The Naked Brain
How the Emerging Neurosociety is Changing How We Live, Work, and Love

Richard Restak, M.D.

Dr. Restak is a neurologist and neuroscientist. He has written several books on the brain, how we think, our emotions, etc. He is also a professor at the George Washington University's Medical Center. He has been studying the brain and its functions all his career.

In The Naked Brain, he looks at the emerging technologies being used to scan brain responses to life around us. He sees a "neurosociety" in which brain scans can show how people will respond in situations and can predict how a person will react. He also sees how people can be manipulated through the ways our brains work.

He opens his book with these potential developments:

• Tests aimed at revealing to others some of our thoughts and tendencies...
• Brain scan images directed at gauging our suitability for certain jobs
• Tests...explain why we are romantically attracted to some people but repelled by others
• Advertising campaigns that use brain scans...
• Clinical enhancers of the brain designed to turn us into insatiable consumers...
• Brain image profiles of us to ascertain which political candidates we are most likely to vote for...

The chapter titles also reveal Dr. Restak's topics: "The Emergence of the Neurosociety", "How the Brain Processes Information", "The Emotional Brain", "How Our Brain Constructs Our Mental World", "The Empathic Brain: Blurring the Boundaries Between Self and Others", "The Power of the Frontal Lobes", "How Our Brain Determines Our Moral Choices", "Make My Memory", "Neuroeconomics: What Happens in the Brain When We Reason and Negotiate", and "The Perils of the Neurosociety".

As a medical librarian, of course I had make a cursory check Dr. Restak out. I needed to feel comfortable that he was giving the reader sound information rather than his own vision of the brain and the world. He has been in the field for years, has some articles published in leading journals, worked with PBS on documentaries on the brain, and his bibliographic references in this book are sound. I'm going on the assumption, as well, that as a medical professor for a large university that he can't be too off in left field.

The Naked Brain is written in easy to understand layman's language without giving up medical soundness. There are some medical terms that have to be included and Dr. Restak gives understandable definitions of them, repeating those definitions as necessary. There are a couple charts of the brain as well (too bad they're on page 16 - it would be easier to refer to them if they were on a page before the first chapter).

The language is readable, enjoyable, and properly startling. He is cautionary of how the future of the field can/will develop. Dr. Restak also discusses areas that scientists (or con artists) would like to see but probably never will This is fascinating reading. When it gets too scary in possibilities, Dr. Restak adds statements like this: "As I have emphasized throughout this book, brain patterns for complex and sophisticated levels of thought and behavior involve multiple circuits... That's why it's so risky and often just plain wrongheaded to attempt too rigid a localization on complex and multidetermined behaviors to specific locations within the brain." In other words, there are too many areas of the brain involved in complex thoughts and emotions for us to know how everything works and thus control.