Frontier Psychiatrist

David Eagleman

How do baseball players catch fly balls? Is Mel Gibson really Anti-Semitic? Are murderers culpable for their crimes? Did Pink Floyd read Carl Jung?

These are some of the questions raised in Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, a new book in which David Eagleman blends his expertise as a neuroscientist with his skill as a fiction writer to produce a lively primer on brain science for the layperson. Imagine a talk show hosted by Oliver Sacks and Nick Hornby (or the editors of Frontier Psychiatrist).

Eagleman is best known for Sum, a short story collection that ponders the existence of God. In Incognito, he turns to the secular and argues that our notion of reality is a fiction.  We believe we control our bodies and minds when in fact we’re slaves to our brains, which dictate not only how we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch, but how we act, feel, and think. Forget objective reality. Forget God. Forget the soul.  Forget free will. What we call existence occurs within a three-pound ball of nerves, mostly without our awareness. If our brains are ships, our conscious minds are mere passengers, oblivious to the complex mechanisms that ferry us across the sea of life.

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