Lone Frank is an award-winning journalist, science writer, and TV presenter. She has a Ph.D. in neuroscience and has done some science research in Denmark and the U.S. This is her first book.

This book was recommended by reviewers as bringing up to date the findings of neuroscience. The science journals I get and the science web sites that I often look at have been full of articles that have described, and often shown pictures of, the many neuroscience studies of the brains of primates as well as humans, usually using fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and other body probes. These relatively short magazine or web articles present new data but seldom describe the implications of the studies – what they tell us about the workings of the brain. Seeing pictures of how, where, and when the brain reactions occur (or “lights up”) with neuronal activity is certainly interesting, but the big picture of what this means is usually given slight attention, if any. So I had hoped that this very recent book would include such, but I was disappointed. Another aspect of this book also disappointed me. It was written in first person, so a fair portion of it described Lone Frank’s travels and other personal aspects that were not relevant to describing the latest work done by the most active “neuroscientists in the news.” She has visited and interviewed very many of them, so her book is well described as a significant collection of interviews of important neuroscientists whose studies have been regarded as being at the frontier of the many amazing recent brain scans.

One aspect of her own mindset is made clear early on – she is an atheist who admires the work and books by the very outspoken atheists Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris. This is significant in a book about the brain, for it tells us that she is also one who believes in reductionism or determinism – a bottom-up approach to science that ignores top-down aspects that are considered as present and very significant by all theologians and by many philosophers and scientists. Some have described reductionism as similar to the Newtonian mechanistic worldview that science consists of a bottom-up approach: from physics to chemistry to biochemistry to biology to … to neuroscience to humanity and to the brain. For example, this worldview means that all chemistry can ultimately, if not currently, be described by physics. The fact that this doesn’t work even within physics seems to be ignored by most biologists and neuroscientists, according to most philosophers, theologians and physicists. In general terms, the bottom-up approach recognizes that new concepts that play no role at a lower level can “emerge” as a system goes to a higher complexity. For example, the physics of interacting particles (like protons, neutrons, and electrons in forming atoms or molecules) does not need the necessary thermodynamic concepts of temperature or entropy that emerge when describing many-body effects among atoms or molecules. At the level of Newtonian physics, space and time are absolute (which Einstein proved to be wrong) and there are no quantum physics effects that need be considered. I expect biology and neuroscience to someday advance beyond the oversimplifications and the very important omissions of the reductionism worldview they seem to presently be clinging to.

Back to the specifics of Lone Frank’s book, there are two instances where I felt her description did not go far enough. One involves “mirror neurons” – the fairly recent observation that the way the brain lights up for the primate (or person) doing something is accurately mirrored by a primate (or person) who is observing the activity. This is seen by neuroscientists who compare fMRI images of the “doer” and the observer. This caused quite a bit of excitement among neuroscientists a few years ago and it has now been confirmed by many. But there was no discussion of an aspect that occurred to me: Is there any difference between the two brain patterns? Or, could one tell who was the “doer” and who was the observer? If not, then reading the fMRI brain scans cannot be called “mind reading” since the two persons surely know whether they were the “doer” or the observer! The other instance involves a person ducking when an object is thrown at him. New fMRI studies showed that the part of the brain that they call the “visual part” lights up 250 milliseconds after the person ducked. Unless they plan to ignore causality, then neuroscientists must realize that the delayed brain response cannot be the initial brain response. There has to be some earlier visual brain response since one does not duck before seeing an object thrown towards one! These are but two examples of observations for which there was no discussion in this book of the implications of the observations. This is why I rated the book as I did.