Chapter 5 is the best one for me!

Interesting, not too deep, has good quick overviews of studies. In the second to last and last chapters he talks about how we can use new neuroscience and psychology findings to improve the prison systems (i.e., don't send everyone to prison, have more nuanced punishments) which was very interesting.

Do you believe in libertarian free will or Cartesian dualism? If so, David Eagleman’s Incognito will radically challenge your beliefs.

Incognito is probably the best work of nonfiction that I have read this year (2011), and it is also one of the best books on neuroscience that I have read in quite some time. Some of the material here has been presented elsewhere (if you have read works on neuroscience or consciousness by scientists and philosophers like Antonio Damasio, V. S. Ramachandran, Joseph Ledoux, Alva Noe, Patricia Churchland, and Daniel Dennett, much of the material in Incognito will be familiar to you), but Eagleman does an amazing job of showing how processes below the level of conscious awareness control much of our behavior and actually make us who we are.

One of the most frightening yet enlightening case studies that Eagleman discusses in this book is that of a man who had been married for twenty years and lived a normal, law-abiding life when, suddenly and unexpectedly, this man developed an intense interest in child pornography and even attempted to solicit sex from a very young prostitute: this middle-aged heterosexual man suddenly found that he was a pedophile (although he never actually raped a child). At the same time as his sexual appetites were changing, he also began having very bad headaches, so his wife took him to see a physician, and eventually he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. When the tumor was removed, both his headaches and his problem with pedophilia disappeared. About a year later, however, the headaches returned, and so did his sexual interest in children. He returned to the neurologist, and it was discovered that his original tumor had not been completely removed and had started growing again, and upon cutting out the tumor a second time, he again lost his sexual interest in children.

Another example of a tumor causing a sudden change in behavior that Eagleman discusses is that of, Charles Whitman, who in 1966 killed 16 people (and wounded 32 others) on the campus of the University of Texas. Prior to the shooting, Whitman’s behavior had begun to change dramatically, and he felt that something was wrong with him. In the suicide note he wrote before committing his mass murder, he asked that he be autopsied when he died. When an autopsy was carried out, a tumor was found to have been growing and pressing against his amygdala; the amygdala plays a key role in regulating aggression, fear, and social behavior. Whitman’s friends testified to the fact that, in the months leading up to the shooting, he had not really been himself. Whitman himself wrote, in his suicide note, that he no longer felt like himself and that he was struggling with violent urges that he could no longer control. Had he not had this tumor, it is almost certain that Whitman would not have become a killer.

Eagleman presents numerous other examples which show that our behavior and personalities are determined to a much greater extent by physiological and chemical processes than the ordinary layperson might think. However, Eagleman also pays due respect to the effects of the environment in which we live as a factor in shaping our very selves, but as he points out, we can no more control the environment in which we find ourselves than we can control the physiological and chemical processes that cause our brains to grow and change.

This book is not meant to be an argument against free will. It is not a philosophical treatise. What it is is a fascinating synthesis of the biological basis of the self and of consicousness. I highly, highly recommend it.

Interesting read! A lot of examples are reused in his later 2015 book “The Brain,” but this work stands out for its engagement with the legal and social implications of neuroscience.

Unimpressed. Very short and intended for the extremely clueless about modern psychology. The author could have done much more with the topic, but alas..

An interesting book, apart from the weird chapter on how to "cure" criminality