• The Accidental Mind

  • How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God
  • By: David J. Linden
  • Narrated by: Ray Porter
  • Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
  • 4.1 out of 5 stars (321 ratings)

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The Accidental Mind  By  cover art

The Accidental Mind

By: David J. Linden
Narrated by: Ray Porter
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Publisher's summary

You've probably seen it before: a human brain dramatically lit from the side, the camera circling it like a helicopter shot of Stonehenge, and a modulated baritone voice exalting the brain's elegant design in reverent tones... to which this book says: Pure nonsense.

In a work at once deeply learned and wonderfully accessible, the neuroscientist David Linden counters the widespread assumption that the brain is a paragon of design - and in its place gives us a compelling explanation of how the brain's serendipitous evolution has resulted in nothing short of our humanity.

A guide to the strange and often illogical world of neural function, The Accidental Mind shows how the brain is not an optimized, general-purpose problem-solving machine, but rather a weird agglomeration of ad-hoc solutions that have been piled on through millions of years of evolutionary history.

Moreover, Linden tells us how the constraints of evolved brain design have ultimately led to almost every transcendent human foible: our long childhoods, our extensive memory capacity, our search for love and long-term relationships, our need to create compelling narrative, and, ultimately, the universal cultural impulse to create both religious and scientific explanations. With forays into evolutionary biology, this analysis of mental function answers some of our most common questions about how we've come to be who we are. The book is published by Harvard University Press.

©2007 The President and Fellows of Harvard College (P)2010 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"This is a terrific book that accomplishes its aim of presenting a biological view of how the brain works, and does so in a charming, fetching style." (Joshua R. Sanes, Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University)

What listeners say about The Accidental Mind

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Best general-public Brain Science book to date

I have been a professional neuroscientist for the last 20 years. When asked for a book on this field aimed for the general public, however, I always found it very difficult to recommend one. Is not that there are few published books on the topic; but they tend to be too superficial, prone to groundless speculation, or both. Here you have a book that is well written, entertaining and superb at explaining the core ideas and principles of modern Neuroscience for the layman. Although brain science is not a simple subject, Dr. Linden does a superb job at making it understandable and interesting. Highly recommended.

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57 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Does Not Make Its Case but Highly educational

While some of the explanations of brain physiology seemed a bit more complex than necessary to build a foundation for later chapters, the book was still quite fascinating. No one should be fooled into thinking that this is light reading/listening though. The author gives about as deep of a treatment of the neuroscience behind subjects such as why we dream, how we form memories and why we fall in love as a college educated lay person can handle. On the other hand, the author's insistence that the brain is an inefficient kludge was not supported at any reasonable scientific level. For example, the comparisons of the speed of neuro-transmission to the speed of electrons over copper wire, and the focus on agglomeration of newer and ancient brain structures that have some overlap do not make the case for inefficiency. Nevertheless, this is not the focus of the book. Well worth the credit for anyone interested in understanding the science.

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20 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Brain - mind - humanity

This is what popular science writing is, or should be, all about... Making "real" science just that little bit more accessible to the keen reader with an interest in the field and the willingness to stretch themselves just enough for the journey. As always, it couldn't have been easy for the author to decide how much "nuts & bolts" biology and chemistry to include. Undoubtedly many readers will, like this reviewer, find some sections too technical, but they're always short enough that the reader can forge ahead and get to the "real world" implications of the chemistry -- the emergence of mind and its interaction with the body and environment.

Even though I'm quite a keen reader of accessible books, blogs and articles on neuroscience, psychology and philosophy of mind, I still learnt quite a bit from this book. A few examples that come to mind (!) are:

(1) The circadian ("approximately one day") timing circuit;
(2) The working of "blind sight," our second sight ability situated in the more primitive brain;
(3) The left brain's ability and predisposition to look for patterns, filling in the blanks even when they don't exist; ...and many more.

The narration by Ray Porter is engaging, more akin to an informal chat than a read speech.

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12 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Excellent Overview of the Brain

Any additional comments?

The Accidental Mind provides an excellent overview of the development and processes of the human brain. It is long enough to have covered a broad spectrum of topics and to have gone reasonably in-depth, but still concise enough that it held my interest throughout. The narrator, Ray Porter, did an outstanding job. He was animated, did an excellent job of channeling the author's intent, and wasn't an enunciating drone as so many non-fiction narrators are. I'm actually interested in seeing what other audiobooks this narrator has read - a first for me.

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6 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Insights into the Brain

David Linden in “The Accidental Mind” relates how the human brain has evolved and describes how it biologically works. Along the way he links the chemical, electric, psychological and behavioral apparatus as we experience it on a daily basis. Linden uses an engaging style which keeps the reader’s attention. This is also an approachable introduction to neuroscience as it is currently understood. The novice with little or no background will not find segments of the book difficult, but will need to pay attention to follow the descriptions and explanations provided. Otherwise, the book is readily approachable by the person with a general interest. The text is aptly read by Ray Price.

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6 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

tough to follow at times

a little dry, the narrator is actually fantastic, I'm used to hearing Porter in the Joe Ledger novels so i was always expecting him to start talking about the inner workings of the brain, and then have a zombie eat it.

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Good listen but strong scientific bent

Although this has a strong scientifc bent, I enjoyed the entire book; but like the two previous posters, I have a science background. The material is extremely interesting, but some may find it less than enthralling with all the scientific explanations. Having said that, how could any writing about the function of the human brain not have a strong scientific bent...

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

Puzzling until the end ... missed opportunity

The production and narration of this book are first rate. No problems there.

This book started out a bit odd ... the author bends over backward describing how poorly designed the brain is. He likens it to an ice cream cone - through each evolutionary stage a new "scoop" is added.
Not a bad metaphor given his evidence. His point is that the human brain is not an exalted paragon of "design". It uses bio-chemical "wiring" that is slow and a bit of a kludge ...

In the last chapters it becomes clear - this is really a rant against creationism. Given the reductionist process of the author -- the brain is the result of evolution, thus it arose from lower creatures, thus it is inherently primitive. Then he quotes a couple of studies of unfortunate folks with various brain disorders and from these couple of cases states that we "know" how the brain works. For me there is no way for us to really know about God (or god) logically so I am at a loss to know why so much time is spent on it -- we will ALL have our answers soon enough.

There was a startling (to me at least) fact pointed out in this book that was just dropped in the rush to his tirade. Due to the architecture of the brain, low-level sensory acquisition structures present processed perceptions FIRST to the "emotions" (limbic) BEFORE the analytical part. An emotive judgment is the first reaction we make -- analysis comes later. In an evolutionary context this makes sense. Living things must determine -- what is it? prey, predator, sexual partner, etc.? Only THEN do we analyze. Hummm -- very fertile ground here ... the psychology of "eye" witnesses ... the nature of intuition ... why is love irrational? ... etc ...

Scientists like Linden EMOTIONALLY ask aloud -- why do people need religion when it is so "obviously wrong". Maybe the answer is right here. A strictly analytical explanation is not the "whole brain" answer we seek. Describing chemical processes is light years from "useful" truths about HAVING a brain.

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2 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Good book, bad narration

How did the narrator detract from the book?

The narrator did not do justice to this book. As if he assumed that the text would be too boring to be read normally, he strongly and dramatically emphasized certain words every time they appeared (e.g., the word "unusually"), without regard to whether it actually made sense to stress that word in that particular sentence. It was distracting, because I had to quickly replay the sentence in my mind, to determine where the author would have placed the stress, in order to properly catch the author's meaning. And, unfortunately, this happened about every other sentence or so. Very distracting.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

A bit too detailed in spots

I enjoyed the descriptions of how the brain works but not at the molecular/electrical pulse level. He does address interesting questions of memory, dreams, love and religion. Narration was quite good.

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