Booth Shares Title

“We have a user’s manual for all the machines we possess, except for the most important one.” After this illumination, Marco Magrini wrote a book about the human brain, adapting it as if it were a manual for a washing machine, refrigerator, or any other common household appliance. The metaphor is clearly evident in the book’s chapter titles, such as Installation, Operation, Control Panel, Expansions or End-of-life. A humorous tone, as in the comparison between the Model F TM (female) and Model M TM (male) brains, makes this a manual that everyone with a brain can enjoy. The brain is not a machine, yet every user of a human brain should know more about its components, the mechanisms and the biological gears that make it work. And it is the right time to do so: even though humans are far from fully comprehending their own brains, the enormous advances made by neuroscience in recent years have shed light on the counterintuitive and unexpected wonders of this unusual machine. “They are admirably described in this book,” MIT professor Tomaso Poggio writes in the afterword, “which also happens to be fun.”