It confused me, being neither scientifically accurate nor pleasant to read. The first problem is that the fascination with bazillions of metaphors and similes just turns it into a hallucinogenic fantasy about Ackerman's creativity, rather than reflecting a real love for the amazing process of the brain. Some chapters are dramatically more rewarding than others. I made myself finish it to give it a chance, but it was hard going. But even as a fan of both popular science, a stream-of-consciousness thinker and a liker of Ackerman, I found this book unbearable to read in places. I loved Natural History of the Senses and really liked her book on Paul West's stroke. In prose that is not simply accessible but also beautiful and electric, Ackerman distills the hard, objective truths of science in order to yield vivid, heavily anecdotal explanations about a range of existential questions regarding consciousness, human thought, memory, and the nature of identity. And in addition to explaining memory, thought, emotion, dreams, and language acquisition, she reports on the latest discoveries in neuroscience and addresses controversial subjects like the effects of trauma and male versus female brains. Her dazzling new work, An Alchemy of Mind, offers an unprecedented exploration and celebration of the mental fantasia in which we spend our days-and does for the human mind what the bestselling A Natural History of the Senses did for the physical senses.īringing a valuable female perspective to the topic, Diane Ackerman discusses the science of the brain as only she can: with gorgeous, immediate language and imagery that paint an unusually lucid and vibrant picture for the reader. Long treasured by literary readers for her uncommon ability to bridge the gap between art and science, celebrated scholar-artist Diane Ackerman returns with the book she was born to write. From the New York Times bestselling author of The Zookeeper's Wife, an ambitious and enlightening work that combines an artist's eye with a scientist's erudition to illuminate, as never before, the magic and mysteries of the human mind.

An Alchemy of Mind by Diane Ackerman