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This collection on mind-brain consists mostly of papers from the 1996 Birmingham, England meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The Editor, Steven Rose, highlights the danger in believing that progress in neuroscience will result in “a pill for every ill,” attempting to temper the extraordinary claims made in some circles as “at best arrogant and at worst … dangerous.” Thus chapters generally present careful, thoughtful, and unexaggerated interdisciplinary views of the following research topics: developmental neuroanatomy (John Parnavelas); the pharmacology of thought and emotion (Trevor Robbins); memory and brain systems (Larry R. Squire, Tim Bliss), again of the brain (A. David Smith); theories of schizophrenia (Richard Bentall, Tim J. Crow); neurocomputing (Roger Penrose, Igor Aleksander); philosophy and neuroscience (Richard Gregory, Susan Greenfield, Mary Midgley); and the neurobiology of consciousness (Wolf Singer). I will now discuss some of these chapters in more detail.
Paranavelas covers the basic units of brain function while introducing the idea that genetic factors and the “microenvironment of cells in or near proliferative zones” (p. 30) codetermine at which points “cells decide to form a particular set of connections and to produce a certain neurotransmitter” (p. 27). For example, certain “proteins essential for neuronal functioning are [present or absent depending] … on environmental rather than genetically driven … factors” (p. 29). Particular attention is also spent on the author's interest: whether separate progenitor cells exist in the ventricular zone for glia vs. neurons (they