• brain

Inviting the author to Book Club can be a high-risk strategy. There is always the possibility that no one will have liked it, and an awkward hour will ensue, littered with disingenuous attempts to spin a positive angle. There was no danger of that when Adam Zeman, Professor of Cognitive and Behavioural Neurology at Peninsula Medical School, joined us to discuss about his second book: ‘A portrait of the brain’.1

It is a beautiful account of the brain, starting at the atomic level, then gradually zooming out chapter by chapter, ending at the level of the soul. In a style reminiscent of Oliver Sacks, Zeman uses neurological case histories to illustrate our understanding of each layer. Several readers independently drew a comparison between the two authors, and so we were interested to hear that Zeman …