Portraits of the Mind

"This is a picture book of the brain. In the history of neuroscience, we have certainly struggled with our understanding of the brain. One limitation has been our inability to actually see what the structure of the brain is and see how it works. That has been answered by ever more sophisticated technologies for taking pictures of the brain. Finding connectomes relies upon the most powerful microscope you can imagine, and the power to analyse those images. I describe that in my book, but my book is mainly words. If you want to see the images of the brain which have been so important for science, Portraits of the Mind is a wonderful resource."

"This is a picture storybook about the brain, which sounds really mad. But both my kids have looked at it with me. My son is nearly 13, and my daughter is 15, and they really liked it. It is such an engaging book because the brain is so fascinating – but people are quite often scared to think about it. This is basically a history of how we understand the brain. It starts with the early philosophers like Aristotle and so on. It also has just the most beautiful pictures and drawings and diagrams of the early dissections – and then, eventually, we get to the current level of photography in terms of the microscopic detail of neurons and dendrites and synapses and all the amazing things about this amazing part of us. So I think it is brilliant. And if you can’t be bothered to read it all, you can just look at the pictures and read the captions, and you learn so much."