Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain - by David Engleman (2011)

Another prisoner here on death row lent this book to me after he found out I like reading about how the brain works. Ironically one of my attorneys had offered to order the same book for me about a year ago, but I deferred his offer at the time because I already had a stack of good books that I needed to read (and still do). So I guess this is one of those books that I was just meant to read.

I enjoyed this book thoroughly. Despite the unfair (and deceptive) criticism I read that was written by some other neurologist, Engleman does a fair job of presenting complex brain science in layman's terms. Yes, he glosses over some stuff that a scientist might think important, but the book is not written for scientists, so to critique him for this is not just unfair, it's pretty lame. For the lay person this book is informative, well written, and ingaging. Though I strongly disagree with Engleman's conclusions in regard to how neuroscience could be applied to criminal law (he almost completely ignores the sociological aspects of criminal behavior), he at least confines this discussion to one chapter; and I don't disagree with the need for more behavioral science when it comes to criminal law (as opposed to the pseudoscience that isn't science at all though it currently dominates our criminal justice philosophy). I mostly just abhor the idea of using behavioral statistics to determine how someone is treated after committing a crime (i.e. locking someone up because of what they MIGHT do instead of just what they HAVE done). The last thing we need is more people like me being brainwashed into believing what terrible people they are just because some statistics say so. The statistics themselves become self propogating data.

But overall Engleman's book was a pleasure to read. I learned a few things I didn't know, and refreshed a lot I had read before. I expect this book will influence at least a few of the things I write for this blog in the future (especially the idea that we aren't as individually "free willed" as we think, and the concept of conscious entities that exist unconscious to us in our own brains, i.e. "zombie systems").