The Brain Supremacy

Kathleen Taylor explains the latest increasingly influential advances in neuroscience by looking at the practical and ethical implications of new technologies, to allow readers to make their own informed judgements. She also explores how to distinguish the hype from the science.

She helps us make sense of neuroscience by looking at its social and historical context, so showing how it relates to our everyday lives both now and in the future by discussing how advances in neuroscience may alter our behaviour.

In a world full of science, the balance of power between sciences is changing. Advances in physics, chemistry, and other natural sciences have given us extraordinary control over our world. Now the younger sciences of brain and mind are applying the scientific method not only to our environments, but to us. In recent years funding and effort has been poured into brain research. We are entering the era of the brain supremacy. What will the new science mean for us, as individuals, consumers, parents and citizens? Should we be excited, or alarmed, by the remarkable promises we read about in the media - promises of drugs that can boost our brain power, ever more subtle marketing techniques, even machines that can read minds? What is the neuroscience behind these claims, and how do scientists look inside living human brains to get their astonishing results?

The Brain Supremacy is a lucid and rational guide to this exciting new world. Using recent examples from the scientific literature and the media, it explores the science behind the hype, revealing how techniques like fMRI actually work and what claims about using them for mindreading really mean. The implications of this amazingly powerful new research are clearly and entertainingly presented. Looking to the future, the book sets current neuroscience in its social and ethical context, as an increasingly important influence on how all of us live our lives.

Kathleen Taylor studied physiology and philosophy at the University of Oxford. After a research MSc at Stirling University, working on brain chemistry, she returned to Oxford to do a DPhil in visual neuroscience and postdoctoral work on cognitive neuroscience. In 2002 she won two writing competitions run by the Times Higher Education Supplement. She has written on a range of topics from consciousness to cruelty. Her first book, Brainwashing, was published in 2004, her second, Cruelty, in 2009.

9780199603374 | Ł18.99 | 25 October 2012

For author lectures/interview/review copy/author article – Contact – kate.farquhar-thomson@oup.com Tel: 01865 353423