pangeaprogressblog
Paul Broks trained as a clinical psychologist at Oxford University and went on to specialize in neuropsychology. He has pursued a career combining both clinical practice and basic research.
What book has influenced you most? Explain how.
I read René Descartes' A Discourse on Method and Meditations in my student days. The experience has never left me. It was the Penguin Classics edition with Frans Hals's portrait of the great 17th-century philosopher staring out from the front cover. Reading the Meditations felt like dissolving into those heavy-lidded eyes and into his thought processes. Descartes' erroneous but fatally beguiling division of mind and matter has become ingrained in our way of thinking, and the apparent irreconcilability of subjective and objective points of view remains one of the great conundrums in the science of mind.
V.S. Ramachandran's The Emerging Mind, based on his recent BBC Reith Lectures, is a lucid and engaging tour of some of the most enticing territories of cognitive neuroscience.
Ian Glynn's An Anatomy of Thought: The Origin and Machinery of the Mind is a brilliant general introduction to brain science.
Paul Broks
including but not limited to development of cognitive processes, brain-behavior relationships, adult and child neuropsychology, disorders of speech and language, and very importantly the interface of neuropsychology with related areas, such as cognitive neuroscience, behavioral neurology and neuropsychiatry.
