'7 1/2 Lessons About the Brain' by Lisa Feldman Barrett

Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett's books about the brain blow my mind. 7 1/2 Lessons is her most approachable popular work to date, and it is easy to read. And entertaining. And relatively short; the details are in an appendix. 

The 7 1/2 lessons are meant to update the popular understanding of the brain with neuroscience research. What the brain evolved for and still does is keep our bodies alive, monitoring the budget of our metabolic needs outside of our conscious awareness. It does this by learning from experience to make predictions about what our bodies are about to do. It's weird but true that the brain knows you're about to raise your hand (or do anything) before you're aware of it.

In addition, our brains are not unique in the animal kingdom, nor are they composed of parts as we have been taught. We are all used to hearing about the different parts of the brain, like the "lizard brain," supposedly evolutionarily-older structures that govern the fight-or-flight response to saber tooth tigers. Barrett wants to set the record straight: there is no lizard brain or other dedicated part of the brain, nor is the human brain is not unique in size or structure.

The truth is the human brain is a series of networks that wire flexibly to create varied human minds and social realities. In fact, our ability to create social realities appears to be the truly unique thing about us and the superpower that has allowed us to dominate the planet.

This is all fascinating stuff with implications for how we interact with each other and govern ourselves. Barrett alludes to this at the end of each chapter, but again leaves out details.

I hope that people will be curious enough to read this book and start thinking a little differently about what it means to be human. I'm not sure it will be very persuasive, however. The whole approach depends upon the acceptance of evolution. In 2020, that should be a no-brainer (pardon the pun), but there are still large swaths of humanity that doubt it.

The other thing that makes me sad is the title: if you're not already a brain nerd, why would you pick up a book of lessons on it? I took a highly non-scientific pole of one colleague who said the title was boring. Barrett is good at coming up for understandable metaphors for brain functions, but she is not telling a compelling story with this book. True popularization of these ideas will have to wait.