READERS can’t get enough, it seems, of books about the mind and the brain.
They are, after all, that publisher’s dream: books about ourselves. We may
struggle with tracts on consciousness, hoping to uncover a meaning to our
lives—or we may do it to be thoroughly diverted by puzzles such as “Who is
this ‘I’ that has the impression of reading that ‘self’ is an illusion?”. Maybe
brain books these days promise a kind of self-discovery—a respectable form
of self-help.
We lap up books on memory to understand our own personal windows on the past.
We gorge…
