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> Please write a book!

Aww, thanks. You're very kind. I should state for the record that my thinking on this subject has been heavily influenced by Subcortical Structures and Cognition -- which is a fantastic book, but is written for neuropsychologists and related professionals (so occasionally I try to translate it to the best of my ability for people who are interested in the brain, but not neuropsychologists).

> Do you agree with such an assessment that humans are more emotional than rational? OR Emotional part of the brain has more influence that the rational part of the brain?

Ah, interesting question. I think that Lehrer is using "emotional brain" to mean anything "thinking" the brain does without our conscious awareness or oversight -- that is, any brain activity that involves directing our behavior (so not including basic things like alertness/arousal/basic sensory processing/respiration/homeostasis, but including things like implicit learning, threat detection, orienting towards goals, prioritizing sensory information, directing our attention, etc).

In that sense, then yes, absolutely, I think we are more "emotional" than "rational". Although the rational PFC has extensive connections to just about every other part of the brain and can direct a lot of things, the brain is designed in such a way as to try to minimize what the PFC needs to do, so a lot of things just "happen" for us automatically, without need for conscious direction. Which leaves our big, beautiful PFCs free to solve new problems and write poetry and do science and invent things and all of the other things that we can do that (most) other animals can't.

> how do you feel, as a Neuropsychologist, when someone writes about such important topic that might give away wrong impression or even wrong information on how our brain works?

There are certainly advantages and disadvantages. One of the major advantages, I think, is alluded to in the book. Because so much of what experts "know" is handled by their subcortical structures, it can be very difficult for them to effectively explain and communicate what they know, since "explaining" is inherently a PFC-mediated process. Lehrer describes experts as being very "intuitive", by which I think he means that they rely on how "subcortical" their knowledge base and thinking about a topic has become, and so experts often cannot "cortically" explain why they just "know" something.

So people who are not experts in a subject may have a communication advantage that experts do not have. That silly saying "Those that can't do, teach" may have been a response to our collective recognition that often explaining a subject and knowing a subject do not correlate very well.

I think outsiders can also question basic assumptions more easily, and not get caught up in some "established" modes of thinking in a field, and they may more easily be able to see connections between bodies of disparate knowledge that people immersed in a specific field wouldn't be able to think of (e.g., connections between behavioral economics and neuroscience).

Of course, there is always the problem that they will misunderstand, miscommunicate, misinterpret, or otherwise misrepresent what they are talking about. For instance, I think Lehrer has read a lot of Antonio Damasio (The Feeling of What Happens), Joseph Ledoux (The Emotional Brain), and neuroeconomics (with its emphasis on "nonrational" consumers as a contrast to the "rational" consumers of classic econ theory), and that has biased him towards describing all subcortical structures as the "emotional" brain. Perhaps a slightly more expansive reading list might have led him to consider a different conceptualization.

Alternatively --and I say this in part because he did seem to have quite a lot of experts look over his material before it became a book -- maybe he uses "emotion" because it's a handy label that he thought the general public would be able to latch onto. For better or for worse, experts often have trouble letting go of the subtleties of their field, and recognizing that if laypeople just get the "basic idea," then that is better than nothing. As the cognitive neuroscientist Daniel Willingham put it, "shallow knowledge is better than no knowledge."

Of course, that assumes the shallow knowledge is basically true. This is a disadvantage of non-experts writing about a subject... if they give people shallow knowledge that is incorrect or misrepresented (e.g., maybe a science journalist describes a study showing a modest correlation between variable X and Y under Z conditions as "X CAUSES Y!!!"), they can actually do more harm than good.

Ideally, then, science journalism should be self-correcting, which is why I think science journalism blogs like Lehrer's The Frontal Cortex are a good thing... they provide links to the study, and allow comments where expert commenters, skeptical readers, and other science journalists could point out misconceptions or other errors.

Books do not have this self-correction feature, which does raise the danger that they will be sources of misinformation. And I think, honestly, that a lot of readers get stuck in the mentality they learned from reading high school textbooks that "if it's in print, it must be true", and they do not want to, or know how to, read critically. I guess these dangers have to be weighed against the possibility of them providing a lot of correct information in a format that the lay public will want to read.

Was that enough of a non-answer?? :)

I promise I'm well aware she's a girl. I just tend to say/type dude a lot. Dudette doesn't roll of the tongue/fingers as well. :)

Since I'm not very far into it, I can't answer that question very well, but I guess it depends on what type of background you have. If you know a lot about neuroanatomy, you'll probably be fine, although my understanding is that there's a lot in there about neuropsychological tests. The authors recommend that people have a general background in neuropsych first (from something like this or this ) but I guess it depends on what type of background you have and what you want to get out of the book. I wouldn't really recommend reading those two books if you're not in neuropsych or a closely related field. They're boring enough for us to read. :)