The Other Brain focuses on the mostly ignored part of the brain - glial cells or white matter. Even in my course work I mostly just learned that glial cells were responsible for cleaning up and myelination. Although new evidence is showing that these underrepresented cells are responsible for so much more and we are just now discovering how much.

Fields takes a comprehensive look into the field of glial cells including his own research. The information presented is pretty cutting edge, which is even more exceptional since it is a book. The writing is engaging and the book is well laid out.

However I would have liked more science. A lot of the information presented was still fairly basic and a lot of the new research was not very in depth. I really picked up this book because it claimed to talk about the neurological discoveries into schizophrenia - a topic that is of particular interest to me. Yet nothing presented was really new or even contained much depth. A lot of the research is still preliminary and the implications are not well known. This is fascinating in and of itself, I wish the book did not make claims beyond that.