How elastic is your brain?

MY PLASTIC BRAIN
A trip of a year to discover if science can improve its spirit
By Caroline Williams
278 pp. Prometheus. $ 24

Williams is looking for a change of brain (or as Jasanoff would say, a quest to improve his mind, which is partially formed by his brain). She is a chronically distracted anxiety that is disorganized and constantly lost. Each chapter tells his adventures with the latest, greatest brain training tool to enhance his mental abilities. She begins, for example, trying to increase her ability to pay attention and resist distraction by asking scientists to "zap" it with electromagnetic energy targeted to the outside of her head . In the following chapters, she tries to reduce her anxiety, broaden her creativity, improve her math skills, calibrate her internal GPS and control her perception of time, using various hacking techniques. brain. Each chapter is a story of mini-redemption, Williams beginning skeptical and ending victorious.

Williams writes in a familiar, dinner-party style, delighting guests with tales of his exploits. If I were invited to this party, however, I would be the unbearable person who pecked the scientific warts in his stories. These include his persistent Cartesian dualism separating the brain and its "owner," inaccurate metaphors as a reference to "enlightening" brain regions, and stale scientific claims that the brain is a battlefield between an intruder alarm in the brain. Tonsil and a source of reason in the cerebral cortex.

But that may not do Williams justice to read his intriguing research of self-improvement as a primer on the inner workings of the brain. This is not his goal. "My Plastic Brain" is best appreciated as a nice memoir, not a book that explains the science of how plasticity really works under the hood.

ELASTIC
Flexible thinking in a period of change
By Leonard Mlodinow
252 pp. Pantheon. $ 28.95.

As much as I appreciate Mlodinow's narration, the scientific details have given me the whiplash. Part of his understanding of the structure and function of the brain is working, but he also has many outdated scientific claims. For example, he writes that the brain is made of organized neurons in a hierarchy, which is correct, but it incorporates it into an archaic view of brain structure that experts in the evolution of the brain have shunned for decades. Errors inevitably follow, such as treating the reward system of the brain as synonymous with emotions and how they manifest themselves (this is not the case). He points out that neurons always shoot (true), but he locates this phenomenon on the brain scale to a single (false) brain network. "Elastic", like the two previous books examined here, illustrates how difficult it is for scientific writers to keep pace with discovery outside of their areas of expertise.