Reviews

A masterpiece. The best of its kind and beautifully crafted. Alluring story telling, building to a penetrating understanding of what it is to be uniquely human. Ramachandran is the foremost pioneer the Galileo of neurocognition. --Allan Snyder, FRS, Director of the Centre for the Mind

With arguably less name recognition than Oliver Sacks (The Mind's Eye, etc.), neurologist Ramachandran (A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness) covers similar ground for a similar audience, seeking to explain how a normal human brain works by studying individuals with unusual neurological problems. His strength is in constructing relatively simple experiments in order to test his ideas and theories about complex perceptual and behavioral abnormalities. Actor/narrator David Drummond presents the material with much more verve than one might expect from such a specialized and technical topic. Illustrations and figures from the text are retrievable as "bonus material" from the audio CDs. An appealing exploration of a fascinating subject; recommended wherever Sacks does well. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/10; the Norton pb will be released in March 2012.-Ed.]-Kristen L. Smith, Loras Coll. Lib., Dubuque, IA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.