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Being conscious of being
How physics, engineering and mathematics have transformed our understanding of brain function is enthrallingly explored in Models of the Mind, says ROX MIDDLETON
BRAIN POWER: Illustration for multimedia teaching projects by the Yale University School of Medicine [Patrick J Lynch/Creative Commons]

Models of the Mind
by Grace Lindsay
(Bloomsbury, £16.99)

LIVING in an age of materialism, finding the source of all experience within the wet, offal-like contents of our skulls is a core mystery.

Even those with a spiritual or dualist perspective concur that the phenomenon which gives us the means to experience everything else, located somewhere on the inside of the body, holds the key to life itself.

Models of the Mind by Grace Lindsay is an extremely thorough and wide-ranging introduction to how elegant maths and physics have contributed to our understanding of brain function at every level: from the chemicals and cells that live and die in our heads to the abstract network graphs that let us conceive of the generative effects of cell connections.

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