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Amazon.com (019530893X) 8 reviews
Amazon.com (0099429772) 4 reviews
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Steven Rose

The 21st century brain

Neuroscience is making significant advances in understanding the workings of the brain, and these are likely to bring new treatments for mental illnesses. There is also the possibility of mental enhancement, and even of some form of mental control. In The 21st century brain:Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind, Steven Rose explains the background to such possibilities, and looks at where they may lead.

The book starts with a look at the evolution of the human mind, seeing how our brains relate to those of other animals. Rose goes on to consider the development of our brains during our lifetime, starting from a few cells in an embryo, through childhood to maturity and in to old age. The later chapters of the book looks at the possibilities which our knowledge of the brain might bring, although Rose's view is that much of it is hype. I felt, however, that some of his arguments were weak. That drug companies will use any means to maximise profits he sees as being obvious - and so not needing any supporting argument. Such a style of writing may be OK when pointing out the possible dangers posed by advences in neuroscience, but I thought he also missed the point when criticising Chomsky's ideas of a 'grammar module' in the brain. But if you can put up with such a style of argument then you'll find plenty of interest in this book. The book gives a useful overview of neuroscience and provides a vital glimpse of where it is likely to lead - information that we will all need to make informed decisions in the coming decades.

Note The US version of this book has the title The Future of the Brain: The Promise and Perils of Tomorrow's Neuroscience (even though Amazon are trying to persade you to buy both)

Amazon.com info
Paperback 352 pages  
ISBN: 019530893X
Salesrank: 157946
Weight:1.1 lbs
Published: 2006 Oxford University Press, USA
Amazon price $17.95
Marketplace:New from $9.95:Used from $2.65
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Amazon.co.uk info
Paperback 256 pages  
ISBN: 0099429772
Salesrank: 99539
Weight:0.62 lbs
Published: 2006 Vintage
Amazon price £6.74
Marketplace:New from £4.13:Used from £3.49
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Amazon.ca info
Paperback 352 pages  
ISBN: 019530893X
Salesrank: 30159
Weight:1.1 lbs
Published: 2006 Oxford University Press
Amazon price CDN$ 13.83
Marketplace:New from CDN$ 13.32:Used from CDN$ 3.14
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Product Description
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. More important, he shows what all this science can--and cannot--tell us about the human condition. He examines questions that still baffle scientists 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 years to come.
 
A nuanced account of what neuroscience really knows *****
Steven Rose, a founding member of the Society for Social Responsibility in Science, has 40 years of publishing in neuroscience behind him. Since the 1960s he fought against "On Aggression," "The Territorial Imperative," "The Naked Ape" and has combated a whole succession of varieties of social Darwinism and biological determinism up to the current batch of snake oil salesmen marketing pharmaceutical solutions to social problems.
"The Future of the Brain" summarises the achievements and limitations of the great progress that neuroscience has made over recent decades, from one of the few neuroscientists who have appropriate modesty about what their science can tell us about the human condition and what it can't. If you have read any of the current crop of books on the mind, then you absolutely must read this book. If Rose is right, then we face grave dangers: not so much because neuroscience will enable a futuristic dystopia of thought-control or eugenic manufacture of super-brains, but rather that ill-advised and counter-productive medical intervention will enrich the pharmaceutical industry at the cost of increasing human suffering.
Rose gives a much more nuanced understanding of what the mind is, how it is enabled by our biology and shaped by our lives and those of our evolutionary and social forebears.
 
Should be titled "History of the Brain" *****
Neurobiologist Steven Rose goes to great lengths to correct common misperceptions about the explanatory potential of current genetics, evolutionary psychology, and molecular neuroscience. Ultimately, only the last two chapters cover the "future" of the neurosciences, delving into topics like transcranial magnetic stimulation, pharmacological cognitive enhancement, and neuroethics. But before telling us where we're headed, Rose spends 10 chapters telling us where we've been, both in terms of cognitive change across the lifespan, the cascading processes of synaptogenesis and apoptosis seen in utero and in early childhood, and the changes in brains both across species and across evolutionary time. If "The Future of the Brain" could be said to have a central principle, it's that "the past is the key to the present," and it is here that Rose's talents as a writer truly shine: he integrates the histories of neurons, individuals, psychopharmacology, sociobiology, cognitive psychology and genetics into a coherent narrative, with both appropriate subtlety and engaging clarity.

Rose begins with theories of the origins of life, proto-cells, and nucleic acids. He uses this broad introduction to debunk the simplifications we often make without hesitation: thinking of humankind as the highest on some evolutionary scale of nature; considering organisms to be passive players in evolution; believing that evolution strives for increased complexity as time continues. As he writes, "all living forms on earth ... are more or less equally fit for the environment and life style they have chosen. I use the word chosen deliberately, for organisms are not merely the passive products of selection; in a very real sense they create their own environments ... The grand metaphor of natural selection suggers from its implication that organisms are passive, blown hither and thither by environment change as opposed to being active players in their own destiny." In this way, Rose complicates the popular notion of causality frequently seen in news articles, where researchers claim to have discovered a gene "for" this or that; to Rose, every result has multiple causes, both genetic and environmental.

After reviewing how neural nets may have initially developed in the first multicellular animals (Coelenterates), Rose describes the development of the mammalian cortex during gestation as autopoesis, the process of continual self-creation. The reader is whisked from fertilisation to the embryonic formation of the neural groove, to the birth of neurons and glia in the neural tube, to the migration of neurons as they follow concentration gradients of neural growth factors. We then follow changes in brain structure seen in hominins, then hominids, and finally homo sapiens.

The later chapters document the development of psychopharmacology and the rise of Big Pharma, from aspirin to valium and now Ritalin and Strattera. Rose winds up with fascinating predictions about the future of neurotechnology, all of them well-tempered by a thorough understanding of our past.

Rose's book is quite simply the best popular neuroscience writing I have read. It is hard to imagine another writer that could so seamlessly weave together the fields of genetics, cognitive science, neurophysiology, and pharmacology into such an entertaining yet informative book. Highly recommended...
 
So what's new in neurosciences? ****
It is very well known that the brain is an incredibly complicated mass of tissue--not to mention a complicated and popular subject of today's trend sciences. Therefore to attempt to write anything concerning this feild would be considerably challenging, regardless of your educational and professional background...yet I believe that Steven Rose has done a great job for two very important reasons.

Firstly, Rose translates the subject and its ideas into a form that is digestible by all readers. Yet, the material is sometimes bland and redundant for those who have studied the subject in greater depth.

Secondly, Rose is honest. He not only critiques himself for past publications, but also comments how some of the material in the book has been illustrated in his own life. I believe that the latter is very important because it encourages the reader to do the same, and this type of learning, I personally believe, is awesome. Rose knows that although his entire audience are not experts, some of the ideas about the brain concerning memory, cognition and interpretation can be easily explored by experiences with one's surroundings; and this is what is so intriguing about biological sciences.

The book is a quick read and again, easy to understand. For those who have a background in the field, Rose presents the material well and gives a somewhat journalistic review of the current issues, fallacies and anticipations in the field.
 
Awful on two accounts *
I got only half way through this book, so I am writing this review as a warning. This book is awful on two accounts. It is hastily written, and it isn't very informative. I would expect most readers to be either confused and/or bored, depending on their background (I cannot account for the other reviews). Rose has several schematics of the brain, but does not actually explain them except in the most cursory way. Rose emphasizes the interplay between genes and environment where environment must be interpreted in the broadest sense: for the unborn it includes not only the uterine environment but the signals from the other cells constituting the embryonic/fetal complex. This is fine, but well accepted, at least amongst the scientists I have read. Rose is impressed with Dimasio's work on consciousness, but he more refers to it than tries to make it clear, just as with his brain schematics. He raises some interesting questions about evolutionary psychology, but he is so dismissal of the field, that the reader must seek elsewhere for an objective analysis. Yes, I enjoy reading Richard Dawkins and even Steven Pinker, but I am not writing this review with an axe to grind.
 
How neuroscience will and will not change our lives ****
The Future of the Brain (Rose's 15th book) is about how neurotechnology derived from neuroscience will atttempt to change our brains, about what we can and cannot expect from science, and what we should fear. Rose is a brain scientist whose speciality is in the neuroscience of memory.

He is also a prolific writer on evolutionary biology. He is a proactive opponent of a strictly reductionist stance in biology and a stern critic of what he sees as a genocentric approach to psychology and what it means to be human. Some of his books (most notably Not in Our Genes (1984) written with Richard Lewontin and Leo Kamini, and Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology (2000) which he edited with Hilary Rose) are more about the politics of evolutionary biology than about the science; but here Rose keeps his political views mostly in the background. The result is an informative book that helps us to understand what science is learning about how the brain works and about how it can be affected by outside agents.

After an introductory chapter he begins with the nitty-gritty of how the brain came to be and how it might be understood--from proto-cells in the pre-biotic soup to axons, dendrites, synapses and brain "structures." His theme throughout is that the brain cannot be understood except as a process continually in motion. He argues that how our brains developed cannot be appreciated through an isolated study of the genetic blueprint. Instead we must look to the brain's developmental history in interaction with the environment to determine what it is and how it works and why.

The middle chapters move from the brain to the mind, from the nuts and bolts of neurology to the experiential human being living in an environment in part created by itself. Rose touches on the "mystery" of consciousness and the paradox of free will. He finishes with some conjectures about what kinds of pharmaceutical agents are to come, what kinds of invasive procedures might be employed in attempts to combat various diseases or to cope with the effects of ageing or to help make us "better than normal." The final chapter is on "Ethics in a Neurocentric World."

Although Rose does not spell out how the mind differs from the brain--I take it he presumes a dictionary definition--much of the book is concerned with the distinction. The brain is the flesh and blood; the mind is the experience, is how I read him. I want to add that the distinction between brain and mind can be seen as similar to the distinction between sex and gender. Sex is biology. Gender is the cultural expression of that biology.

He objects to viewing the brain as composed of "modules" directed by genetic imperatives. He writes that "...life is not a static 'thing' but a process" (p. 62) We are forever changing. The Steven Rose of 30 is not the same as the Steven Rose of today. He is a different person because of what has happened to him during the ensuing decades, and how he has reacted to what has happened, and what he has learned. And if Steven Rose were somehow cloned, that Steven Rose would be different still because of the different environments--pre-natal and afterward--in which he would grow.

He speaks of "patterns of activity" in the working brain. He doesn't like the use of "modules" such as a supposed "reading module" or "reading instinct." (p. 134) However it is really impossible to write about something as foreign to our everyday experience as the workings of the brain without resorting to metaphor and analogy. Something is like something else. Something is compared to something else. This is how we learn. So instead of modules, Rose employs variously, "a collection of mini-organs" (p. 149); "brain regions" (p. 157); "brain...structures" (p. 133), etc. In fact he uses the term "modules" himself on, for example, pages 149, 156, 158. Furthermore his railing against the use of our experience in the "Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation" during the Pleistocene by evolutionary psychologists is partially contradicted by his acknowledgment that we are indeed shaped by our environment as we in turn shape it. It is clear to me that where Rose and the evolutionary psychologists differ is in their perception of how much the environments since the Pleistocene have changed us. Steven Pinker, Edward O. Wilson and others think "not all that much," while Rose thinks "a whole lot." The truth, one can imagine, lies somewhere in between.

It should be noted that one of the unsolved problems in evolution is knowing how fast evolutionary change can take place. Stephen Jay Gould spoke of rapid change after long periods of stasis while others have disagreed; but no one can say how much we have changed biologically since the Pleistocene. It is known that large populations are strongly resistant to evolutionary change because mutations quickly get swamped in the huge genetic pool. My feeling is that in populations as large as ours, little evolutionary change is taking place. The environment is constantly changing, but the selective pressure usually brought about through starvation, disease, and competition from other species is really not much in evidence. And so I tend to side with those who believe we haven't changed all that much.

Steven Rose is a wise and caring man who sometimes forgets his manners when speaking about those with whom he has sharp disagreements. But in this book he is at his best and most well-behaved. Let me finish with perhaps the wisest of his observations. He is speaking of the increased "powers of surveillance and coercion available to an authoritarian state." He warns, "The neurotechnologies [now available and to come] will add to these powers, but the real issue is probably not so much how to curb the technologies, but how to control the state." (p. 302)
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