Far too many bad books have been published about the brain. Some are filled with empty claims about the nature of consciousness, a concept so slippery it would take a book to define it, let alone explain it. Others have adopted a bombastic I-know-the-answer tone of voice that fits ill with a science that is still in the pencil-sucking stage.

Happily, Steven Rose’s new book avoids both these pitfalls. It neither claims to know all the answers nor cooks up plausible catchphrases to make a complex subject appear simple. Neurobiologists, he asserts at the outset, have no Theory of Everything and the science of the brain remains data-rich and theory-poor.

This makes the task he undertakes much harder. It is always easier to write about a science that has recently undergone a great simplification, such as geology in the wake of plate tectonics, than it is about one that is gathering data at an accelerating rate but has no overarching theory to encompass it. As Peter Mewadar once remarked: “Theories eliminate facts.” Once there is a theory, we know which facts to take seriously, and which to ignore. Without one, all facts have an equal claim to our attention — and in the neurosciences there are an awful lot of facts to attend to.

So a lot of this book is fairly heavy going. Even the most dedicated reader may be momentarily dazed by clunkers such as: “The transformation of vision into perception is a process in which the ontogenic specificity of the growth of connections between retina and visual cortex, and within the many sub-regions of the cortex, occurs in intimate interplay with experience-dependent plasticity and is relatively uncontroversial among neuroscientists.” It may be uncontroversial among you lot, you find yourself muttering, but it’s incomprehensible among us lot.

To be fair, the great majority of the book is clear and the description of the state of knowledge about the brain splendid in its concision. Some facts leap out. In the nine months of its gestation, a baby acquires its complement of 100 billion brain cells by making them at the rate of 250,000 every minute. The mind boggles, or perhaps it should be the brain, though Rose gives short shrift to that old dichotomy. There are two types of people in the world, he says: those who are partial to dichotomies, and those who dislike them. Joking apart, he definitely belongs to the latter category.

The second half of the book moves into familar Rose territory, where he lays about him with good effect on issues such as reductionism (he’s against it) and genetic determinism (ditto). There is a wise passage on the phenomenon of attention deficity/hyperactivity disorder, and how in psychiatry a case definition can itself lead to an explosive growth of diagnoses, even though today’s children are probably no more inattentive or disruptive than were yesterday’s.

Finally he gazes dystopically into the future, conjuring up a world in which we have the power to “correct” even minor deviations of brain chemistry, or dope the awkward into unresisting contentment by the equivalent of Huxley’s Soma. He is right to warn the reader against this danger and to assert the primacy of ethical judgment over technical possibility. He has come far from his Jewish childhood in North London, but it is still possible to discern rabbinical echoes informing the scientific analysis — and this makes his book especially valuable.

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