The Paradoxical Brain

At its core, the driving force behind all of science is an innate curiosity about observations that cannot be explained. And yet, academic science texts often focus on consensus views and fail to point out places where the established models fail. In The Paradoxical Brain, editor Narinder Kapur tackles counterintuitive phenomena in neuroscience head on, from savantism in autism spectrum conditions to how malignant brain tumors can suppress allergies. While the format of the text follows the traditional academic style, with contributing authors from various fields taking turns describing recent advances in neuroscience, the articles are much more engaging than in most academic texts. By making unexplained paradoxes his unifying theme, Kapur has encouraged the authors to be equally informative and provocative, and the end result is an excellent book that would be equally appropriate as a leisure read or a reference text. The authors are genuinely interested in (and to some extent confused by) the topics that they discuss, and it shows. The tone of each section is refreshingly informal, with the authors spending most of their time discussing interesting yet perplexing phenomena and then speculating on possible underlying causes. Twenty-four different phenomena are discussed, including functional sensory facilitation after the loss of eyesight, the (largely ignored) positive effects of aging on cognition, and the subjective nature of memory. In the end, The Paradoxical Brain manages to successfully be both a rigorous academic text and an entertaining read. While some of the articles are accessible to anyone with an interest in neuroscience or the cognitive sciences, the book as a whole is more appropriate for those with an advanced background in the field; many of the articles assume that the reader has an understanding of fundamental principles of neuroscience and a basic knowledge of neuroanatomy.