Popular Science Review - The Human Mind

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Review - The Human Mind - Robert Winston

While I can see why this book is titled The Human Mind, it would perhaps have been more accurate to call it The Human Brain, because a large proportion of it is spent on the actual physical lumps involved in the various thinking processes.

After covering the basics of body, brain and mind, Winston dives into the brain's working, then pulls out a number of different aspects of the mind (or, rather brain), such as senses, emotions, learning and so on. It's good stuff, and Winston's style is amiable and straightforward. I very much liked his balanced and fair defence of animal experimentation, although few animal rights protesters would agree.

So the good news is that it's a very effective, easily read book on the human brain. But there are issues - firstly that title.

What the full title (The Human Mind - and how to make the most of it) promises to me is a book that's half on human psychology and half on how to make your mind work most effectively - a sort of British version of Pinker's How the Mind Works. What I got was a book on brain physiology and a very tiny amount on making the most of it. That really isn't good enough. Winston just spends too long telling us what various bits do, and how when we do this particular thing that bit of the brain is in use. I wanted to shout "So what? How does this help me make the most of my mind?" He could comfortably have cut a quarter of this book by removing unnecessary references to how a particular bit of the brain was responsible for a particular function - after a while it got very samey.

The other problem I had is just a bit of the super-trivialization of Winston's TV shows crept in. Normally I've been pleasantly surprised by his books, which are much less irritating than Winston on TV, but we had to have references to, for instance, a test on the show where two groups, one holiday camp representatives, the other physics students were tested for extroversion by seeing how much sticky tape they could lick in a packing warehouse. (Apparently introverts generate more saliva.) This is just crass.

I really don't understand how this book got onto the 2005 Aventis shortlist. Not only was it not published in the right year (it originally came out in 2003 - presumably he got special dispensation because he was an Aventis judge last year), but books like Simon Singh's Big Bang and Brian Cathcart's The Fly in the Cathedral, both vastly better, didn't even make the longlist.

Having said that, I find it hard to believe that this book isn't available in the US, but I can't find any trace of it on Amazon.com - if anyone spots it, please drop us an email at info@popularscience.co.uk. It's just possible Winston is too British - a review of one of his previous books criticised him for using obscure British references like Skoda (for those of you who have never heard of it, this is a very large Czech engineering/car manufacturing company, now part of Volkswagen). Hmm.

Also in hardback:

Reviewed by Brian Clegg

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