This is an excellent book. It feels like sitting around with your favorite neuroscience professor and having him just go off on his own ideas about the nature of the self. Unlike the more hubris-ridden books like Consciousness Explained, this book has the restraint of a practitioner and does not feel compelled to offer the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. Instead, it simply explores the nooks and crannies of neuroscientific knowledge. This is primarily done through disorders of the brain, which maintains a kind of personal interest in these disorders that can otherwise become very dry (e.g. The Compass of Pleasure). All in all, the book is a superb exploration of cognitive neuroscience, and basically works like an advertisement to come get a Ph.D in the field.

There are three caveats I have to my otherwise stellar recommendation of this book, and together I think they warrant one less star than the full five stars...although just barely.

First, I feel as though Ramachandran is either targeting a more sophisticated rather than popular audience, or gives his popular audience a bit too much credit. A lot of the information seemed predicated on a basic understanding of cognitive neuroscience, and so I would suggest a book like Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain as a prelude to this book.

Second, I'd like a footnote on the points where Ramachandran asserts things are uniquely human. He quips at one point that negative predictions in science aren't generally a good idea, and a claim of uniqueness is fundamentally a negative prediction ("X is unique to humans." = "I predict no animal can be found with quality X.") Given our increasing appreciation for animal's cognitive abilities (especially dolphin language and social dogs, not to mention moralizing apes), the claim that anything is unique to humans seems to warrant at least a footnote in defense of the claim, and an acknowledgement of where and how animals came close to these abilities.

Finally, either the book could use slightly more editing, or the editor(s) decided that the book was likely to be read piecemeal, because Ramachandran explains things multiple times and uses the same illustration multiple times—sometimes almost verbatim. While this works well in conversation, it's really disruptive to encounter it in the flow of an otherwise swift and engrossing book.

Don't let these caveats scare you away, though. This is an excellent book which should go onto the reading list of anyone who keeps up to date in cognitive science.