Reviews

    "The book’s greatest strength is Linden’s knack for demystifying biology and neuroscience with vivid similes (he calls the brain, weighing two percent of total body weight and using 20 percent of its energy, the “Hummer H2 of the body”). Though packed with textbook-ready data, the book grips readers like a masterful teacher; those with little science experience may be surprised to find themselves interested in—and even chuckling over—the migration of neurons along radial glia, and anxious to find out what happens next"

    --Publisher’s Weekly  (starred review)  Click here to read the complete review.


    "Linden tells his story well, in an engaging style, with plenty of erudition and a refreshing honesty about how much remains unknown. The book should easily hold the attention of readers with little background in biology and no prior knowledge of brains. It would make an excellent present for curious non-scientists and a good book for undergraduates who are just entering into the brain's magic menagerie. Even readers trained in neuroscience are likely to enjoy the many tidbits of rarely taught information — on love, sex, gender, sleep and dreams — that spice up Linden's main argument. The Accidental Mind stands out for being highly readable and clearly educational."
    --Nature, Georg Striedter   Click here to read the complete review, which elaborates an interesting and useful critique (requires an individual or institutional subscription to Nature)

    "Let others rhapsodize about the elegant design and astounding complexity of the human brain—the most complicated, most sophisticated entity in the known universe, as they say. David Linden, a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, doesn't see it that way. To him, the brain is a "cobbled-together mess." Impressive in function, sure. But in its design the brain is "quirky, inefficient and bizarre ... a weird agglomeration of ad hoc solutions that have accumulated throughout millions of years of evolutionary history," he argues in his new book, The Accidental Mind, from Harvard University Press. More than another salvo in the battle over whether biological structures are the products of supernatural design or biological evolution (though Linden has no doubt it's the latter), research on our brain's primitive foundation is cracking such puzzles as why we cannot tickle ourselves, why we are driven to spin narratives even in our dreams and why reptilian traits persist in our gray matter."
    --Newsweek, Sharon Begley   Click hereto read the complete feature

    "Linden's story is captivating.  Chapter by chapter he builds his compelling arguments, starting with a close examination of the human brain's structural flaws and the shortcomings of its parts."
    --Scientific American MIND, Nicole Branan
           "[Linden] argues persuasively that our brains are wonderful "kludges"-
           perfect examples of what millennia of small changes can achieve in
           the total absence of overarching design principles and no ability to
           start afresh... The majority of this book is an enjoyable neurosciences
           primer for the general reader.  Evolutionary and psychological 
           perspectives provide occasional insights about the mnd, but mostly
           the subject here is the organ capable of conjuring it into existence.
           Linden makes clear that it is the physical substrate of our mental 
           phenomena- the squidgy and and haphazard mass of our brain- is a 
           gloriously evolved muddle."

          --Times Literary Supplement (UK), Druin Burch


               "The Accidental Mind is well suited for a wide audience. Nonscientists
            and newcomers to neurobiology will appreciate Linden's clearly
            articulated overviews of such complicated topics as the brain's cellular
            architecture, neurotransmission, neural development, and the
            molecular and cellular basis of memory. Linden does an excellent job
            of providing detail on these subjects, but not so much that the reader
            feels like the “soul is departing their body” (as he jokes is often the
            case with neurobiology books). Neurobiologists such as ourselves will
            find much of the book to be review, but there are enough offbeat 
            stories, colorful examples, and thought-provoking speculations to
            keep us interested throughout. (It might aid sales if the book were
            enclosed in plastic with a sticker on the outside advertising: “Want to
            learn why you can't tickle yourself? Why the genitals don't occupy a 
            larger area of the sensory homunculus? How tooth brushing can
            provoke orgasms? Buy this book!”)
            
            --Neuron, Zachary Scheiner and Daniel Storm
              Click here to read the complete review (requires an
              individual or institutional subscription).


             "Linden, a well-known expert on synaptic plasticity, does an unusually
             good job of balancing entertainment and accuracy. He does not
             patronize readers and is careful to avoid the oversimplifications that
             plague neuroscience journalism (a brain center for love, a gene for
             adultery, and so on)... [The Accidental Mind] is entertaining,
             intellectually stimulating, well written and scientifically authoritative.
             Although not a textbook, The Accidental Mind would make an 
             excellent introduction to the field for nonspecialist students, or for 
             anyone else wanting an introduction to neuroscientific thinking and to
             the types of explanations that neuroscience can (and cannot) offer to
             some of life's great mysteries."

             --Nature Neuroscience, Charles Jennings
               Click here to read the complete review (requires an
               individual or institutional subscription).


             "Many popular neuroscience books emphasize the brain's complexity
             using terms of purpose: this region is for emotion, that one for vision,
             and so forth, each interacting in a perfectly designed whole. This
             ambitious, engaging, and often irreverent book by Linden (Johns
             Hopkins Univ.) adopts a quite different perspective, instead
             emphasizing the evolutionary origins of the human brain...   
             Summing Up: Highly recommended."
           --Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, S.A. Huettel
              Click here to read the complete review.


           "Either way, Linden's point is made: the magnificent brain and the
            mind that it fabricates are just more accidents of evolution, a series
            of modules of various capacities that that developed for different
            reasons and then piled on top of one another like, as Linden puts it,
            so many scoops of ice cream melting together in messy, if often
            delightful ways."

           --Harper's Magazine, Gary Greenberg


           "Linden's style is breezy, making the book a surprisingly easy read
           for the non-expert.  One of the points that the book makes is that
           memory is tied to emotions and Linden has certainly learned this
           lesson, managing to explain the basic facts of how the brain works 
           while keeping 'the audience' engaged emotionally with the topic.
           Indeed, his chapter on sex looks at human proclivities with the 
           sharp eye of a practiced comic, all the while actually explaining the
           science.  I can't help but think that Linden is one hell of a dinner
           party guest."

           --Metapsychology Online Reviews, Konrad Talmont-Kaminski
              Click here to read the complete review.

    "Even those of us of a hard‐line, naturalist stance often assume that when it comes to us humans, although there might be one or two flaws—childbirth, for instance—by and large, we are put together pretty well. Above all, our brains are first‐rate computers and here, indeed, natural selection did as well as God.  In this entertaining book on modern brain science, Linden sets out to disillusion us of this kind of thinking and shows that the human brain is just as much a string‐and‐sealing‐wax contraption as so many other parts of our bodies and those of others. Overall, this is a good introductory primer to modern brain science and, as such, I welcome and praise it."
          --Quarterly Review of Biology, Michael Ruse
             Click here to read the complete review (subscription required)
 

           "The human brain's reputation is that of an impeccably designed
            machine, able to perform functions well beyond the scope of any
            supercomputer. While the brain's capabilities are remarkable, its
            design is not, asserts brain researcher Linden. Instead, the 3-pound
            lump of flesh has been cobbled together by millions of years of
            evolution. In this survey of the brain for lay readers, Linden attempts
            to explain the brain's ascendance to the seat of what makes a human
            human"

      --Science News


    "For anyone interested in a skillfully guided tour through the world of     neural function, The Accidental Mind is a playful yet academically informed work that addresses issues as diverse as intelligent design, the fallibility of the senses, the human religious impulse, and the possible heritability of sexual orientation.  Without overwhelming the reader with the biochemical underpinnings of neural function, Linden explores the role that neural design (structure and function) has in the explication of various human behaviors.  Through the use of clear examples, comprehensible diagrams, and relevent case studies, Linden is able to flesh out the gritty details of brain function in a very non-gritty way."

            --History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Charles J. Alt

          

          “The Accidental Mind's greatest strength is demystifying biology and       .           neuroscience into understandable human terms for the nonscientist.    .           His writing is witty and engaging. What is interesting is how the human .           brain design is not designed as many have imagined.”

          --Public Libraries Association, Dr. Terri Maggio


          "The Accidental Mind is utterly readable and really quite delightful"

          --WGN Radio, Milt Rosenberg


    "This is a terrific book that accomplishes its aim of presenting a biological view of how the brain works, and does so in a charming, fetching style."

    --Joshua R. Sanes, Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University


    "This is the first scientific book I've read with "attitude." David Linden is something of a Howard Stern shock jock and there's a lot of heavy breathing in this book as he attempts to give an overview of brain function and the linkage between psychological and brain processes. However Linden is clearly a thoughtful scientist and this comes through in his excellent choice of facts and theories to present. This is a very intelligent book."

    --John Lisman, Professor of Biology, Brandeis University



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