An alumnus of the École normale supérieure, Lionel Naccache is a doctor of cognitive neurosciences, a researcher in cognitive neurociences at the ICM (Institut du cerveau et de la moelle épinière – Institute for Brain and Spinal Cord) at the Salpetrière Hospital, and professor of medicine at the Université Paris VI. He is the author of Le Nouvel inconscient, Perdons-nous connaissance?, Un sujet en soi, and the recently published L’Homme réseau-nable, and Le Chant du signe.
Here, for the first time, is a book that brings the brain into our everyday lives and makes it accessible to all.
The science of the brain tells us about ourselves – our emotions, our memory, our perceptions – but it does so in a language that is still not very accessible to us.
Glia, basal ganglia, hippocampus, membrane receptor…; these terms rise up like a wall between our brain and us.
Parlez-vous cerveau? offers to tear down that wall in 35 short, enlightening and entertaining chapters, each devoted to a fundamental concept, and illustrated with a remarkable story, making the concept more easily assimilated and memorized.
We see the glia and the neuron wage a very instructive battle of the sexes; we encounter the basal ganglia in the guise of a balloon vendor; we discover the double life of the hippocampus, the palace of memory at night, the cerebral GPS by day; while Antoine Doinel, François Truffaut’s double, meets membrane receptors on his way…
Easy to read, complete, and extremely instructive, the first guide that enables the reader to become an expert in the language of “brain!”