I enjoyed the book, though most of the information was not new to me. The illustrations were quite beautiful and I liked the explanations given in the book. Though it was written in 1998, it was still up to date enough to talk about fMRI and other methods of scanning. ( )

If one wants to learn about the basics of neuroscience or simply how the brain works, this book serves as a good introduction. It has wonderful, 3D illustrations, and the language is easy enough to understand. It (literally) copies the main ideas from the important thinkers such as Sacks, Ramachandran, Le Doux and others. (I'm not sure how science books deal with citing case studies and other important ideas, but although it mentions the names of these thinkers, it doesn't really cite them directly for it.) That said, it is definitely more interesting and rewarding to read about the ideas, theories and studies from the main sources themselves. Typographical errors aside, this book, read slowly, might serve to heighten one's interest in the neurosciences. ( )

I found the book both beautifully illustrated and extremely well-written (...not always the case in cognitive science, unfortunately), but as other reviewers have mentioned, given the publication date of the book, it's likely less than completely up to date by now. That said, I'm glad to have this title in my library: though it has been a few years since originally purchasing and reading it, I do still reread parts of it on occasion.

ETA: a new version has been released this year! I haven't had the opportunity to check it out, but presumably the worries of being out of date wouldn't be applicable to this new edition. ( )

I enjoyed the book but I am sure science unfettered will show that the Mind is nothing to do with coming from the brain. ( )

It's a really gorgeous book--oversized, nice glossy pages, loads of beautiful illustrations. The content was interesting and good (though in this field, with a 2000 pub date, it's already pretty outdated). One of my biggest complaints about this book was the atrocious editing. This book was absolutely fraught with not only typographical errors, but also wrong word choices, bad cut-n-paste jobs, missing words or halves of sentences...it just goes on. Very disappointing in a book published by a respectable scholarly press, and it tends to make you wonder if that little effort was given to the language, how much effort was put into fact checking and assuring the accuracy of the content? My low mark is mostly for this and the fact that the organization of the book felt thrown together. Otherwise, it is full of a run-down of some fascinating studies and bits of trivia about the brain. ( )