7 1/2 Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett 2020

If you’re a regular reader of BookMarks, you’ve probably noticed that I rarely write a negative book review.  I can almost always find at least find some redeeming feature in every book.  That’s in part because I don’t like to be negative but primarily because I have become increasingly adept at quitting a book when I become bored, frustrated, or angry while reading it.

I came close to abandoning Barrett’s book several times but persevered thinking that it would improve or at least that I would learn some important lessons about the brain.  In retrospect, I’m not sure that was the right call on my part.

Part of my frustration with this book is that the author’s a bit too cute with her wry observations in parentheses scattered liberally through the text and her dumbing down the content.  Admittedly, she provides an in depth explanation of the neuroscience in a long Appendix, but by that time, I had lost interest.  Her observations, puncturing long held myths about the brain, did open some new avenues of understanding for me—the brain as network, tuning and pruning, free will, social reality—but I found her metaphors to often be offputting.

Overall, the book achieved its mission by teaching me lessons, but the frustration in getting there was not quite worth the effort.  Can’t recommend this one.