Out Of Your Mind by Jorge Cham & Dwayne Godwin

subtitled The Biggest Mysteries of the Human Brain. And who better to tackle the subject and bring it to audiences in a highly accessible manner than Jorge Cham, creator of the comic strip PHDComics (based on his own adventures in academia while studying robotics) and co-creator of the highly-rated PBS cartoon Elinor Wonders Why, and Dwayne Godwin, a practicing neuroscientist, professor and former graduate dean?

For centuries, philosophers and biologists have pondered the role of the mind in human functioning, eventually adopting multidisciplinary efforts to better understand how the brain works and the correlation between mind, feeling and identity. Misters Cham and Godwin do a frankly amazing job of distilling what we’ve learned on this subject into one elegantly written and amusingly illustrated volume.

Each chapter title is a question that most people have asked themselves at least once in their lives. Whether it’s asking why we feel the way we feel, what our brains are capable of or the nature of consciousness, the chapters all delve into common aspects of how we think and interact with the world around us. Short interlude comics break up the longer chapters, which are themselves speckled with cartoons that humorously underscore the text. As a big fan of the exercise theory of continuing neuroplasticity, I loved the multiple ways in which the book encouraged the on-going growth of neural connections via both serious (if uncomplicated) text and light-hearted illustrations that work together to engage multiple parts of the brain.

So yeah, as a bit of a brain nerd — some of my favorite parts of my undergraduate degree in Information Technology/Computer Science were the bits mapping programming to human intelligence. Multithreading for life, baybeeee! — this pop sci book was definitely up my alley. But even if you don’t have a science background, this book makes for a wonderful introduction to the brain, what it can do and how it affects our everyday lives.

It’s also surprisingly timely. Tho written well before the current stages of sociopolitical nightmare, this one bit in particular felt like a necessary rebuke to people who would argue that empathy, of all things, is a sin:

[E]mpathy is critical to love. Putting ourselves in other people’s shoes and caring for others are integral parts of what it means to love.

This, ofc, comes in the chapter “Why Do We Love?” which is followed by “Why Do We Hate?”, an equally important topic that speaks of the perils of hatred as an addiction and how we can overcome it (and yes, addiction gets its own chapter here, too!) So this isn’t just a textbook about brain parts: this is a book that meaningfully engages with who we are as people and how we can better understand both ourselves and others. That it does all this with humor and grace is a testament to the authors’ ability to communicate complicated concepts in ways that are not only easy but fun to read. Recommended.

Out Of Your Mind by Jorge Cham & Dwayne Godwin was published January 28 2025 by Pantheon and is available from all good booksellers, including