SNAP

Will scientists ever understand the human brain? Or are the mysteries of the mind too profound for mere humans to comprehend?

SNAP: Has Brain Research Reached its Breaking Point? presents a challenge to the current claims of neuroscience. As a discipline, it is lavishly funded. Learned journals in the field of brain research publish thousands of studies every year. Images of the brain “lighting up” when thinking, remembering or simply perceiving have captured the public’s imagination.

But there is growing scepticism about claims that neuroscientists are poised to unravel the ultimate conundrum of the human brain. James Le Fanu’s book explores what we now know about the five cardinal mysteries of the mind: subjective experience; memory; free will; the powers of reason and imagination; and the sense of self that provides profound insights into the exceptionality of the human experience. And it is that exceptional quality which leads Le Fanu to ask whether neuroscience has in fact now reached its limit.

James Le Fanu is a physician, columnist, social commentator and historian of science and medicine. He was born in 1950 and spent his childhood in Scotland, East Africa, Yugoslavia and Cyprus. He studied the humanities at Ampleforth College before switching to medicine, graduating from Cambridge University and the Royal London Hospital in 1974. He subsequently worked in renal transplant units at the cardiology departments of the Royal Free Hospital and St Mary’s Hospital in London.

For the past twenty years, he has combined medical practice with writing a twice -weekly column for the Sunday Telegraph and Daily Telegraph as well as contributing reviews and articles to The Times, Spectator, Prospect, the Oldie, the British Medical Journal and the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. His much acclaimed THE RISE AND FALL OF MODERN MEDICINE charts the change in fortunes of medicine over the past sixty years from the supreme achievements of its twelve definitive moments to its current discontents. His most recent book WHY US? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves investigates a paradox: that major developments in genetics and neuroscience of the past two decades have inadvertently revealed the limits of an exclusively scientific account of the form and attributes of the living world and the exceptionality of the human mind. He has in addition made original contributions to controversies over human embryo experiments, the social and environmental causes of illness and shaken baby syndrome.

James Le Fanu is married to the publisher Judith Annan. He has two children and lives in south London.