My guest in this week’s Spectator Books Podcast is Rob Newman. Listeners of a certain age (ie mine) will remember him as a tweedy professor on the spoof History Today upbraiding David Baddiel with the line: “That’s you, that is.” But here he arrives as a real scholar: the author of a provoking (and also funny) new book called Neuropolis: A Brain Science Survival Guide. With wild claims being made for the ability of brain science and magnetic imaging to locate the “language organ” or the “seat of wisdom”, and with human consciousness being reduced to a collection of chemical accidents, Rob discusses the way in which old myths have crept back in in the guise of hard science. He says the science of the brain is both stranger and more wonderful than these reductive accounts would have it.
You can listen to our conversation here:
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