TIME TRAVELER: David Eagleman, who hits the hardcover nonfiction list this week at No. 14 with “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain,” is the kind of guy who really does make being a neuroscientist look like fun. His experiments tend to involve things like dropping people off amusement park thrill rides (to measure the way time seems to slow down during near-death experiences) and hanging out in the studio with Brian Eno and the drummer from Coldplay (to see how professional timekeepers stay precisely on the beat). He wears hip ankle boots and designer jeans while dashing between TED talks and his lab at Baylor. In his spare time, Eagleman has even written an acclaimed collection of speculative short stories, “Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives,” that will be staged as a full opera in London next year. He’s also getting some traction with his efforts to start a new quasi-religious movement called Possibilianism, which aims to move beyond the dueling certitudes of traditional religion and atheism to explore radical what-ifs about the universe and human consciousness. One story in “Sum,” for example, considers the possibility that life on earth may be just a brief, pleasurable vacation from our true existence as gigantic beings doing the heavy lifting of holding up the cosmos. (“If you are thinking of dying,” Alexander McCall Smith wrote in the Book Review in 2009, “this book may not exactly increase your peace of mind.”)
TBR
Inside the List
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Published: June 10, 2011
David Eagleman
Multimedia
Note
This column will appear in print in the June 19, 2011 issue of the Book Review. On the Web, the best-seller lists and the “Inside the List” column are available one week early.
In “Incognito,” Eagleman engagingly sums up recent discoveries about the unconscious processes that dominate our mental life, including his own pioneering work in time perception. His contention that we are always living a little bit in the past, thanks to the time it takes the conscious mind to coordinate different sensory signals, may give comfort to deadline-challenged journalists. His claim that smaller body size correlates with living more closely in the moment (the benefit of a shorter spinal cord) has already cheered up another beleaguered demographic. “I once mentioned this in an NPR interview, and I got flooded by e-mails from short people,” Eagleman told the New Yorker in April. “They were so pleased. For about a day, I was the hero of short people.”
POTTY MOUTHS: Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortés land at No. 1 on the how-to and miscellaneous list with “Go the _ to Sleep,” an irreverent children’s-book parody that became a viral Internet sensation a month before it hit the stores. Kathryn Schulz, writing in New York magazine, turned a review of the book into a meditation on our equivocal relationship to the newspaper-unfriendly word in the title. “That word — which appears, like a crude jack-in-the-box, in the last line of every stanza — is why the book works, both creatively and commercially,” Schulz (who planted a few poppers in her own decidedly serious book, “Being Wrong”) wrote. “Yet this popularity was not a foregone conclusion. Like sex, alcohol, nudity and drugs, swearing sets off the great American seesaw of schoolmarmish horror and schoolyardish glee, and it can be hard to predict whether a writer who curses will wind up exalted or excoriated.”
GRACIAS: Thank you, Jimmy Fallon, for giving me an easy way to fill out the last few lines of this column, by quoting this passage from “Thank You Notes,” currently No. 4 on the paperback nonfiction list: “Thank you, first sheet of a new toilet paper roll that won’t tear off evenly so I have to scratch and claw and shred three layers of the roll just to get the thing started. But that’s cool. I think I’ll have the last laugh, since I know where you’re ending up.”