Broca's Brain

Carl Sagan, the astronomer best known as the host of the television series Cosmos, ranges across a number of scientific disciplines in this collection. The book takes its title from the nineteenth-century French anatomist Paul Broca, whose work on the brain is one of its touchstones.

Rather than working through a single subject, Sagan moves between different areas of science and shows how they connect. Throughout, he asks what part the human intellect plays in scientific discovery, looking at how researchers think, what drives them, and where their reasoning can go wrong.