Books that Make You Think

Nonfiction that makes you think is rare compared to the number of volumes in print. One in a hundred, maybe? But I found a cool one by looking at the award-winning books on the Denver Public Library site. The Echo Maker is two stories, one about a woman whose brother suffers brain injury in a car crash and subsequently goes through all kinds of strange delusions and machinations that keep him from feeling like a normal part of the world. The other story is about a neuroscientist who studies people with brain injury and writes about them in a way that a lay person can understand.

What I find most fascinating about this novel is the premise that this "abnormal" brain function is actually normal and is just a tiny, tiny part of what our brains are capable of. People with color synesthesia see a color when they see, think, or hear a particular number or word (one is blue, Wednesday is yellow, etc.). Some people experience very pleasant sensations in feet they no longer have. People who suffer from Capgras syndrome think that their loved ones are actually robots or "imposters." In the book, you start to see how the hallucination could seem real. Bizarre stuff. But to some, just an indication of what the brain can really do, perhaps even precursors to the next stage of evolution.