It's not me, it's me!

Eagleman, David. Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011.

Reading Incognito took me a while, partly because I was preoccupied and partly because I wasn't sure I'd get anything new out of it. Some of the material is very similar to that in other books I've read recently: the contribution of the emotional side of the brain in How We Decide and the chicken sexers in Moonwalking with Einstein. Looking back on those reviews, I see that those books reminded me of others. Is there a finite amount of brain knowledge to recycle?

Of course not, given the complexity of the brain. Accordingly, there's enough new in this effort to make it worth considering. There are simple points that surprise, such as the figure that demonstrates the "blind spot" in your eye and how smart your brain is to fill in an appropriate background pattern. Eagleman also sprinkles in funny bits with a purpose--how strippers' tips correlate to their fertility levels, for example.

The second half of the book brings the serious theses, examining how competing "programs" in the brain can make you not seem like you sometimes (e.g., when intoxicated or tumor-ridden) and how that concept and related ideas could help form a new means of dealing with criminals. I'm not sure what will come of Eagleman's ideas, but they definitely seem worth thinking about. We have these fancy brains, after all.

Rating: **1/2