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Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science

Carl Sagan

Mass Market Paperback | Pages: 398 pages

Rating: 4.04 | 9653 Users | 272 Reviews

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Title	:	Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science
Author	:	Carl Sagan
Book Format	:	Mass Market Paperback
Book Edition	:	Deluxe Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 398 pages
Published	:	February 12th 1986 by Ballantine Books (first published April 12th 1979)
Categories	:	Science. Nonfiction. Philosophy. History

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It's very hard to give a review and rating for the entirety of this book. From chapter to chapter it feels disjointed and varies quite a bit in both content and quality. I seem forced to review the different parts and chapters individually.

The first "part" of the book, titled "Science and Human Concern" and encompassing the first four chapters, showcases Sagan's eloquent and brilliant writing especially well. In these chapters I learned new things and gained a new appreciation for Einstein's incredible mind; One would be hard-pressed to argue the book doesn't start off strong.

The next part, called "The Paradoxers", starts of well enough, explaining and refuting various pseudoscientific and paranormal beliefs. But in chapter 7 Sagan spends over 50 pages refuting the claims made in a specific book called "Worlds in Collision" written by a specific author named Velikovsky. This would be fine if I were reading Broca's brain 30 years ago when it was published, but as it is I have never heard anyone repeating the ridiculous claims spouted by Velikovsky so I wasn't very interested in their refutations. I ended up skimming through most of the chapter. This is just one of the ways the book suffers from how dated it is. After this, part two continues with a couple good chapters, the first on theological arguments and second on science fiction.

The next two parts of Broca's Brain are both mostly concerned with astronomy, space exploration, and humanity's future. They continue to vary in quality from a great chapter on Robert H. Goddard's tireless work towards space exploration to a terribly boring chapter on choosing namesakes for features of other planets.

The final part skeptically examines religion and does a pretty good job until it ends with a chapter concerning hypothesis that explains religious stories and experiences in terms of subconscious memories of birth that's almost Freudian in its level of wild speculation.

Broca's Brain is magnificent at times, but at times it's dense enough to make up for it, and overall it just felt too muddled for me to give it a very good rating.

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Original Title:	Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science
ISBN:	0345336895 (ISBN13: 9780345336897)
Edition Language:	English URL http://www.carlsagan.com/
Literary Awards:	National Book Award Finalist for Science (Paperback) (1981)

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Ratings: 4.04 From 9653 Users | 272 Reviews

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Although some of the book is dated since it was written in the early 1970s, it was still an interesting book. It contains essays covering different topics. Although the ideas can be deep, Sagan is able to communicate the ideas to the masses. The title of the book comes from the opportunity Sagan had to hold the brain of one of his idols. He wondered if future scientific advances would allow us to be able to obtain the memories of a deceased person. He then goes on to say that it would be the

Museums have an inner world that the public never sees. In one of these hideaways, Carl Sagan was permitted to view the brain of Paul Broca, a surgeon who died in 1880. As Dr. Sagan looked at the cerebral remains of one of his heroes, he had this thought: It was difficult to hold Brocas brain without wondering whether in some sense Broca was still in there.Sagan wondered at a possible future where technology would allow us to download Brocas memories. And then he wrote something that struck me.

This is a collection of essays, all somehow related to science. I read it over the course of several months - not because it wasn't interesting, but because sometimes I just wasn't in the mood for it. The articles on skepticism and the history of science were fascinating, but the later descriptions of the "current" situation in astronomy and planetary science was more than a touch dated. (It was written in the 1970s.) All the same, it was still Sagan, and I do so enjoy reading Sagan. I look

Ultimately I found this a bit disappointing. I liked the descriptions of historical scientists, and some of the language was beautiful, but mostly the book just dragged. Sagan's dissection of Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision--a 55-page takedown of a now-obscure pseudoscience tract that I've never read and never hope to--was particularly punishing. I also felt that Sagan occasionally forgot he was supposed to be addressing lay audiences--either that, or my poor performance in high school geometry

Part of my five start rating is for the book itself, but a big part of my experience of "Broca's Brain" is inextricably tangled up with memories of sitting late at night at the kitchen table with my father when I was a teenager, discussing Sagan, the brain, and life itself. We didn't know then that my erudite, articulate father's future would involve a fall and a chronic brain injury that would profoundly affect Wernicke's area and his ability to read and communicate. Much of the neuroscience in

As a fan of Carl Sagan, this book is principally interesting because it appeared just before he "went viral" with his famous book Cosmos and the widely viewed TV series based on it. In Broca's Brain Sagan is at a transition between practicing scientist and the near-mythical popular science advocate he was about to become. Much of the science is datedit's current to about 1975 or soyet it is historically interesting to those tracking scientific development. And the chapter on "robots" is simply

Re-read it....Carl Sagan arguably is one of the best writers on science specially astrophysics. Science and faith have always been at loggerheads since mankind started juxtaposing the two and it became the task of scientific analysers like Carl Sagan to argue, defend and convince the importance of scientific approach vis a vis the popular approach of faith which he does in this book lucidly..