November 25, 2024
Cartoonist Cham (We Have No Idea) teams up with neuroscientist Godwin for this fizzy investigation of how the brain works. Mixing science with lighthearted illustrations, the authors survey how different brain regions affect behavior, demonstrating the frontal lobes’ importance to personality with a brief comic about a 19th-century railroad worker who developed a bad temper after an explosion damaged his left frontal lobe. The authors delve into the physiological underpinnings of love by explaining that positive stimuli cause the release of dopamine, which deactivates the brain’s fear center and calls on the hippocampus to encode the experience “so you can remember later what led to this enjoyment.” Cham and Godwin highlight some fascinating if well-known experiments and case studies, describing, for instance, how “Patient H.M.” lost the ability to form new memories after a doctor removed his hippocampus in 1933. Unfortunately, the discussions can feel rudimentary, with a chapter on free will revolving around the obvious point that such behavior as sneezing and crying appear to be innate and therefore unconscious. Diverting if insubstantial, this is heavy on “pop” and light on “science.” Illus. Agent: Seth Fishman, Gernert Co.
December 15, 2024
Unlocking the mysteries of the brain. The authors of this book would seem to be an odd couple. Godwin is a neuroscientist and Cham draws funny little cartoons. Yet together they make brain science--an extremely complicated subject--accessible to the general reader. Moving through history, they examine how the brain's secrets have been slowly revealed. Sophisticated scanning equipment has provided crucial clues in understanding how the brain is compartmentalized. Some researchers approached the brain through psychoanalysis and experiments about thinking processes. Godwin and Cham look at why people love and hate, which is connected to reward mechanisms in the brain. Similar patterns show up in addiction, whether to substances or social media. They also study the role that chemicals in the brain play in happiness and whether free will is real--or just a convenient fiction. But even as they accept the importance of brain mechanics, they veer away from the idea that all human decisions are preordained by chemistry. There are too many environmental and genetic variables, they say, and there is too much that we don't know about the intricacies of neuron behavior. In fact, science has only scratched the surface of the subject. Cham's drawings turn complexity into amusing simplicity. "The mind remains a great frontier," the authors write. "We need thinkers and artists to join us in exploring the perplexing cosmos within our heads." An entertaining examination of fundamental questions about what makes us human.
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