Asya Kazantseva made a rapid entrance into the world of popular science in 2013 with her first book, Who Would Have Thought! While she had been involved in science popularization earlier, it was the release of this book that catapulted her to megastar status as an author of popular science literature. The book instantly became a bestseller, receiving praise and recommendations from the scientific community. What set it apart was its accessibility — it was easy to read, and even those far removed from science could grasp the ideas and conclusions with ease. The language wasn’t the typical dry, academic tone but rather felt like a close friend explaining complex ideas, sprinkled with humor. In Who Would Have Thought!, Kazantseva explored the science behind our bad habits, seasonal mood changes, and the “chemistry of love.” The book quickly won the “Enlightener” award for its contribution to popular science, and I was absolutely thrilled by it, recommending it to all my friends.
A couple of years later, her second book, Someone on the Internet is Wrong, was published. This time, Asya focused on hot-button topics that spark fierce debates online: vaccines, GMOs, homeopathy, and the mortality of HIV. While this book also became a bestseller, I personally found it slightly weaker than the first. And then, in 2019, her third book, The Brain is Material, was released.
This book is entirely dedicated to the brain, highlighting just how little we still know about it. However, we’ve made a huge leap in the past hundred years, although some of the research and its conclusions have been quite inhumane, and many of those conclusions were later revised as new data emerged. Focusing on a single theme, rather than several disparate ones, has both positive and negative effects on the book, in my opinion.
The language remains light, and Asya has managed to present the brain from various perspectives, focusing on different aspects of its functioning and our knowledge of it. The book is filled with fascinating historical examples, such as what happened to people who lost parts of their brain or how “progressive” scientists once destroyed pieces of people’s brains for their supposed benefit.
For the first time, I learned why young children can learn languages so easily, while adults cannot, and that even today, scientists cannot definitively explain what sleep is or why we need it from an evolutionary perspective. But if you don’t sleep — you die. That’s a scientific fact.
However, when Asya dives into explaining how the brain works, it’s the kind of thing that “you won’t understand without a stiff drink.” Or at best, you might grasp it for three minutes and then forget it, like a bird with a short attention span. It’s at this point that the accessibility of the narrative gets lost, as the topics being explained are far from simple for the uninitiated reader. This is the kind of dense material that Asya cleverly avoided in her earlier books, which is probably why they became so popular among a wide range of readers.
Here, though, she has even separated the more complex topics into the last section of the book, calling it a “Brief Course in Neurobiology.” And that’s where everything I struggled to understand in the book is concentrated. How neurons and synapses work, who produces and breaks down what. I mean, I’m not stupid, and with some effort, my brain could probably grasp and retain all this scientific theory, but while reading, I treated this section as somewhat insignificant and unnecessary for the overall understanding of the book. The only thing I really understood was that it’s all very complicated. And I marveled at how nature even developed such a complex system like the brain. And most importantly — why did nature even need to? No answer.
The book is still interesting, but the “wow” effect isn’t quite the same as in the previous ones. As a result, it doesn’t spark the same level of enthusiasm. By the way, if you want to see many of the brain’s features in action through vivid examples, I’d recommend watching the first couple of seasons of the American show Brain Games. While there’s almost no scientific explanation there, the “Wow!” factor is exponentially higher.
My rating: 4- / 5
