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.