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179 reviews for:
The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain
James Fallon
3.26 AVERAGE
179 reviews for:
The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain
James Fallon
3.26 AVERAGE
God this book was awful. It would have been a DNF if it wasn't for book club. The author is both totally full of himself and totally full of shit. How are you going to have a science book all about the brain and not cite any sources???? Basically it's just a book about how great and smart and fun and accomplished he is, mixed in with a ton of brain science that's incomprehensible to me as a layperson. Easily one of the worst books I've ever read.
The data and research is spectacular and I found it very interesting. I'd give this 5 stars
The rest? An excuse for this guy to talk about how fuckin rad he thinks he is. This gets 1 because it's
B O R I N G. The anecdotal stories are redundant, not particularly interesting or unique and spent a lot of time going on wordy tangents about himself.
This book needed way more data and research and less stories of him being generally annoying
The rest? An excuse for this guy to talk about how fuckin rad he thinks he is. This gets 1 because it's
B O R I N G. The anecdotal stories are redundant, not particularly interesting or unique and spent a lot of time going on wordy tangents about himself.
This book needed way more data and research and less stories of him being generally annoying
James Fallon is very clearly a neuroscientist first, and an author second...or third, or maybe even fourth.
At times Fallon's voice was so narcissistic that I had to laugh; at times the prose was so scientific that I had to skim until I got past the endless talk of cortices and fMRIs and got to the point of the entire book, which was this: Fallon discovered he had the brain of a psychopath, and in doing so, disproved his own original theory of psychopathy.
All in all, a fascinating book written by a fascinating person who is a very bad author.
At times Fallon's voice was so narcissistic that I had to laugh; at times the prose was so scientific that I had to skim until I got past the endless talk of cortices and fMRIs and got to the point of the entire book, which was this: Fallon discovered he had the brain of a psychopath, and in doing so, disproved his own original theory of psychopathy.
All in all, a fascinating book written by a fascinating person who is a very bad author.
informative
The book was really just public preening. Uncomfortable and probably completely dishonest.
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Interesting, but there's some really complicated brain science in there. I understood it well enough while I was reading it, but I'll never, ever retain any of it. In fact, it's already gone.
What would you think if you were told, after an all-too-common brain scan, that yours is the brain of a psychopath? Probably, if you are, say, a banker or a fishmonger, you would think they were pulling your leg, and all the more so if you were one of the world's leading scientists in the study of the brain and psychopathology was your field of choice. This, which sounds like an absurd situation, is what actually happened to the author of this book, who, after rather disdainfully refusing a diagnosis made by the very diagnostic method he was developing, then began to retrace his own history and examine his own habits in order to find the psychopath within himself. Written perhaps a little too over the top, a little overblown in some respects, the book makes the reader wonder, more and more with every page that turns, just how much of a psychopath he himself is. Very interesting.