Freudian scripts and sensory slips: Books in brief
Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks
Nicky Hayes Yale Univ. Press (2024)
Aristotle proposed that humans have five senses, but ignored internal ones. Today — as Nicky Hayes, president of the British Psychological Society, describes in her engaging global history from ancient Greece onwards — neurologists count more than 40 human senses used to receive information. The study of people “only becomes psychology when it is fully backed up by research evidence”. That said, it must include more than statistical methods, and must value asking subjects about their experiences, she argues.
Robert Zatorre Oxford Univ. Press (2024)
Charles Darwin appears twice in cognitive neuroscientist Robert Zatorre’s investigation of music. In 1871, Darwin pondered music’s apparent irrelevance to human survival as “most mysterious”, but he later admitted that listening regularly to music might have kept parts of his “atrophied” brain “active”. In Zatorre’s view, “to understand musical pleasure” we must grasp both the brain’s “perceptual/cognitive system” and its “reward system”. His pioneering book, based on profound research, is technical but always accessible.
Frank Tallis Abacus (2024)
Psychoanalysis, proposed by Sigmund Freud in Vienna in the 1890s, is probably science’s most controversial field. “Few major thinkers have been attacked and vilified more than Sigmund Freud,” emphasizes clinical psychologist Frank Tallis, who is overall an admirer, and author of a Freud-inspired detective series, the Liebermann Papers, adapted for television as Vienna Blood. Still, he often criticizes Freud in this biography, which is also a study of Vienna’s golden age, around the turn of the twentieth century.
Salman Khan Viking (2024)
Khan Academy is a non-profit online educational organization with more than 150 million learners in some 50 languages. It was started in the United States in 2006 by Salman Khan, who studied computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and is the son of immigrants from Bangladesh. His practical, inspiring book considers how artificial intelligence can transform education — mostly for the better — and “create a new golden age for humanity, a time that will make today look like a dark age”.
Judith Butler Allen Lane (2024)
In the past decade, gender has been attacked by conservatives from many fields, notes philosopher and gender-studies scholar Judith Butler. This includes Pope Francis in his 2015 comment, quoted by Butler, that teaching gender in schools is “ideological colonization … think of Hitler Youth”. The book’s purpose is, however, neither primarily argumentative nor philosophical. Instead, it considers: “What kind of phantasm has gender become, and what anxieties, fears and hatreds does it collect and mobilize?”
Nature 630, 812 (2024)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02084-3
This story originally appeared on: Nature - Author:Andrew Robinson
