The Brain is Wider Than the Sky: Why Simple Solutions Don't Work in a Complex World - Couverture rigide

Simplicity has become a brand and a cult. People want simple lives and simple solutions. And now our technology wants us to be simpler, to be 'machine readable'. From telephone call trees that simplify us into a series of 'options' to social networks that reduce us to our purchases and preferences, we are deluged with propaganda urging us to abandon our irreducibly complex selves. Dazed by the marketing, we hand over our lives to databases, iPads and smartphones. At the same time, scientists tell us we are 'simply' the products of evolution, nothing more than our genes. Brain scanners have inspired neuroscientists to claim they are close to cracking the problem of the human mind. 'Human equivalent' computers are being designed that, we are told, will do our thinking for us. Humans are being simplified out of existence. It is time, says Bryan Appleyard, to resist, and to reclaim the full depth of human experience. We are, he argues, naturally complex creatures, we are only ever at home in complexity. Through art and literature we see ourselves in ways that machines never can. He makes an impassioned plea for the voices of art to be heard before those of the technocrats. Part memoir, part reportage, part cultural analysis, THE BRAIN IS WIDER THAN THE SKY is a dire warning about what we may become and a lyrical evocation of what humans can be. For the brain is indeed wider than the sky.

"As readers have come to expect from Bryan Appleyard, his new book is another literate and sensitive reflection on how science is changing our self-understanding." (Steve Fuller The Literary Review )

"an acerbic expose of the empty promise of the computer age." (James McConnachie Sunday Times ) --Sunday Times

Bryan Appleyard s The Brain is Wider than the Sky is a beautifully written defence of human complexity in the face of the corporate mechanisation of our lives. If you are frustrated by automated queuing, this is one for you --Michael Burleigh - Sunday Telegraph, Books of the Year