The Human Brain: A Guided Tour

I have thoroughly enjoyed the Science Master Series, but I found this book to be the weakest so far. I would identify the following as problems: the use of illustrations is poor. It contains illustrations that do not advance the material and it does not contain illustrations that could help quite a bit. The most irritating oversight is the frequent reference to previously covered material The citing would be useful except it identifies only the chapter in which the material is covered. Nor are the instances cited contained in the index. This strikes me as extremely cavalier editing. Greenfield cites work done with Aplysia (just try to find where that might be in the book) without mentioning Nobel laureate Eric Kandel or his discoveries about long term memory. While the material was very interesting to me it seemed like too much of a patchwork with little thought given to consistency or how the reader might navigate the material.

As an easy to read overview of the brain and its functions this book is great. I like the systems within systems approach especially.

Her approach of integrating the 'top down' (brain functions) with the 'bottom up' (cellular mechanism) is very clear and easy to read. Besides, she cited many interesting examples in explaining how the brain gets malfunction. However, it would be much more clear in conveying the message if she can use more graphical representations instead of text description. (In that case I will rate it a FIVE STARS without hesitation!) All in all, it is still a marvelous book to enjoy!

IT'S A VERY GOOD OR PEOPLE WHO ARE INTERESTED IN BRAIN BUT NOT BIOLOG

Great book for the "rest of us". The language is clear, and the content VERY interesting. I highly recommend it, if it's one of your first experiences with Brain/Mind issues. Read it.