Really good and interesting book laying out the many facts and details of the brain.The information was laid out well and built onto itself clearly. Would recommend!

BRAINSCAPES

A number of topics are already old hat for neuroscience books. Indeed, it’s almost as if they follow a template:

- Describe the parts of the brain.
- Describe what those parts of the brain do.
- Explain how we’ve come to know these things from examples of people with impaired brain function in those parts (citing anecdotes accordingly).

Brainscapes: The Warped Wondrous Maps Written in Your Brain—And How They Guide You by Rebecca Schwarzlose covers similar ground, albeit with a difference. As the title suggests, her point of departure is how different parts of the brain interact in order to allow us to perceive, to move, to recall, to imagine, or even to comprehend the abstract.

Inasmuch as we are able to identify what specific parts of the brain are for, we often take for granted that multiple sections of the brain operate in unison to carry out specific functions—the old canard that “neurons that fire together are wired together.” Interestingly, however, we can actually map out how this happens with respect to how our brain translates what we sense into the things that we see, hear, touch, taste or smell. We can also map out how our brains carry out what we would describe as cognitive functions. Such maps are what Schwarzlose describes as “brainscapes”: the distorted representations of reality that occupy your brain maps and dictate what you perceive.”

“A map is a spatial representation of something else,” Schwarzlose writes. “Therefore, a brain map is a spatial representation in the brain of something else.”

It’s a fascinating perspective, and one that Schwarzlose argues is the evolutionary response to a biological problem: providing the most efficient brains given the fragility of the human body. The solution that nature appears to have settled upon is to give the brain the ability to sometimes specialize its functions and sometimes to have those functions distributed. Hence, if we pay attention to the different parts of the brain that are involved in cognition or perception it is possible to infer what is being thought about or sensed.

Of course, it is clear that this is a lot easier said than done. Just the same, Schwarzlose paints a portrait of how remarkable our brains are—even when it has been proven that our brain has built-in tendencies to deceive us. She notes, “I am struck by the significance of this simple idea: our brainscapes embody the world’s place in each of us.” No doubt anyone reading Brainscapes will be similarly awed and appreciative.

I don't know about you but I've always been fascinated by the human brain!

So this book was the perfect fascinating read to satisfy my quest to learn more about it!

I learned so much thanks to this book and all of the amazing information I found in it, it's definitely the kind of non-fiction book I'll need to get back to and reference back to in the future, cause I'm sure I'm gonna go look for more of it.

This book is about the wonderful interplay between our brains and our environments, as negotiated by our senses and mapped into our the neurons in our brains.

It's a bit geeky, in a good way—comparing the visual and sensory maps of different species is fascinating. It also raises philosophical and policy questions. Topics include:

✯ How our senses affect our understanding of not only the world, but also abstract ideas, like numbers and time
✯ How experiences in infancy affect what we perceive later in life
✯ The potential of harvesting “neural data” for commercial uses. (No, I do not want Facebook or Google reading my mind, please.)

The author writes, “Any book worth reading should change how the reader experiences the world, even if only by a little.” This book meets that goal and then some.

There is so much information contained in this book, that I think I will have to read it multiple times. Halfway through I began to imagine what my memory-related brain maps must look like, as my brain maps attempted to store data about brain maps...

This book is all about brain maps, the ways the neurons in your brain are interconnected to represent data about the outside world, and how these maps affect your perceptions of the world around you. Rebecca Schwarzloze is a cognitive neuroscientist, and she excels at explaining the complex functions of the brain, in language that is easy for a non-scientist to understand. She takes the time to use many different examples and analogies to help paint a clear picture of how the brain is representing the information it receives about the outside world. There are twelve main chapters, in which Schwarzlose explains different types brain maps, how they work, why they exist, how they can change, and finally how we have learned to use technology to read and write to these brain maps.

In the first chapter Schwarzlose explains how the first brain maps were discovered by a Japanese scientist studying blindness caused by bullet wounds to the heads of soldiers. The precise measurements of where the brain was damaged, and what visual impairments the soldier had as a result, allowed for a basic understanding of where exactly incoming visual data is mapped onto the brain.

In subsequent chapters, Schwarzlose explains why brain maps exist, and how different brain maps allow you to respond to different sensory inputs. The chapter I enjoyed the most dealt with the technology of brain-computer interfaces, and what they can and cannot do. The ability to decode brain maps in order to determine what sensory data someone is receiving, or to allow for brain-damaged patients to control prosthetic limbs, is all fascinating technology that has so much untapped potential.

This was such an informative and well-written book, and I was very impressed with how well these concepts were explained with everyday examples. Schwarzlose is an excellent communicator, and we need more scientists like this that are able to spread their amazing discoveries to a wider audience.

I received a NetGalley ARC, and this is my honest and voluntary review.

This book is slow to start. The author spends a lot of time (15% of the book) trying to convince the reader that the brain contains maps, and explaining what maps are, and how that relates to brains. I mean, I think you can just say that the brain contains maps? Like, I'm pretty sure that readers are already on board with that concept if they pick up a book where the first sentence of the description is "Your brain is a collection of maps." I couldn't figure out who the author thought her audience was, given that she felt the need to continue to argue and explain that point.

After that, the book gets better. It's pretty dense, with lots of fascinating and detailed information. I wouldn't call it easy to read—if anything, the author's tendency to overexplain made it harder to read. Yet overall, the prose is pretty clear, and the subject matter interesting.

I also found it difficult to read because the formatting of the ARC was a mess. Whenever the letter combination "fi" appeared, the next letter was blanked out, so "final" became "fi al," etc. I'm sure this has been fixed for the published version. Yet it's impossible to say how much of a negative impact this had on my reading experience vs. the content of the book itself. I enjoyed the content of the book, but reading it made me crabby and impatient. I wish academic presses realized what a negative impact poor formatting has on the experience of ARC readers. Would this have been a five-star review if not for the formatting issues? I don't know. I'm human, and part of how I evaluate books is based on how they make me feel. This one annoyed me, so it gets four stars. Readers of the published version may have a better experience.

Science writing for a lay audience is a challenge because unless you're Stephen Hawking you're tasked with making complicated concepts understandable enough and entertaining enough that your readers don't feel lost or bored and give up. For me, though, Brainscapes errs too far on the side of the enthusiastic and the anecdotal. I felt reminded far too often, as I read, that what I was learning about the brain was something I should be very excited about. I would have preferred to have been led to discover my own wonder. This is a Mary Roach kind of science book, and will likely appeal to her readers, but I'm more of a Konrad Lorenz kind of science reader.

Brainscapes is the best introduction to a scientific concept that I ever read. I believe that even a ten-year old can understand most of the book, a level of comprehension which is particularly suitable for outsiders like me. Deep and complicated scientific concepts are explained through stories that really happen, guiding the reader from the time when the word neuroscience didn't exist until the most modern advances, inventions, and discoveries of today. The books is separated into sections according to human senses, treating each of them separately and showing how is the sensual experience and potential dependent on the brain, providing all details that an enthusiast could ever wish for.

What an insightful book. The illustrations were amazing and the fact that everything was back up by existing literature just made this read that much more enjoyable to me. I highly recommend anyone with a passion for neurology and psychology to pick this up, you won’t regret it.

Thank You to Rebecca Schwarzloseand Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, for the digital ARC provided through NetGalley in exchange for a candid review!

This was an interesting book, presenting how the brain "maps" processes (ex: sight, smell) and backedup by the research projects that helped to reveal this information. This book is well written for anyone with a general interest in how our senses work.

This book is intriguing, the concepts are broken down and explained well. The author does a nice job of connecting ideas and resources.

Brainscapes by Rebecca Schwarzlose is a great book very deeply rooted in neurology and psychology. It does a fantastic job bringing the reader through the brain, its functionality, and all of the complex maps that it creates to be able to complete basic life functions such as sight, movement, smell, memory, etc. This book was deeply fascinating and engaging. Highly recommend!

Brainscapes - love the title. :)

This book was a great read for me personally, but I am a psychology buff. I would say that this book would be better read by those that have a little more knowledge/insight into Psychology 101 first before diving into this book so that concepts and ideas are a little more familiar. This is definitely not a book for those that are seeking a lighthearted, nonfiction book to peak their interest - this is more along the lines of a scientific book with descriptions on animal experimentation, which can be triggering/intense for some readers if you weren't aware beforehand what was coming.

A solid 4 star book.

Thank you Netgalley, author, and publisher for providing an ARC of this book!

An informative book, especially for those that are new to the topic. The author takes us through how the brain uses maps to interpret information from our senses, and other concepts such as time and number.

I was a little disappointed as due to the blurb provided about social media and brain manipulation, I was expecting a different book. There are just a few pages on this towards the very end of the book. The books main focus is on the senses and how they operate.

I would also say that if you have studied psychology at school or beyond then a lot of the studies will be familiar to you as she takes the reader through the classic studies of first discoveries. There are also lots of animal experiments which some readers might not want to read.

Thank you to Netgalley, the publisher and author for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

I received a digital review copy of this from the publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt through NetGalley. I set aside another brain book that I finally devoted the time to read (Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow) when this became available.

Our brains make literal maps of everything: visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, olfactory, movement, and many special maps that combine senses and intentions to help us relate to the world. Scientists have also found evidence of crossover neurons in maps, complicating things further - neural responses representing movement in the tactile map and what appear to be touch responses in the movement map. The maps sort out and economize the thinking and non-thinking.

You can thank brain maps for the speed and clarity of your senses, not to mention the fact that you have the headspace to harbor five senses instead of one or two.



I'd read Michio Kaku's 2014 The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind when it came out and he referred to some of the technologies at the time to "read" minds and mimic telekinesis (meaning, controlling consciously with minds). Technology continues to improve with respect to our access and understanding of these maps to the point that scientists have been able to help some suffering from paraplegia to restore rudimentary control over some limbs, even provide extremely limited visual cues to the blind.

This is an easy and yet not so easy read. Schwarzlose writes conversationally but the material may be unfamiliar to most, even readers of the subject. Be warned, though; there are cavalier descriptions of animal experimentations (and not just your average laboratory rats. "In other words, yes, it is possible to open up the brain and see the map in V1, but only with a great deal of effort." is a tamed summary.) This should not be a surprise as how did scientists gain knowledge before the recent advances? Still, she closes with a good observation, which may seem obvious but too often isn't: "Any book worth reading should change how the reader experiences the world, even if only by a little.

On findings of concentrations in the touch maps:

In other words, we feel more than we need to with our faces because our distant ancestors walked on four feet, like the pig, and survived better with faces packed with tough receptors. In this way, our perception of touch is shaped not just by our human bodies and human needs, but by the bodies and needs of the creatures from which we evolved.

More vestigial evidence of of that darned evolution.

On music training and its effect on movement, tactile and auditory maps:

But that does not mean that the brain maps of child musicians are superior to those of their non-musical peers. Piano lessons do not buy your child a better brain. Instead those lessons(or rather the hours of practice that they promote) buy you a brain that is better suited to piano playing and other tasks that require dexterity of the hands.

Take that, Baby Mozart hawkers!

On the evolution of attention... attention makes us better at perceiving particular targets, but worse at perceiving almost everything else. Think of the basketball bounce counting experiment and the surprise visitor (my example, not hers.) Attention is a necessarily finite resource.

There is no reason why a mind couldn't perceive and process all of that [a "firehose of panoramic sensory experience"] information simultaneously. And yet it is patently clear that our minds [as opposed to a hypothetical alien with the ability] cannot. Why is that?
To answer that question, recall the tough tradeoffs inherent in brain evolution. Your brain mustn't be too big or heavy, or demand too much fuel. Brain maps are one of nature's solutions to this problem - a way to reap the most from a finite brain.



On the understanding of the maps

Knowledge about a representation is a powerful thing. That;s because once you know how something is represented, you can eavesdrop on or manipulate what is being represented.

This raises questions as to how and ethics. Schwarzlose observes that some forms of "mind reading" are already possible or will be in the near future. Also, most of those technologies if even possible, are impractical. She does discuss the heath, privacy, and autonomous impacts to people.

The development of brain maps is crucial during our developmental stages (even in the womb) and Schwarzlose makes the case against hands-off parenting/child rearing:

All we can do is try to give children the enrichment and interaction that will help them develop diverse maps, because these neural foundations will give them the greatest ease and versatility for building cognitive ladders throughout life.




A note for the publisher on the digital formatting: the entire book had dropped letters in words, with spaces in place of them. It was odd, occurring on my ADE reader app on my iPad, in NetGalley's reader app also on my iPad, and on my Kindle. And it was pervasive throughout the text.

This book is a game-changer if you're looking to change your life. Rooted in science, this book is a refreshing look at how we navigate the world. It invites you to shift your perspective and see things through a different lens. It's easy to read and well-written. I highly recommend this book to students, colleagues, and anyone wishing to dive deeper into shifting their current reality.

Special thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free, electronic ARC of this novel received in exchange for an honest review.
Expected publication date: June 15, 2021
Our brains are a myriad of maps; maps that tell us how to process sensory information, how to relate to the world, how to relate to others, and various other everyday behaviours we aren’t even conscious of. “Brainscapes” by neurologist Rebecca Schwarzlose is an examination of these maps, presented in a layperson way, through direct examples, scientific studies, and illustrations.
I am a bit of a brain “nerd”; I love to read about how the brain works and I am obsessed with its pure power, so I jumped at the chance to pick up this novel.
Schwarzlose does use commonplace language throughout this novel (with the exception of when she details scientific equipment or research and commonplace language cannot be used, but then she explains and describes in a way that a reader can understand) but it is NOT an easy read to say the least. There is a lot of information in this novel, and it’s not something that can be read in a day.
Schwarzlose talks about the brains role in sensory processing, how our brains are the same and how they are different (from both each other and others in the animal kingdom). There is a lot of fascinating information in this novel, especially when comparisons to animals were drawn, when we could see how they processed the world in regards to how we processed the world, and where, in fact, we were very similar. However, there is a lot of heavy, scientific bulk to this novel, too. Those who are more science-minded would enjoy parts of it and those who are more interest-motivated (like myself), would enjoy parts of it. It is a novel for everybody, and yet not one section is completely for one group of people.
“Brainscapes” is a unique and engaging way to look at our human brain, how it has evolved over time, and how and why it processes things the way it does. Regardless of where you lie on the scientific spectrum, this novel will leave you in (even more) awe of the magnificence of the human brain and its capabilities.