The Idea of the Brain

by Matthew Cobb

This is the story of our quest to understand the most mysterious object in the universe: the human brain.

Today we tend to picture it as a computer. Earlier scientists thought about it in their own technological terms: as a telephone switchboard, or a clock, or all manner of fantastic mechanical or hydraulic devices. Could the right metaphor unlock the its deepest secrets once and for all?

Galloping through centuries of wild speculation and ingenious, sometimes macabre anatomical investigations, scientist and historian Matthew Cobb reveals how we came to our present state of knowledge. Our latest theories allow us to create artificial memories in the brain of a mouse, and to build AI programmes capable of extraordinary cognitive feats. A complete understanding seems within our grasp.

But to make that final breakthrough, we may need a radical new approach. At every step of our quest, Cobb shows that it was new ideas that brought illumination. Where, he asks, might the next one come from? What will it be?

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Neuroscience, Psychology, History, Philosophy, Brain

481 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2020

About the author

Matthew Cobb (born 4 February 1957) is a British zoologist and professor of zoology at the University of Manchester. He is known for his popular science books The Egg & Sperm Race: The Seventeenth-Century Scientists Who Unravelled the Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth; Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code; and The Idea of the Brain: A History. Cobb has appeared on BBC Radio 4's The Infinite Monkey Cage, The Life Scientific, and The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry, as well as on BBC Radio 3 and the BBC World Service.
Cobb has written and provided expert comments for publications including New Scientist and The Guardian, translated five books from French into English, and written two books on the history of France during World War II.

Reviews

[Morgan Blackledge · Rating 5 out of 5]

The ancients believed the heart was the anatomical seat of thought and consciousness and considered the brain to be of relative little import.

Our current understanding of the brain and its functions emerged and evolved bit by bit over time.

Because the precise functions of the brain have been (and continue to be) extremely difficult to research and understand.

Paradigmatic metaphor (the idea of the brain) has played an enormous role in guiding our thinking and inquiry.

As technology advances, each epoch provides a new dominant metaphor.

The brain is hydraulic.

The brain is like a clock.

The brain is like a telegraph network.

And finally, the brain is like a computer.

The computational metaphor is still the dominant metaphor for understanding the brain.

To paraphrase philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn.

Paradigms work until they don’t. And then new paradigms either emerge, or progress stalls.

Author Matthew Cobb asserts that, while mountains of information on brain function have stockpiled over the past 50 years, there have been no significant theoretical advances in that time.

Cobb explores the fact that we are almost certainly at the edge of the use value of the computer metaphor.

The next paradigm may (or may not) emerge within our lifetime.

And although the advances we have seen in the past 50 years have been breathtaking to put it mildly.

We may not answer very basic questions regarding brain function until a new organizing principal emerges.

The situation is reminiscent of the state that biology was in before evolutionary theory.

We had an enormous stock pile of observations, without a way of understanding them as a whole.

Evolutionarily theory provided an organizing principal, and essentially transformed biology into a hard science.

This is how basic research can out pace actual understanding for periods of time.

And how theoretical advances work in tandem with basic research to synergize and create meaning.

Finally, Cobb postulates that there may not in fact be any real organizing principle to brain function, because it is a messy, evolved, pragmatic and embodied system.

In the end, we may need to be satisfied with an irreducibly complex description of multivariate functions, that defy our desperate urges to organize.

[Robyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a history of the brain - not, as Matthew Cobb is quick to explain in the introduction, a history of neuroscience or psychology or any other discipline, but a history of the many ways in which both researchers and society as a whole have conceptualised the brain and tried to understand it. It's not a book for the fainthearted, full of name-checks to renowned scientists and philosophers and explorations of increasingly complex ideas. However, for those with an interest in the brain, this is a well-researched and thought-provoking look at how we got to where we are now and how much we still don't know.

The first part, "Past", is the longest and covers history from the period when the heart was considered to be behind thought and emotion, through to early neurosurgery and anatomy, right through to the discovery of neurons and electricity and many concepts which are still at the heart of neuroscience today. It contained a great deal that I didn't know alongside some that I did, and it was fascinating seeing how many fortuitous discoveries were made entirely by accident, or were made in error yet today would be seen as correct. There are many names, and to those totally unfamiliar with those mentioned the volume could be overwhelming, but it wouldn't be a complete history without them. There were also names you might not expect - amongst them Mary Shelley, whose novel Frankenstein was influential in popularising the idea that the nervous system uses electricity, and Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory but not a man typically linked to neuroscience.

Matthew Cobb covered each era and discovery with as little bias as he could, and clearly attempted to make each section accessible. I'm not usually much of a historian, but the sections on theology and cultural influences were just as interesting as those which directly pertained to neuroscience or psychology.

"...even though we may not currently understand a particular phenomenon, that does not mean we will never be able to understand it. To argue that there are things we can never understand is to undermine the whole point of science, which is to explain what is currently unexplainable."

The second section, "Present", covers more modern neuroscience from the 1950s to 2019. It covers a wide variety of branches, from computational and cognitive neuroscience to mental health to the origins of consciousness. Once again, Cobb tries to take an unbiased viewpoint, although some of what he concludes might be disputed by some in the field. (It is difficult to say anything that someone would not disagree with). Highly complex ideas are made as understandable as possible for novices to the field, although again some familiarity is helpful.

One particular part of this section which resonated was almost an aside in which Cobb mused on the effect of private companies controlling most research and development. He detailed the case of a woman who received a brain implant to warn her of impending seizures, only to lose it when the company which developed it went bust. "I lost myself" the woman reported. "It was more than a device. The company owned the existence of this new person." Research is an industry, and progress can come at an incalculable cost - how many people have been enrolled in trials with huge benefit, only to lose all benefits when the trial ends? Do we even need to understand how the brain works, rather than just how to fix it when things go wrong?

"Ultimately, it would not matter if there was no deep understanding of how those therapies work, as long as they do."

There was also a section which made me laugh out loud detailing an fMRI experiment performed on a salmon. I will leave the joy of discovering it to anyone who reads the book.

Part three, "Future", is a brief exploration of where Cobb thinks research might go, and the many questions which remain unsolved. It looks at the flaws of current methodology and postulates how scientists might work past them. He makes some valid points, and whilst there are no easy answers, all neuroscientists should consider what he has to say.

"Animals are not robots piloted by brains, we are all, whether maggots or humans, individuals with agency and a developmental and evolutionary history".

Overall, this is a thorough review of a complex area which should appeal to any enthusiast in psychology or neuroscience. There are more accessible books to the complete lay reader, but to those with a basic background in biology, psychology, or neuroscience, this is a fascinating read.

[P K · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this book for a neuroscience book club I co-run, comment if you want our notes😊

I really disliked this book. It read like the index of what might be an interesting book. It just read as a dense list, there’s a new name on every page, no narration in between to tie it back to an overarching point. Just: scientist A in 400 BC did experiment 1, found result 1a. Then scientist B 200 years later had the idea to do experiment 2, found result 2a. Scientist C…I knew most of the material already from my education in neuroscience, but if it was presented compellingly, I’d like the refresher, and would like the extra details I didn’t remember from my first learning. But it was just an absolute chore. The number one thing I’d like to say to readers is that neuroscientists largely aren’t saying the words Cobb is putting into our mouths.

Ostensibly, this book is about how the metaphors we’ve used to understand the brain over time have been informed by the technologies of the time, and in turn, these metaphors actually constrain our understanding. That concept makes a couple of cameos in the book, but is by no means an organizing principle.

Perhaps the most aggravating thing about the book is the string of strawmen Cobb produces about subfields in neuroscience. For example, he cites recent findings in fMRI, but doesn’t seem to understand that the statistical methods developed since the 1990’s have gone a long way to addressing the criticisms he presents, like cluster corrections which would now prevent a “dead fish” finding. Cobb writes like “This this dead fish had activation in area X, lololol. Thus, fMRI was defeated.” What fMRI scientist is arguing that complex states like fear are localized to specific areas like the amygdala? The dominant understanding of the brain is a network model. His main criticism of fMRI is that “it is too coarse to allow a real understanding of the computational activity of the brain.” Which is exactly why it is used in conjunction with techniques like optogenetics and single cell recording to inform a full understanding of the brain. Good luck understanding the network level of brain function without a high level measure of functional changes across the whole brain. The weird thing is, he addresses this idea at other points in the book, saying “There are many scientists who feel we are drowning in a tide of data about the structure of brains, while what we really need are some clearer theories and ideas about how it all fits together.” fMRI scientists could just as easily turn this around and say we’re never going to understand network dynamics by studying individual olfactory neurons in maggots (Cobb’s main line of work). But that would be silly to say, because most scientists understand we need investigation at multiple levels to form a full picture. Cobb states “A map–and at their best that is what fMRI data are–does not tell you how something works. Where is not how.” It seemed like Cobb was criticizing media reporting of fMRI studies instead of actual papers by fMRI scientists, because I’ve never heard anyone in the field espouse the views he “debunks.” Mather et al., (2013) said it well, “But to say that neuroimaging answers only “where” questions is to confuse the superficial format of raw neuroimaging data with the content of the questions those data can answer; Neuroimagers collecting fMRI data need no more restrict themselves to “where” questions than cognitive psychologists measuring reaction times need limit themselves to “when” questions…“Indeed, looking back over the past two decades of work using fMRI, one can see that an initial focus on “brain mapping” provided a critical foundation for the field that allowed it to go beyond “where” questions to address “how” questions. To the extent that highly specialized brain regions are discovered, and their functional specialization well established, activity in these regions can serve as markers for specific cognitive functions, enabling us to ask whether and to what extent mental process X is engaged in task Y. For example, by showing people a series of scenes and faces and asking them to remember one type of stimuli and ignore the other during a retention interval, researchers tested the hypothesis that people suppress mental representations of distracting to-be-ignored stimuli.”

He attacks the easy target of a Jennifer Anniston cell with “Just because a particular cell is activated by a photo of Jennifer Aniston does not mean that is all the cell does–other faces, or other stimuli entirely, may also be represented–or that cells from no other network are involved.” Well, the authors of that original paper (Quiroga et al., 2005) clearly state that “We do not mean to imply the existence of single neurons coding uniquely for discrete percepts for several reasons: first, some of these units responded to pictures of more than one individual or object; second, given the limited duration of our recording sessions, we can only explore a tiny portion of stimulus space; and third, the fact that we can discover in this short time some images—such as photographs of Jennifer Aniston—that drive the cells suggests that each cell might represent more than one class of images.” So again, Cobb is taking apart an argument the authors never made in the first place.

Similarly, Cobb breezily dismisses the dopamine theory of drug addiction with “Many addictive recreational drugs, such as nicotine, cocaine and amphetamines, alter dopamine concentrations in the same part of the brain, but they do this in different neurons, by different routes and in different ways…Despite the enthusiasm for the dopamine brain disease model of addiction, it seems certain that although different addictive behaviours may look–and feel–the same, they probably have different underlying mechanisms.” It was not at all clear to me why he thinks this. It is well established that the dopamine system and its synaptic targets are heterogeneous. It projects to the striatum, medial prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, amygdala, and other areas, all of which have different functions. So the first part of what he's saying is correct, but the second part doesn’t follow from that. What addiction researchers seem to agree is that increased dopamine transmission is clearly both necessary and sufficient to promote psychostimulant reinforcement, but for four other major drug of abuse categories (opiates, ethanol, cannabinoids and nicotine), “there are also dopamine-independent processes that contribute significantly to the reinforcing effects of these compounds” but that “there is overwhelming evidence that all five classes of abused drugs increase dopamine transmission in limbic regions of the brain.” (Pierce and Kumaresan, 2006). Cobb actually asserts in one casual backhand that opiates do not increase dopamine levels in the brain at all, which the weight of evidence strongly denies.

Overall, wouldn’t recommend this book. I found it tedious, cursorily researched, heavily cherry picked, as well as smug and dismissive in tone. It read like Cobb really wanted everyone to think the way he is investigating the nervous system is the best way, and he really needs everyone to think the other ways are stupid, which is becoming an increasingly antiquated view in an ever more collaborative and interdisciplinary scientific world. Would not read another book by this author.

[James Foster · Rating 5 out of 5]

This morning I read an op-ed in the New York Times by Lisa Feldman Barrett titled “Your Brain is Not for Thinking”. Her argument was that the primary function of the brain is to keep the body going, not to think. From an evolutionary perspective this is obviously true, however surprising we find it. Throughout most of evolutionary history the brain’s only function was to monitor and control the body. Thinking is a relatively recent thing that humans do, and humans are a very young species. Most brains in the world, of course are non-human, and we hesitate to say they “think” in the same way humans do. This reminded me that I hadn’t yet written a review of Matthew Cobb’s splendid “The Idea of the Brain”. Let’s remedy that.

We tend to assume that our models of the brain are correct. For example, we “instinctively” think of the brain as separate from the body, the seat of consciousness, as a computer, and as a collection of neurons; we “instinctively” think that what the brain does is think (Cobb’s argument), or remember, or create consciousness. Cobb documents that each of these ways of understanding the brain are relatively modern and incomplete—not instinctive or obvious at all.

Cobb walks us through a history of models of the brain, then he surveys the state of brain science, and finally he speculates about where brain science is going. He says “neuroscience” rather than “brain science”, apparently without realizing that the term itself begs the question, assuming the brain is best understood in the context of neurons which provide neural functions. Cobb is a neuroscientist who studies olfaction and the neuronal basis of behavior. So it is natural that his instinctive characterization of the brain is neuro-centric, even though he argues that this is just one among many models that humans have used to explain the squishy gray stuff we keep above our necks.

In the ancient western world the seat of emotion, perception, consciousness, and thought was the heart, not the brain. If you think of it, with whatever organ you choose, this makes sense. The brain just sits there. But the heart is always moving. You can’t ignore the heart. But you can’t feel the brain at all.

This changed in the 17th century. This was an era of mechanical devices: clocks, music boxes, automata, and such. Naturally (“instinctively”?) the body was considered to be a mechanism, and the brain the thing that drives it. This was the time of René Descartes and “Cartesian dualism”, the idea that mind and body are distinct. Most people still assume dualism is obviously true, though it is only a few hundred years old. Thinkers in this era explained the interaction between mind and body in mechanical terms. The mind “tugs” on strings and the body moves; you pull on the nerve in a frog’s leg and it twitches. Nicolaus Steno was particularly forceful in advancing this view, using a new state-of-the-art instrument, the microscope. He showed nerves to be hollow, like straws within which flows some vital substance.

In the 18th century a new phenomenon, electricity, captured the scientific and artistic imagination. Witness Frankenstein animating his monster with a lightening bolt, or Galvani shocking a frog’s leg with a battery. Scientists performed experiments on animal bodies, including humans, and not always dead, to show that electricity induces corporeal motion. This is when Giovani Aldani, possibly the model for Dr. Frankenstein, flogged a kind of freakish road show, stepping from from a table with just human heads, to one with a headless corpse, to a full body, connecting each in turn to a battery. However, it was never clear what role electricity actually played in these demonstrations. Merely tugging on nerves did produce motion, after all, and attaching a battery did not always work.

In the 19th century, the electrical paradigm became less spark-like, and more like that modern miracle, the telegraph. Brain studies shifted from mechanism to function. Phrenologists measured lumps in the skull, on the theory that specific functions and capabilities arose from specific parts of the brain, so that talents and deficiencies could be explained by having excess or deficient brain matter, which one could discover by measuring lumps and dips in the skull. Thus one could “prove” that someone was a natural criminal, laborer, or intellectual by measuring the skull. For example, the fact that men’s brains are bigger than women’s was taken to prove that men are more intelligent than women. Phrenology was eventually discredited when scientists began looking at the actual brain, rather than the skull. Parts of the brain were indeed sometimes associated with mental abilities, but these were not enlarged nor did they lie beneath lumps. Still, some capabilities such as “intelligence” did not have seem to be localized. A surprisingly acrimonious debate emerged over whether specific mental activities were localized in the brain or whether they arose from the brain as a whole. This is an active debate, even today.

In the latter part of the 19th century, evolution came into the picture. The argument was that differences in mental capacities between species were a matter of degree, not kind, which was best explained by common ancestry. Spiritualism also became popular, however, so that even some highly influential evolutionary biologists thought that at least some mental phenomena, such as consciousness, transcended the body, so that evolution was not a significant factor.

As the 19th century seeped into the 20th, neurons became the center of focus for “brain science”. New tools, such as better microscopes and staining techniques, revealed a chemical basis to neural and brain function. Ramón y Cajal showed that neurons had distinct, disconnected components such as axons and dendrites, which were linked in a specific orientation, head to tail. Also, he found gaps, synapses, between neurons. So, neural function could not be explained by parts that contacted each other, like mechanical switches, or by connected things like wires. Something had to pass between neurons in one direction, rather than along them.

This led to a new conception of the neural system in the mid 20th century, a new kind of electronic machine built out of digital circuits. The brain became a computer.

All of that is from the “Past” section of the book. In the “Present” section Cobb describes our current understanding of how memory works, how circuits have limited explanatory power, and how brains are similar to but different from digital computers. He describes the chemical basis for neural and mental phenomena. He describes the current view, that mental functions are both local and global; though some regions must be present for specific functions, those function may still require the whole brain. I was surprised to learn that fMRI “brain scans” are misleading, and that results from fMRI data are often over-hyped.

In the “Future” section Cobb describes where brain science might be going, and which new metaphors and technologies may help. This was the most exciting part of the book. But to say too much would spoil the journey for you, dear reader. And this review is long enough already.

If you are at all curious, this book will help you understand how that curiosity can arise from your body and your brain. This book is utterly engrossing and surprising. Excellent read.

[Alina Lucia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the neuroscience equivalent of Bertrand Russell's "A History of Western Philosophy", just shorter, with a lot less Plato(or still a lot of Plato?) and certainly a lot more Francis Crick.

[Sherif Gerges · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the greatest works of popular science I have ever read. Cobb writes with power, clarity, and rare erudition. He turns the long, tangled history of the brain into a sweeping narrative that crackles with tension and insight. Christianity, dogma, science, intellectual fashion, he exposes them all, from Ancient Greece to Thomas Aquinas, from Kraepelin to the age of functional genomics. This book has permanently changed the way I understand the brain and history of science. Astonishing.

I would have loved to see more about Posidonius and Nemesius of Emesa or one of the many physicians of Byzantium, although I recognize that one can always add more and that including everything may make the book unreadably long.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb book about the history of our understanding of the mind, from classical times until scientific investigations in the last 300 years, until now. Also as a bonus, a clear-eyed review about his expectations for the future of this inquiry. Great science writing with a subtle, wry sense of humor.

[Abderrahmane Nadir · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book, an overview of the brain ( past, present and future), the most enjoyable part was the demolishing of some current mythes that circulates in our culture like the 3 layers of the brain (reptilian,cortex and limbic ), or the division of the 2 hemispheres of the brain (right for art and emotion and left for abstract objective thinking ) , and the oversimplification of the brain functions using the fmri studies it was such fun read

[Frederick Gault · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is full of stuff about what we do NOT know. Much of what we think we know about the brain is not supported by data! For example: left brain people, right brain people. No. Parts of the brain are known to have specific functions - sort of, but the brain is very plastic and can sometimes work around missing or damaged areas, like when a patient recovers from a stroke. It now appears that hellishly complex networks of neurons all through the brain support each other to make things happen. fMRI, which shows those lovely colored images of the brain "lighting up" with blood flow, is actually regarded as nothing short of phrenology-level quackery by some scientists. The fMRI voxel (ie. 3D pixel) contains an enormous number of neurons. All the fMRI tells us is that blood goes to that voxel, not what the blood is doing, what chemicals are being exchanged and what inhibitory feedback loops are in action. In short, modern science has very little idea about what and where things happen in the brain. Neurons are like wires, No. While it is true that there is an electric potential along an axon, the communication between neurons is mostly chemical and very poorly understood. Metaphors used for the brain, like "switchboard" and "computer" are hopelessly inadequate.

What's more, the brain is not in a jar, it is integrated into the organism. To study what the brain does and how it does it, one should work to understand the entire organism.

In a shocking experiment researchers attempted to reverse engineer a silicon chip using brain research tools. They indentified the connections, removed parts to see what stopped working and so forth. In the end they could not determine how the chip worked or what it did.

It seems that we need a Newton, Darwin or Einstein to come into brain and cognition research. We need new ideas and new metaphors. We probably need more advanced technology.

The human brain is a very complex system, consciousness is a hellishly difficult thing to define, much less explain. Big projects have produced astounding quantities of data, but little understanding. I, for one, thought great progress was being made in this field. Progress has been made for sure, but no one is anywhere near to explaining how the brain functions and where cognition comes from.

[Shuaib Choudhry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book where the author goes through a historical arc of how humans have understood the brain; how that thinking evolved, dependent on the prevailing paradigm, and shaped the current understanding. This book is very much built on an understanding that humans think through metaphors, as explained by George Lakoff's famous book Metaphors we live by, and how that impacts the contemporary scientific paradigm and thus the understanding and thinking behind how the brain functions. For most of history up until recently, the prominent view about where thought originates from was the heart and not the brain. This was logically consistent with experience by nature of the fact the heart reacts physically to many situations where thought is required such as decision making, reflexive actions or emotion. This still pervades our language today particularly with the common phrase "think through your head, not your heart". Then at the start of the renaissance, the brain was determined to hold the seat of thought and since then this assumption has held up until recently. Scientists are now saying we can’t just study the brain independently but have to take into account it's interaction with the environment and other parts of the body.

At the start of the 17th century a mechanistic view of the brain started to take hold as scientists viewing the brain as a mechanical object became more commonplace. Descartes was inspired by a fountain in a park and drew an analogy to how the brain functions through forces and pressure and valves controlling this interplay. Then electricity was discovered and it was subsequently determined that there was electric potential flowing through the nerves of humans. This then provided the new paradigm, that of the brain as an electrical object, inspired by telegraphic networks. From middle of the 20th century and beyond the computer has now taken this place, where the brain is viewed as carrying out a logical set of instructions and storing them in memory. Obviously throughout time there has been varying perspectives on these metaphors, some have used them loosely as a way of framing how one understands the brain whereas others have used them more strongly and deem them congruent to the brain.

Now the complexity of the brain is much more nuanced than these reductive analogies and the author does really well to consistently highlight this as well as display it through some of the most informative experiments in the history of neuroscience. These have often come about because of pure happenstance, while others from the courage and sacrifice of patients who were searching for any cure/relief from the difficulties certain mental afflictions were causing them. One of the most fascinating experiments is the one where the corpus callosum, the structure of the brain which connects the left hemisphere to the right, has been severed for patients yearning for relief from severe epileptic fits. What has been discovered is truly extraordinary, this severing may produce two minds. The left and the right hemisphere display a good degree of independence from each other. Now they're not completely dependent as the left hemisphere is believed to be the location of the vocalisation of language and this is nicely illustrated in the experiments. This also touches upon another debate around the brain which has been raging for centuries. Is function in the brain localised in specific regions? It's something scientists project onto limited empirical evidence but usually there is something more complex lurking in the background activity in other parts of the brain that strongly suggests this is very much an integrated system.

Another key problem facing the scientific community in trying to understand the brain is that there is no viable theoretical framework in which they can frame their problems. The approach currently is just to collect a deluge of big data which some neuroscientists are very dismissive of because there is no overarching goal or hypothesis in which to guide this collection of experimental data. One major crux of this issue is whether the mind is material and thus the provenance/origin of consciousness. Like most debates within this space materialism is often taken as an implicit assumption and thereby slanting the debate. The author also makes the erroneous statement that no empirical evidence collected so far gives us a non-material explanation. Well duh that's the whole point of it being immaterial and so one needs a framework which can take into this account but obviously that is not possible in the current prevailing paradigm.

I do think one really good logical argument out there against the material nature of the brain is by John Lucas in his work titled Mind, Machines and Godel where he ingeniously utilises Godel's incompleteness theorems to show that the brain is not a logical object and therefore not a computer. This is obviously a logical, not an empirical, argument but I think it was a strong one and perhaps further exploration is warranted to take this perspective further and see how it could be used to develop an innovative framework for neuroscience to use as a theoretical basis. The current two opposite ends of the metaphysical spectrum in framing how we understand the brain are, Descarte's dualistic philosophy, where a part of the brain is immaterial, and this is what gives rise to consciousness or the pure mechanistic conception that the brain is an information machine and thus replicable through experiment. The author says evidence so far points somewhere in the middle of these two, so we won’t be getting conscious AI anytime soon. What we find out by the end is that the brain, which is the most confounding object in the universe known to us, is very much still a mystery. Does the brain only represent information it receives from stimuli or actively construct it? How does consciousness arise? Is the brain purely acting on it's own or is the whole nervous system fundamentally interconnected such that the the constant interaction that the brain has with various parts of the body is vital? Although we have made progress in a historical sense, we're still very much in the dark.

Overall this book is quite a detailed look at the most influential perspectives on the brain provided by scientists and what you will at the very least take away from this book is that the brain is truly an astonishing object without any comparison in the known universe. The structural connectome, a neuronal network with a mind boggling amount of neurons that synchronise in never ending ways, illustrating firing patterns of incredible complexity, form the main processes of the brain. Beyond the maze of the structural connectome you have a plethora of neurohormones which are modulated in their release and thus aid the brain's neurons in constructing ever more complex signals subsequently aiding human perception; the chemistry underlying this is only starting to be explored. Humanity is still very much at the early stages of the exploration of the enigma that is the brain.

[Dan Graser · Rating 4 out of 5]

This dense yet approachable tome from Matthew Cobb delivers exactly on the promise of its title, giving a complete history of how humans have attempted to understand the most complex thing in the universe, the human brain. The dependence on metaphor with current technology is an interesting recurrence and though approaches a more accurate and graspable notion, never really does justice to the subject at hand.

The work is divided into three obvious sections, Past, Present, and Future. The first section is by far the largest and if you are not familiar with the many well-known and ridiculously obscure names associated with this field, this section will fill that gap in your knowledge but be advised that the names and experiments come at you fast and furious which makes for very dense reading. "Present," details much of the specialized work going on in the fields and sub-specialties that arose from the previous sections' studies. Again this is wonderful material that will bring you up to date as well as dispel some of the common notions that get tossed around by gurus and pseudo-spiritual idiots (i.e...are you more right brained or left brained?) as well as providing some amusing anecdotes as to where studies using the latest technology have had to check themselves (the fMRI study on the dead salmon takes the cake here).

Of course in a work such as this there is a section on consciousness. And once again, I am glad to see that no one has a coherent definition of this, studies of the brain's relation to consciousness are thus fraught with issues based purely on arbitrary definitions (mostly from non-scientists), and as a result, providing any satisfactory universal answer to this question is like trying to hit a bullet, with another bullet, fired from two passing trains so that each bullet deflects onto a nail and piece of jello, respectively, and nails them to a wall on a third passing train. I tend to the materialist side of things here and think that woo-woo idiots keep making the definition more mysterious in the face of mounting physical evidence, just my two cents, and Cobb does everything he can to make this Mississippi mud pie of an issue as intellectually healthy as possible.

The final section deals with the future of brain study and though Cobb is modest and doesn't pretend to portend in any great detail, I still felt this section could have been longer without sacrificing intellectual modesty on his part. Also, quite obviously this section is the one based mostly on opinion and avid readers in this area may find material with which to disagree here (I for one think he underplays the significance of connectome studies as well as Daniel Dennett's contributions as a philosopher of the mind). However this does not take away from the work's success at providing great historical context and bringing the lay reader up to date on humanity's studies of the brain. This is a dense volume but one that those with a passing interest in the subject will greatly enjoy.

[Benjamin · Rating 4 out of 5]

All of this book is good, most of this book is great, and -- unlike most books with 'Neuroscience' in the title -- this book has tons of things you have definitely not read anywhere else, all of it worth knowing.

Matthew Cobb gives a history of the way that people think of the brain; the metaphors, heuristics, and lists of questions that investigators pursue. It describes not only the history of brain science, but the traps that even some of the greatest scientists have fallen into, and the general principles of how these traps form. The book is a pleasure to read, well and honestly researched, and -- in the great majority-- carefully edited.

[Jurij Fedorov · Rating 3 out of 5]

Introduction
4/10

Rather boring and pointless.

PAST

1. Heart
7/10

I’m not sure I fully followed his ideas. It’s a lot of historical figures with various theories. Largely they said the heart was the cognition. But in the 1500th century the brain is the cognition idea started to become the main one. It’s not clear when what happened. But the heart theory is fascinating as you can clearly see people are thinking with their brain when someone gets a brain injury. All very weird. He doesn’t explain with clear logic why the brain was not considered the main thinking part from the start. He gets into it, but it’s not really convincing.


2. Forces
7/10

17th to 18th century. Now the brain is really seen as the center of control. Writers imagine the human body being like a machine or clock like the ones they see around them in that time. But the theory of forces controlling the body also comes up again. As it makes sense that some forces are guiding us. There is also some talk of instincts and the similarity to animals even though such books often get banned - and therefore also get more popular actually. These are books questioning the soul and going into mechanistic explanations. But it seems like the soul and forces are still dominating the debate.

The chapter is a bit weaker than the last one. I feel even more confused. The author often talks about how people overall were thinking or what a certain person was thinking. Yet it’s hard to understand who thought what and who these writers were. I guess I should assume they were popular people and that most people had the same ideas? I’m not sure that’s the case.

3. Electricity
7/10

Electricity is seen as the force of life. As electricity experiments are popular it makes sense to make these conclusions. Then as we experiment on animals and see muscles move via electricity it makes sense to conclude that this is the power of the soul.

4. Function
8/10

We are getting into the actual science and not just loose philosophy. Now people are looking into animal brains and even studying people who have brain injuries in certain parts of the brain. Which makes scientists like Broca find brain areas responsible for certain instincts like the language center.


Brain size and intelligence correlation is mentioned. And then brain size, intelligence and race. But the author is clearly not knowledgeable on this area so he just calls this “racist” and lazily moves on. Which is a shame because this research is by far the most interesting part of the chapter for any modern reader. It’s a huge debate point in 2021.

5. Evolution
6,5/10

According to the author, some ideas are good and some are evil or bad. He doesn’t really explain why some ideas are “bad” whatever he means by it. They just are. At times he attacks outdated thinking and in other parts he attacks ideas that are still supported by most experts today. I looked up a source the author used and saw that the source called a person and his theories “evil”. I guess he’s just directly reprinting personal opinions?

The chapter itself is about Darwin and other thinkers and how we started to search for similarities in animal brains. Brain centers are mentioned, but many deny them. Darwin’s theory is not used to research brain modules until much later. I assume he implies evolutionary psychology that appeared in the 1980's. It’s quite a slump for sure.

6. Inhibition
6,5/10

Freud and drugs. Didn’t really get it.

7. Neurons
6/10

Neurons and how the brain supposedly worked with signals. People just discovered neurons and imagined how it worked, but no one knew for sure.

8. Machines
6/10

Crude machines and how they were used to illustrate how the brain works.

9. Control
5,5/10

Brain a machine. This philosophy is now boring. It’s not the cool creative philosophy of the past. Rather people are trying to actually explain how the brain works. So it’s largely statements like: the brain is like a computer, the brain calculates things, the brain reacts but can also be made to not react.

It’s not the glorious old super theories explaining everything and using the very little old research they have. Now philosophers are afraid of making huge claims as we know how the brain DOESN’T work. Of course we still even now, in 2021, don’t understand how the brain works. So these bigshot philosophers trying to sound clever just sound like noise making machines. They also promise that brains will be recreated via programming.

PRESENT

10. Memory
6,5/10

Memory. Very basic stuff. A bit of a letdown, it's this basic. He goes over some of the big new experiments, but we don’t learn much about what memory is or how it works.

11. Circuits
6,5/10

It is history, but it’s modern “we don’t know” science history. It’s about brain connections and how we actually still don’t know anything about them.

12. Computers
6,5/10

How computer AI works. Very short intro. There are some points about how AI researchers see the brain, but brains are totally different from programs. Also, we don't know how AI works so the research is not used to understand the brain as even simple AI is too complicated to understand.

The chapter feels like a summary of a ton of docs and ideas I've read before. Yet it's kinda dry. I rather read a more fun intro to this stuff. And if you watch docs on brain studies you already know most of this.

13. Chemistry
6/10

About modern drugs and how we don't know how they work. Kinda boring to be fair even though it's full of info.

14. Localisation
7/10

This is better. He spends a few paragraphs pointing out men and women have different brains and explains that brain regions are not completely independent. Still not great deep info, but it's fine.

15. Consciousness
7/10

How modern philosophers describe consciousness. The definitions are frankly pointless to read about as it’s just random people with opinions. The split brain studies are interesting, but I know that already. This book is kinda basic.

FUTURE
6/10

Predictions about future computer and human interaction. Kinda pointless and shallow. It’s the typical floofy guesswork that doesn’t really explain much.

My final opinion on the book

It’s a fine enough intro for beginners. A book about how various generations understood the brain. It’s largely loose philosophy with hundreds of names and mini stories about people focusing on how they felt and thought about the world. It’s all focused on personal ideas, but most didn’t stand the test of time and even the modern ones are not as scientific as most other research fields.

The main thing about the book, and why I think it’s a bit weak, is that it’s made up of two different books. One is a historical intro to brain ideas. Then the second half is about modern perception of the brain. While the history of course is interesting to understand, the modern research chapters are a step down in entertainment and you read about small studies explaining minor details. It’s also just too long all combined. I would have enjoyed a book about only modern research. But reading 2 books in one is too much. In many parts I just couldn’t keep focus on the audiobook.

It’s weird how the most interesting thing about the book is ancient research yet that’s just 1 single chapter! The remaining 14 chapters is largely research max 300 years old. I would have really enjoyed a book about ancient history and this feels like it should have been it. The writing style is just dry and humourless enough to not really engage you unless you really like the topic. It’s also waaaaay too many name drops.

It’s a good book with a lot of small ideas. But it’s not a fun book. It tries 2 things at once that end up working against each other and make it too long. If you are new to this topic I think you’ll enjoy it. But while I felt like it was fun at the beginning I figured out after some chapters that this is largely just outdated philosophy.

[Mehtap exotiquetv · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dieses Buch vereint alle wichtigen Forschungen aus Neurowissenschaften und stellt einen Kontext her, der mir zuvor nicht bekannt war. Von der historischen Bedeutung des Gehirns und dessen Wandel, lernt man geschichtlich viel über die Entwicklung des Feldes.
Es hat mich sehr oft zum Nachdenken gebracht weil der Autor in vielen Aspekten was die Vergangenheit, das Jetzt und der Zukunft valide Kritik äußert.
Wie weit ist dieses Hirn-Feld, was wissen wir und was wissen wir noch nicht? Auf was sollten wir in Zukunft einen Augenmerk werfen, damit wir beispielsweise Menschen mit ernsthaften Erkrankungen helfen können.
Gerade das Kapitel mit Bewusstsein fand ich besonders gut weil er deutlich hervorbringt, dass NIEMAND Ahnung darüber hat, wie es funktioniert und wo es im Gehirn verankert ist. Und überhaupt ob es wichtig ist, dass wir das wissen müssen. Und ob es nicht besser ist diese Debatte wichtigerer Themen gegenüber zu opfern.

Finde diese literarische Arbeit bemerkenswert und kann es jedem empfehlen, der sich für Neurowissenschaften grundsätzlich in seiner vollen Bandbreite interessiert.

[Sophie F · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thorough and readable history of brain science, which does not shy away from admitting how little is understood about brain function despite centuries of research. However, cobb is quite dismissive of human/connectome/neuroimaging approaches in favour of his own field of simple model organisms - I felt more could have been done to explore future potential of the study of the human brain.

[Alina Cristina · Rating 3 out of 5]

So many thoughts about this book!
To start with: I did not like it. I did not like the unchallenged focus on the western history of neuroscience. There were so many other stories worth telling!
As a neuroscientist myself I found it frustrating to be reading the same old selection of stories. At some point I even thought about giving up and questioned why was this book even written. The history chapters didn't add anything new. Moreover, it seemed to strengthen the view that the only opinions worth talking about are those of white rich men from the West. Sure, we'll briefly mention other cultures but only to say that they were wrong. And yeah let's add a female voice, some rich lady at a dinner party who agreed with one of the big men, as a "yes, women did have thoughts, but we're only going to talk about the acceptable ones". Also, no mention of the contributions of early brain studies on the biological basis of racism, the consequences of which we are still seeing today.
Even on the purely scientific side, I felt that big chunks of neuroscience were missing, conveniently left out when they didn't suit. For example, reducing the whole idea of brain chemistry to a big, biased rant about psychedelics and later mental health made me want to throw the book at a wall. Another one was using the chapter on localization to discuss the mistakes in fMRI research, while at the same time using it to make an entirely unnecessary and random stab at the debate around gender differences in the brain. While also conveniently forgetting there's more to human neuroscience than fMRI and PET.
Urgh.
The only reason this gets 3 stars and not less is the final chapter, which was quite good. Or maybe I am also quite biased, because it did align with some of my views on the future of neuroscience...

[Elari · Rating 4 out of 5]

🌞

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and informative but rather heavy-going if you're not a scientist. And of course it took me so long to work my way through it that early chapters are a bit hazy now.

[Piet van den Berg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book gives an overview of neuroscience, from the past to the present day. If I took anything away from this book, it is how very little we know. This is illustrated by many examples throughout the (second part of the) book, about our understanding of brain circuits, brain chemistry, brain localization, and so on. The example that struck me most is the work that has been done to understand the neuronal circuits that produce the crunching of the lobster's stomach. Decades of work have been dedicated to the functioning of this circuit of about 30 neurons, and we still lack a global understanding of how it works. One of the more theoretical insights that stuck with me is that the brain is not a thing that was designed - it is a thing that was tinkered with over evolutionary time. Therefore, we should not expect to uncover some overall governing principle or hope to devise some grand theory of the brain, but we should be happy with bits and pieces of understanding that can hopefully fit together in a coherent fashion some day, and provide us with an understanding that, if not general, would at least be more complete. The book itself also struck me as 'bits and pieces' sometimes. It felt like relatively small oases of insight divided by vast deserts of conceptual drought - even if the author has organized the book around a relatively small number of general themes. But then it struck me that this is the state of neuroscience (and this is also what the author himself keeps emphasizing): an integrated understanding is very, very, very far off. To me, this was a valuable insight to take away, and it emphasized the importance of psychology rather than neuroscience to tell us more about human behaviour. And overall, the book is pleasantly written and taught me about many (recent) advances that I did not know anything about.

[Joris · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great overview of the field of neuroscience, focused on its historic development and our present state of understanding.

For most of history (up until Roman times), it was believed our thought and emotion are housed in the heart. Then in more recent centuries, scientists experimented and tried to understand the brain by comparing it with the most advanced technologies of the time: hydraulics, telegraphs, computers, etc. But it looks like none provide a great model. The computer, with its separated hardware and software and set logical structures, is too different from the integrated "wetware" of our brain, with deep interconnected networks of extreme non-linear complexity, constant morphing of physical structure, and functional transformations based on the flows of countless chemicals.

Our limited understanding of the brain is a general conclusion of the book. Even small neuron systems, such as that controlling the stomach movements of a crustacean (30 neurons), are currently too complex for us to fully understand or model. For the human brain (86 billion neurons), the complexity is such that it's not clear we'll build a deep understanding this century. At this moment, we have a mechanical understanding at micro level (the basic functioning of small amounts of neurons), a rough organizational view at macro level (primarily a coarse sense of the localities of certain functions), and some functional theories (e.g. that our conscious brain often post-rationalizes decisions which are really already made by unconscious parts of our brain).

The book made me feel like we're exploring an advanced alien technology, of a complexity far beyond our own and evolved organically without logical principle, experimenting on it and theorizing about it to somewhat limited success. Regardless, the experiments are fascinating, as are the pieces of understanding we do have. While I thought the book was a little too heavy on the past (vs. the present), it's a very worthwhile introduction to the topic.

[Ashar Malik · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is well written and chronologically lists in a very coherent way, how our understanding of the matter inside our skulls has changed. My reason for buying this book was simply to understand how far along have we come, and now having read this work, I must say that I am thoroughly disappointed (obviously no fault of the author). The brain is a fascinating thing, and as our approaches have improved over the ages (especially in the last 200 years), our questions about the brain have not been answered at a similar pace, they have perhaps only morphed into more refined ones. Some might call this improvement, but the void in our understanding of this fantastic organ remains just as wide. This book does an amazing job of documenting the most important developments in the field of neuroscience, and I would recommend it everyone.

[Mishehu · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a word: wow!

The Idea of the Brain is one of the finest pop science books I've ever read in any science field, including the one that forms the book's focus: the brain/mind sciences. Though not a thorough history of this field of inquiry/investigation, it's an extremely cogent and fascinating sketch history of the highlights. The book is no mere collection of facts, however. Cobb guides the reader step by step to a clear understanding of how humankind's understanding of the mind/brain has evolved; what the state of our understanding is today; and where this exceedingly fertile area of speculation and research may be heading. And he's crystal clear in distinguishing fact from speculation -- placing some of the bolder claims from certain quarters of the contemporary brain/mind sciences in appropriately skeptical perspective. I learned an immense amount from this book, and enjoyed every moment I spent reading it.

A closing word: phenomenal!

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant overview of how humans have conceptualised the link between the mind, animating force and the brain/physical sciences. From Aristotelian notions through to McCulloch Pitts Neurons and Crustacean Stomach Neural Nets!

I think this book provides a pretty fair take and isnt imposing any interpretation dogmatically on the historical ideas it expounds on. Really informative for catching up on some of the biggest discoveries over the past hundred years and the most promising research now and, potentially, for understanding where we might be erring in our attempts to reduce everything to one narrow paradigm.

[Sasha Mircov · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the discourse on artificial intelligence hits the fever pitch, it is worth taking a moment to understand not just the thing those systems are trying to emulate but the very thing that created them - the brain. In "The Idea of the Brain," Matthew Cobb does a great job taking the reader through historical and contemporary understandings of the brain. Both entertaining and informative, the book is excellent material to give your brain a rest from the ongoing AI drama.

[Chandler Lane · Rating 5 out of 5]

A look into the history of thought on the brain and how it functions. This book was such a crazy insight into how far we have come in our thinking about the brain and how little we still know. While the future is unknown it is also incredibly promising but for the moment we have seemed to stall out in our ability to further understand the complex nature of the brain.

[Paola Rubiano Buitrago · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good approach into how humanity is trying to understand its own mind.. Or the brain understand itself?.. Apparently we know way less that we thought.. And the tools we got are getting less and less reliable and scientists are getting more divided with each discovery despite all the international cooperation in the matter.. The chapter on circuits got a little too dense.. But as a Chemist the one on brain chemistry was mind blowing (pardon my pun)

[Katherine Odegaard · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm more of a 'what's what' than a 'who's who' kind of person, so this book felt like it was more about who made discoveries with less focus on the discoveries themselves. While interesting to me as a neuroscientist, it may not be as friendly a read to others. I did like the part about the guy who was faking being a scientist and was later whacked by the mob.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely adored this. Filled with so much nuance and humour. A really interesting insight into how the theories of the brain have evolved over hundreds of years as well as facing how little we really do know. Highly recommend.

[Rahim Hashim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fairly comprehensive overview of the major philosophical theories and experimental research describing (or at least attempting to describe) the mind. The book jumps between being ordered chronologically and sectioned by subfields, which was a bit disorienting at times, but overall interesting and enjoyable.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of philosophy. And computers, despite one of the author’s main points being that you shouldn’t compare the brain to a computer.