The Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World [Paperback]

Zach Lynch's "The Neuro Revolution: How brain science is changing our world" is a painfully detailed book on the myriad ways neuroscience impacts our lives today and its possible effects on our future. Despite Lynch's thorough explanation on cutting-edge neuroscience research and his first hand insights from leading neuro-experts, his words seem to lose their fizz as the book progresses from one chapter to the next. Even though "The Neuro Revolution" is well-organized and thoroughly researched, it is clearly over-sensationalized.

A brief synopsis:
The book is divided into ten chapters, each devoted to an aspect that it is closely intertwined to our daily existence such as law, politics, marketing, finance, art, religion, trust, and war. According to Lynch, neuroscience will radically transform each of these arenas in ways we have not fathomed before. He gives detailed explanations on his each of his predictions and evidence for each claim.

Style and structure:
Combine the writing powers of a research scientist and a tabloid journalist, and you get the prose of Zack Lynch. Overall, the book has great structure. Lynch has clearly put in some deliberate thought into every chapter title and a sincere effort in tying together their underlying themes. However, every prediction of Lynch sounds more hyperbole than possibility. There are a lot of repetitious claims and concepts that plague the book. One concept that Lynch keeps harping about in the book is brain imaging (fMRI in specific). Lynch makes it sound like everything we do in the future - right from applying for a job, how we choose our partners, to purchasing designer shoes - will be based on how our brains light up on an fMRI which seemed absurd to me.

A look in-depth:

Chapter 1 - Time's Telescope:
Lynch spends a great deal of time setting up his case in this chapter. He starts off with a review of the past talking about the three revolutions that have changed the course of human history - (a) the agricultural, (b) industrial, and (c) information revolutions. He finally introduces, with much pomp, the neuro-revolution as the fourth wave whose threshold we are currently standing upon.

Chapters 2-5:
These chapters are devoted to describing the emerging areas of neurolaw, neuromarketing, neurofinancing, and the dynamic concept of trust respectively. I must confess that Lynch does give us some food for thought when he poses questions such as "How does someone turn out to be a criminal?" and "Is there a biological basis [for crime]?". Lynch's underlying claim is that "neurotechnology will be extensively used in the courtroom . . . [for] determining bias, compelling the truth, and showing whether someone poses a risk of future criminality"(46). The third and fourth chapters are devoted to exploring how neuroscience will impact marketing and finance. As dry as these concepts may sound, Lynch does justice in capturing the impact of neuroscience and opening our eyes to how our brain reacts to advertisements and makes financial decisions. The fifth chapter is solely devoted to the precarious topic of trust. The central focus of this chapter was the hormone "oxytocin" that is known to increase feelings of trust, love, and sexual gratification.

Chapters 6-9:
The major chunk of the second half of this book is a weak attempt in explaining how neuroscience will potentially impact the more abstract - art, our perception of God, and cosmetic neuro-enablement (a concept introduced by Lynch). Lynch's arguments seem to become weaker with the onset of these chapters - it seems because of the inevitable abstractness of the topics he attempts to explain. One of his weak predictions in chapter six on neuroesthetics states "As neurotechnology advances, we will have the ability to work backward to reverse-engineer the experiences generated by art and use some future variant of fMRI to tell us how to construct great songs, plays, and paintings. A day will arrive when, for some, becoming a great artist will mean learning the fundamentals of neuroesthetics"(130). He uses similar arguments while trying to predict how neuroscience will impact our perceptions of God, war, and our morale.

Chapter 10 - Our Emerging Neurosociety:
Finally, Lynch ties his entire book together in a mere 2-3 pages. As the book progressed I hoped at least that he would spend a considerable amount of time tying his ideas together. However he does not do so in his terribly short and abrupt conclusion. He leaves the reader with a highly optimistic, utopian vision of the future - which to me, an engineer, seems way too unrealistic.

Memorable Quotes:
* "Marketing isn't an invention of capitalism, or any other economic system. Marketing comes straight out of nature"
* "Just as our buildings are shaped by the available resources of construction technology, artworks are shaped by the functional abilities of our brain"
* "One way or another artists have been stirring up cultural, personal, and political change in our brains for as long as they've been mixing pigments, twanging tones, clacking dry bones, pounding drums, snapping pics, rapping or writing rhymes"
* "What's the difference between the mind and the brain? The mind is what the brain does for a living"
* "Using our brains to study our brains means that we are kind of boxed in"

Final words:

It is extremely difficult to write about the future and not be criticized for one's claims. Zack Lynch chose to do just that - predict the future - and unfortunately I found it extremely difficult to swallow his every claim. The book is definitely worth a read, but one must be cautious of every claim that the author makes. It makes a fabulous read for the thirsty futurist, but a tiresome one for the practical realist.

Did you ever know any of those people in school who could write a term paper of any length with virtually no content value at all? Visualize that concept extended to the length of a book and you will have some idea of the remarkable achievement that Lynch and Laursen have with this doorstop. Start by spending as many pages as possible detailing all the fields that you think will be affected by neuroscience (endless repetition encouraged). Then within each detail list all of the groups of people you think will be affected by each of these areas (again, endless repetitions encouraged). Use the word I as many times as you can. String as many adjectives together wherever you can. Do all this, and you will begin to get an idea of how this unprecidented achievement in lack of value was accomplished.

This book's awful cover pretty much says it all. This is not so much an in depth investigation of the future of neuroscience as a load of futuristic hype from a writer who makes a living as a consultant in neurotechology. Posing as if he's reflecting seriously about matters of science-and-society, Lynch is really just selling a Hollywood version of how wonderful life's going to be thanks to all things neuro. The funny thing is, this future-guy is not even up to date with the science. When writing about MRI-lie detection Neurorevolution doesn't go beyond 2002! For everyone who wants a sober and truely interesting account of the neuro-revolution, I recommend "Mindfield" by Lone Frank - curiously, a book with the same subtitle as Lynch's but so much more thoughtfulness.