Book of the week: The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind by Michio Kaku

(Doubleday, $29)

Some “genuinely cool stuff” is happening today in brain research, said Robert Herritt in TheDailyBeast.com. For his latest best-seller, the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku has rounded up a veritable World’s Fair of brain-related gadgetry to wow us with current and potential breakthroughs. We look in on scientists in California who can roughly identify what a subject is looking at just by monitoring shifts in the brain’s blood flow. We learn about a mind-reading body suit that will likely allow a paralyzed teenager to kick a soccer ball during this year’s World Cup festivities. To Kaku, such astonishments offer excuse enough to speculate that science is closing in on making memories downloadable and individual minds immortal. Unfortunately, he has little time for any of the hard truths that would “muddy his vision of tomorrowland.”

But let’s enjoy Kaku’s bold tour for what it is, said Caspar Henderson in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). “Whatever its shortcomings, this book is a clear and readable guide to what is going on at a time of astonishingly rapid change.” Mice have had their memories erased and reprogrammed. Robots have been put in motion by thoughts passing through the brain of a monkey half a world away. Kaku isn’t blind to science’s current limits: When he tells us about a supercomputer named Blue Gene that has simulated processes in 4.5 percent of the brain’s neurons and synapses, he acknowledges that fully simulating the brain’s activity would require a city block’s worth of Blue Genes, plus a river to cool their power source. He wants us to know, though, that some breakthroughs may yield substantial benefits soon in the treatment of such diseases as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and he’s “right to highlight and celebrate this.”

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Unfortunately, there’s a fundamental flaw in the author’s conception of the mind, said Adam Frank in The New York Times. “For Kaku, the brain is a computer made of meat, and understanding the mind is just a really, really hard engineering problem.” But many scientists believe that even a thorough understanding of the brain’s mechanics won’t begin to explain individual consciousness—“the ‘being’ of our being.” Somehow “the essential mystery of our lives” is thus “dismissed as a nonproblem when it’s exactly the problem we can’t ignore.” That weakness doesn’t destroy the value of The Future of the Mind. If you continuously question Kaku while reading him, “the vistas he presents are well worth the trip.”