The Self-Assembling Brain, by Peter Hiesinger – a review

NB. I was sent this book as a review copy.

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From Princeton University Press

Science so often lives in silos, or perhaps more accurately silos of Babel. We sit in our offices, ignoring a great deal of what is happening down the corridor from us, let alone in the building next door or the one on the other side of the campus.  A lot of this is down to inertia, and the academic culture of mistrust. But a great deal of the problem is down to the technical languages that, over the years, we become fluent in, and as we do so we shut out those other scientists who may actually be talking about something very similar, just in a complementary language.

The self-assembling brain is a book unlike any other that I’ve read, in that it is very explicitly trying to deal with this problem. The topic is that of the creation of the physical structures in the brain during, particularly, development.…