Pop Neuroscience Needs to Evolve

My critical take on Joseph Jebelli's new book How the Mind Changed

Popular science seems to be a particularly fraught form of non-fiction that is prone to simplification, misleading claims, and hype instead of rigor. This may be even more true for works of popular neuroscience, an obviously complex field, where even among top experts there are many institutional, philosophical, and methodological issues. Reading audiences aren’t blameless in this given their revealed preferences for these simple works, but the path out of the wilderness has to be forged by those at the interface between active research and the intellectually curious public. Enter Joseph Jeblli, a former neuroscientist turned popular science communicator with full TEDx flare, whose new book How the Mind Changed: A Human History of Our Evolving Brain is an exemplary example of the issues with popular science writing.

How the Mind Changed by Joseph Jebelli is billed as an accessible book on the evolution of the human brain. And Jebelli does initially make an earnest effort to cover human…