena. The writer has a easy to read style with many examples, and even though he does not go deep, he tells a lot about interesting things surrounding cognitive science. If I was a new reader to the area, probably I would have liked the book better and would give more stars. However, it was not very fulfilling for me, since I read a lot about on the same subject, and some of them were much better an...

Do you believe in libertarian free will or Cartesian dualism? If so, David Eagleman’s Incognito will radically challenge your beliefs.Incognito is probably the best work of nonfiction that I have read this year (2011), and it is also one of the best books on neuroscience that I have read in quite some time. Some of the material here has been presented elsewhere (if you have read works on neuroscience or consciousness by scientists and philosophers like Antonio Damasio, V. S. Ramachandran, Joseph...

I need to stop reading these books or they need to stop writing them. Each time I think I am going to learn something new about the brain and each time I don't. This is basically the same as in all the other behavioral economics books (Khaneman et al) or Behave by Sapolsky or the free will books. Nothing new in here though it's all so fascinating that maybe the popular science is running faster than the actual science at this point. Pencils down everyone until you have something interesting to r...