Eagleman's examination of consciousness vs. unconsciousness is crafted with poetic language capable of kindling a sense of simultaneous awe and pride in the structure of the brain, balanced by some troubling explorations of free will in the light of recent neuroscientific findings.

3.5 stars out of 5. It's just irreverent enough to read like "pop science" and just serious enough to be educational.

Swapped out Ramachandran's Tell-Tale Brain for this book this semester in my Physio Psych class. Really enjoyed it and several students reported blowing ahead in the assigned chapters because they loved it so much.

Fascinating. I could have used this when I was writing my college thesis.

I enjoyed the first half of this book and sort of hated the second half. The descriptions and studies on the brain were fascinating but his views on how we can use this information or what it means in the grand scheme of who we are as people were hard to stomach.

As is my way, I struggle with non-fiction though I love what I learn from it. Such a strange catch-22. I really enjoyed the examples and the oddities about our minds that we didn't know about ourselves. At times he lost me as he would casually discuss one topic and dumb it down for us and then suddenly he would launch into a brief but spastic academic rant. (Or maybe it just felt that way to me as I read this over my morning coffee.) For example you would be reading along, "...and the mechanics involved with our memory and conciousness (okay) is a phenomena of such quantum entanglement and superposition that theory and relativity contradict each other (what in the sam hell?! whose theory? relativity? wait. i've got to re-read this bit. bastard caught me off guard)" But I was in awe more often then I was frustrated so it was definitely worth it for me to muddle through parts where my eyes glazed over temporarily.

I really enjoyed the first half of this book. It delves into neurodevelopment and neurochemistry in fascinating, readable ways. Unfortunately (for this reader), the 2nd half of the book is something akin to a treatise on criminal law for the neurologically impaired. That's a worthy subject, it's just not really what I expected to be reading and it was a marked difference from the first half of the book. My interest really waned.

Started off as a dry but interesting exploration of subconscious activity. However, Eagleman sneakily shifted to use his research to defend a thesis on the treatment, not punishment, of criminals. While he makes some good points about our current criminal justice system, I don't necessarily agree with this premise, since it relies on the notion that murder is like Tourette's, an impulse that people lack any control over. I would have given it 3 stars but the way he writes comes across as manipulative, and I don't necessarily trust that he presented a balanced picture of the science.

This book had it all - some fun activities to see the shortcomings of the brain, fun and insightful facts, and some serious questions about where the future of the brain and our knowledge about it will take us. The author used language that was easily understandable without watering it down too much. Great book!