A JOURNAL OF NEUROLOGY BOOK REVIEW

The aesthetics of neuroscience—and the neuroscience of aesthetics Samuel Johnson, the colourful 18th-century English lexicographer, asserted that ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money ’ (Boswell, 1934). Since unlikely to be applicable to the two books discussed here, Dr Johnson’s quip leads one to seek alternative motives and ask what led the authors to write these books, and why and for whom each book was written. Dealing first with what inspired the authors, in the preface to his Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century, Dr Schoonover records how an informal group of American writers and scientists met to discuss ‘novel ways of com-municating science to nonscientists’. The group, now called NeuWrite, addressed the ‘infamous methods section’, the section described as ‘somewhat of a downer ’ which appears in almos