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bella613 's review for:
The Man Who Wasn't There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self
by Anil Ananthaswamy
informative
reflective
medium-paced
I liked this book a lot! It's good writing and quite compelling. I find the topic interesting but I haven't read a ton of this take, so a decent amount felt fairly new to me.
However, what I like about it is also what I don't like about it. The mix of philosophy and science is fun and thought provoking, but it also creates an atmosphere that allows a lot of factually incorrect statements because of language. Philosophy uses a lot of extrapolated theory (and tests these by assuming them true) which science and medicine cannot. The author uses the words "cause" and "explain" in many cases when "correlate" and "hypothesize" might be better. The sections on autism in particular bothered me because it was portrayed in the same "affliction" light as alzheimers and psychosis. I appreciate and enjoy listening to theory with both human anecdote and experimentation, and found the sense-of-self focus highly interesting. But it made me a little uncomfortable that things were boiled down a little too far and simplified to exaggerate that focus.
Overall I liked this book a lot and would recommend a read/listen, but please don't let this be your only source of information on things like autism spectrum disorder, schizophrenia, dementia, and psychosis.
However, what I like about it is also what I don't like about it. The mix of philosophy and science is fun and thought provoking, but it also creates an atmosphere that allows a lot of factually incorrect statements because of language. Philosophy uses a lot of extrapolated theory (and tests these by assuming them true) which science and medicine cannot. The author uses the words "cause" and "explain" in many cases when "correlate" and "hypothesize" might be better. The sections on autism in particular bothered me because it was portrayed in the same "affliction" light as alzheimers and psychosis. I appreciate and enjoy listening to theory with both human anecdote and experimentation, and found the sense-of-self focus highly interesting. But it made me a little uncomfortable that things were boiled down a little too far and simplified to exaggerate that focus.
Overall I liked this book a lot and would recommend a read/listen, but please don't let this be your only source of information on things like autism spectrum disorder, schizophrenia, dementia, and psychosis.