The invention of the MRI ushered in a new era of brain research that is still ongoing. This book covers the latest research and cutting edge techniques across a wide variety of topics include brain machine interfaces, mental illness, memory, medication, and artificial intelligence. Woven throughout the book is the somewhat unconvincing author's theory of consciousness: an entity that can create a model of the world and simulate its future in it. Unfortunately like many sections of the book, the nitty gritty details and in depth exploration are hand waved around. Of course once we have self replicating robots we can exponentially explore the universe by encoding a human and sending it on a laser beam to reassemble our mind and control a surrogate body on some distant receiving station, since none of that violates the laws of physics. When talking about current research and discoveries the book is very approachable and well written but when looking to the future it suffers from overoptimism ignoring many details.

The intersection of science and science fiction. I enjoyed his information about the science vs the fiction behind SF possibilities.

Michio Kaku goes far beyond The Future of the Mind in his book of that title. Kaku rapidly jumps topics that explore not only the mind but human existence and space exploration, with a loose glue of "mind". He offers functional suggestions of how we may advance mental power, both on an individual and global basis. He then proceeds into ideas of artificial super intelligence, which naturally leads to robotics and an exploration of the dangers and benefits this kind of technology may bring. Finally, he reaches into space touching on both alien intelligence and how humanity may send our own consciousness into the great beyond.

The Future of the Mind is optimistic and dreamy, providing a plethora of ideas about the mind, giving a surface exploration of a few, but leaving many as vague speculations without much scientific analysis.

For people unacquainted with the functions of the mind and the ideas of ASI, perhaps this book would have a lot more to offer in terms of jumping off points for further exploration. For me, the book lacked depth and provided only a feeble amount of the science I was hoping for.

Fascinating

Even if I'd read it as soon as it came out it would still have felt vague and outdated because I keep up with the latest science news. For example, it was well known before 2013-2014 that the whole wolf pack/alpha male view was disproven because the original studies were on non-related captive wolf packs and not wild packs which consist of parent and their offspring.

Certain topics were interesting (consciousness, aliens, quantum mechanics), others lacked detail (telepathy, telekenesis), and others I downright disagreed with (can the mind be controlled, AI, reverse engineering the brain).

S'aright

brilliant collection of knowledge about our miracle in the head