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Into the Silent Land: Travels in neuropsychology by Paul Broks, Atlantic Books, 拢14.99, ISBN 190380955X Reviewed by Lewis Wolpert

PAUL BROKS presents his personal experiences of patients with brain damage in his neuro-psychology clinic in poetic prose, spiced with imaginary conversations with spirits. It falls to these non-existent beings to accuse him of being a 鈥淢ysterian鈥�, one who avers that the mind cannot be understood. Worse still, understanding may destroy the myth of selfhood and soul. Between the strange mental states we get Broks鈥檚 views on the nature of our brains, who we are and that dread word, consciousness.

Consciousness is a source of dread to me because no one 鈥� including Broks 鈥� has ever given us a significant insight into what the word means, nor into what it means to be someone. But the second half of the book is much better. It gets specific with insights into hallucinations, dreams and their influence on Robert Louis Stevenson. Broks delves into his own lucid dreaming and clues it can provide to the pathologies of thought.

He should stop wondering about whether we will ever understand the dread word and focus on how the brain works. That is a monumentally difficult problem, but a worthwhile one. For starters, we do not even understand, at the level of neural networks, how we pick our noses.