The Future of the Brain: The Promise and Perils of Tomorrow's Neuroscience - Hardcover

Rose, Steven

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195154207 ISBN 13: 9780195154207

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2005

Synopsis

Brain repair, smart pills, mind-reading machines--modern neuroscience promises to soon deliver a remarkable array of wonders as well as profound insight into the nature of the brain. But these exciting new breakthroughs, warns Steven Rose, will also raise troubling questions about what it means to be human.
In The Future of the Brain, Rose explores just how far neuroscience may help us understand the human brain--including consciousness--and to what extent cutting edge technologies should have the power to mend or manipulate the mind. Rose first offers a panoramic look at what we now know about the brain, from its three-billion-year evolution, to its astonishingly rapid development in the embryo, to the miraculous process of infant development (how a brain becomes a human). More important, he shows what all this science can--and cannot--tell us about the human condition. He examines questions that still baffle scientists: if our genes are 99% identical to those of chimpanzees, if our brains are composed of identical molecules, arranged in pretty similar cellular patterns, how come we are so different? And he explores the potential threats and promises of new technologies and their ethical, legal, and social implications, wondering how far we should go in eliminating unwanted behavior or enhancing desired characteristics, focusing on the new "brain steroids" and on the use of Ritalin to control young children.
The Future of the Brain is a remarkable look at what the brain sciences are telling us about who we are and where we came from--and where we may be headed in the years ahead.

About this title

About the Author

Steven Rose is Professor of Biology and Director of the Brain and Behavior Research Group at The Open University, and is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology at University College London. He has written or edited 15 books, including The Chemistry of Life, The Conscious Brain, The Making of Memory, and Not In Our Genes (with Richard Lewontin and Leo Kamin). He is a frequent radio and TV guest and has written for New York Times Book Review, New Scientist, and Times Literary Supplement.

Reviews

British neuroscientist Rose, a specialist on memory and an able popular-science writer, discusses the technologies for altering the brain that are apt to appear in the next two decades. He first places the human brain in its evolutionary context, delineating the chemical/electrical action by which any cell responds to its surroundings. Scaling up to the way neurons and brains do so, Rose keeps in view significant evolutionary adaptations before turning to a detailed account of the embryonic development of the brain, and then its phenomenal growth in a child's first years. After an interlude about how the brain is prey to the insults of disease or age, the payoff of this preparation arrives for Rose's readers: a presentation of prospective psychotropic drugs, genes, and computers, which advocates (see Ramez Naam's More Than Human, p.1045) tout as boons to humanity. Rose cautions that the power to mend the mind confers the power to manipulate it, so the understanding of neuroscience he provides permits his readers to consider the implications of imminent developments. Gilbert Taylor
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Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195154207
• ISBN 13: 9780195154207
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352