Oliver Sacks may be the father of the popular neurological best-seller, but he’s distinctly different from the current crop of authors, be they as substantive as Daniel Kahneman (“Thinking Fast and Slow”) or as dodgy as Jonah Lehrer. The latest iteration of the genre usually makes generalizations about human behavior on the basis of quantitative studies. The particular histories of the unnamed subjects of those studies are irrelevant; all that matters is the aggregate, because only in writing about the average person can today’s neuroscience author claim that his book is about you, the average reader.
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