These books reveal why the brain is the biggest mystery of all

The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal. By Larry Swanson, Eric Newman, Alfonso Araque and Janet Dubinsky. Abrams Books; 208 pages; $50 and £35

The Brain in Search of Itself: Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the Story of the Neuron. By Benjamin Ehrlich. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 464 pages; $35 and £27.99

The father of neuroscience—Santiago Ramón y Cajal, a Spanish histologist—may not enjoy the fame of other 19th-century giants like Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur, but his achievements make him their equal. Over 30 years, based in Barcelona and then in Madrid, Cajal greatly improved the staining technique invented by his rival Camillo Golgi, with whom he shared a Nobel prize in 1906. This made nerve cells visible under a microscope, revealing the brain’s structure in unprecedented detail. Cajal showed that neurons are independent cells, settling the bitterest debate in microbiology of his lifetime. And he predicted the course of more than a century of subsequent scientific work.

Cajal was a talented artist and photographer too, preparing thousands of illustrations in ink of the cells that he observed through the microscope. His drawings inspired the Surrealists Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel and Federico García Lorca in the 1920s and continue to appear in neuroscience papers today. ”The Beautiful Brain”—80 of Cajal’s exquisite illustrations paired with brief essays on his life and other subjects—is an introduction to the microscopic universe of the mind disguised as a coffee-table book. “The Brain in Search of Itself”—an award-winning biography—sets Cajal’s life in the context of a turbulent period in Spain’s history.

The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience. By Matthew Cobb. Basic Books; 496 pages; $32. Profile Books; £30

If the reader is in search of a single comprehensive introduction to the brain, this is it. Matthew Cobb’s intellectual history traces the development of humanity’s understanding of the brain over millennia, from the musings of Hippocrates, a physician of classical Greece, to the contemporary debate over the nature of consciousness. Mr Cobb discusses everything from the lives of microscopic brain cells to the macroscopic structure of the brain, adding a generous dose of philosophy of mind. The book shows that neuroscience—more than any other scientific discipline—is defined by technological metaphors. Now, as artificial intelligence dramatically improves, it can be difficult not to view the brain as an organic supercomputer. But Mr Cobb urges caution. Not long ago neuroscience conceived of the brain as a hydraulic machine. Then it became something like a telegraph network, and after that a telephone exchange. The imagination of neuroscientists has been shaped by the advanced technologies of their times. There is little reason to expect computer metaphors to look less naive to future scientists.

Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life. By Peter Godfrey-Smith. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 255 pages; $20. William Collins; £20

Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind. By Peter Godfrey-Smith. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 352 pages; $19. Published in Britain as “Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness”; William Collins; 288 pages; £20

The previous three books trace the history of brain science. This pair of award-winning books by Peter Godfrey-Smith—a philosophy professor at the University of Sydney, amateur evolutionary biologist and scuba diver—instead traces the evolutionary history of the brain. “Other Minds” explores intelligence through the lens of the octopus. Whereas other smart creatures—mammals and birds—have the same basic brain structure as humans, cephalopods—octopus, squid and cuttlefish—evolved sophisticated minds independently, out on a distant limb of the animal family tree. The octopus is thus the closest thing there is on Earth to an alien intelligence. “Metazoa”, the sequel to “Other Minds”, widens the scope beyond cephalopods. It shows that consciousness is far more varied, intricate and widespread than is generally acknowledged, which has implications for how humans ought to treat other denizens of the natural world. Mr Godfrey-Smith includes in these beautifully written books descriptions of octopus and other marine life as he encounters them in his dives off Australia’s coast.

Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind. By Gary Marcus. Houghton Mifflin; 211 pages; $24. Faber & Faber; £10.99

Gary Marcus is a cognitive scientist and a leading thinker on artificial intelligence. In this book he dismantles the idea that the brain is an elegantly designed organ of thought. In fact it is a “kluge”, a clumsily engineered machine, pieced together by natural selection from imperfect solutions to evolutionary problems. Mr Marcus winds his way through the brain’s different functions—storing memories, constructing beliefs and making decisions, among others. He shows that, although the brain may work well most of the time, it is prone to systematic failures that reveal a surprising amount about the trade-offs made in the course of its haphazard evolution.

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. By Anil Seth. Dutton Books; 352 pages; $28. Faber & Faber; £20

You may think that your perceptions and thoughts are an accurate depiction of the world around you, constantly refreshed by experience and what you make of it. Not so, writes Anil Seth, a professor at the University of Sussex. In fact, perception is a “controlled hallucination”. We’re not really seeing and hearing things as they actually are. Instead, our brains are “prediction machines”, which make guesses about what we’ll encounter and adjust when something unexpected crops up. “Perception happens through a continual process of prediction error minimisation,” Mr Seth writes. His view of consciousness seems a little depressing: we inhabit mostly a self-created world. But nature doesn’t care. The brain has evolved to aid our survival, not to perceive truth.

The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. By Oliver Sacks. Knopf Doubleday; 320 pages; $16. Pan Macmillan; £10.99

Oliver Sacks, a neurologist, ie, brain doctor, explores the science of the brain in the light of quotidian life. In this classic collection of case histories, he describes the lives of patients with rare neurological abnormalities that alter their experience of the world around them. On his first visit to Sacks’s office the title character, a music teacher whose brain does not recognise objects correctly, grasps his wife’s head, thinking it is his hat. Sacks’s histories are like short stories that describe people grappling with their wayward minds. Also try

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