Unthinkable Paperback – 2018 by Helen Thomson (John Murray)

Unthinkable is the rare work which can combine reading pleasure with genuine insight. It has its faults, or at least shortcomings which result from the genre, but it still worth spending an evening reading the book cover to cover.

Helen Thomson is a journalist with a degree in neuroscience. As such she chooses to revive the conceit of Oliver Sacks by describing the life of people who have unusual brains which either give them abilities or disabilities compared to most of humanity. Unlike Sacks, Thomson chooses to describe these people mostly in an outpatient setting—to allow the reader to see them as persons and not as mental patients or as spectacles for a circus.

We thus encounter a man who remembers every detail of his life, a man who sees color auras around people and a doctor who literally feels the pain of his patients. All make for fascinating case studies on their own. But Thomas takes the cases further by summarizing what neuroscientists know about the origin of these conditions.

There is a theme in the work that these people are only extreme cases of capabilities of all human beings. As such, Thomson tends to shun the idea that these people have identified mental illnesses and instead view them as simply differently abled individuals. I have no training in psychology but tend to think there is something useful in labeling what is a healthy human mind and what are clearly aberrations.

I also couldn’t help but think that many of the chapters read like the extended articles frequently appearing these days in periodicals or the internet. I would have preferred more substance and less anecdote but individual readers’ tastes may differ.

Even so, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and learned something about how the brain works as well. Strongly recommend this book to non-experts in neuroscience who want a work with a captivating style which also teaches some basic facts about the marvelous work of nature that is the human brain.