THE history of neurology is littered with the scalped corpses of millions of unsung monkeys, cats and rats - to say nothing of the woman on BBC's recent Brain Story series who, in the middle of open-brain surgery, chatted to nurses about recipes, going "duh-duh-duh-duh" when the good doctor-showman zapped her speech areas with an electrode. This trick was pioneered by Wilder Penfield in the 1930s, and more recently Bejamin Libet, the man who began examining the half-second by which our conscious brain (rather than our reflex circuits) lags behind the world. Here, McCrone has penned a neat, illuminating, undumbed-down survey of a field which, since the 1980s, has been revolutionised by PET, MRI and more recently, instantaneous MEG imaging techniques. From the early functional mapping of the wrinkly human neo-cortex (which, he points out, if flattened out would have the "spread of a large dishcloth"), McCrone charts the long search for the brain's processing structure, from tensions between dynamic and computer-inspired "computational" models to Nobel-winner Garald Edelmann's now-influential, Darwinian approach to the making of a "conscious moment". An endlessly fascinating, worthwhile, very solid read.