WHEN your child says, 鈥淢ummy, I want to be a brain surgeon,鈥� be sure to have
Jenny Bryan鈥檚 Your Amazing Brain (Joshua Morris, 拢8.99, ISBN 1
85724 189 4) at the ready. She does a fine job of explaining the intricacies of
how the brain sorts, thinks, creates and solves鈥攁wake or asleep. And she
does it in 17 pages. It is a far cry from the dry pedantry of a textbook. The
key is the layout, and the use of transparent overlays. The style will be
familiar to fans of The Human Body (拢8.99, ISBN 1 85724 847 3)
and The Miracle of Birth (拢8.99, ISBN 1 85724 985 2) in the same
Magic Eye series.
Bryan doesn鈥檛 attempt to explain everything in continuous, running text.
Instead she wisely opts for one main chunk of text on each of her chosen brain
functions, with drawings, diagrams and鈥攖he real winner鈥攕ound bites
arranged around it. Did you know that if you stretched out all the nerves in the
body they would be 75 kilometres long? That the human eye recognises 10 million
different shades of colour? That the signal from a kiss travels to the brain at
225 kilometres per hour?
The only flaw is the puzzling lack of scale in most of the illustrations,
although the smallest bones in the body, the malleus, incus and stapes are
pictured next to a pencil point.
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While Brain is candid and gore-free, you鈥檒l need a strong-stomached
10-year-old to hold your hand for The Visual Dictionary of Human
Anatomy (Dorling Kindersley, 拢10.99, ISBN 0 7513 1063 8)鈥攐r a
bloodthirsty four-year-old at the very least. It鈥檚 Gray鈥檚 Anatomy for
children, perfect for swots who want to memorise all the major blood vessels and
to pore over the exploded lateral views of the skull and pelvis. But the book
fails through overambition. Barely two pages are devoted to describing each
major system in the human body. The brain, spine and nerves, for example, are
lumped together, as are the urinary and reproductive systems, both male and
female. Inevitably, meaning is compromised but, in fairness to the authors, it
is a visual dictionary and the pictures are intended to do most of the work.
Lesley Newson鈥檚 Language (A&C Black, 拢8.99, ISBN 0 7136
4026 X), on the other hand, makes no compromises, taking over where Your
Amazing Brain left off to explain, for example, how brain and body merge
seamlessly in a healthy human. Where Bryan鈥檚 description of consciousness is
limited, with senses represented as pictures in an 鈥渆quation鈥�, Language
will help any child think a little harder about what it means to be human. Does
language enable us to think in a way that other animals can鈥檛? And what is a
word anyway? A sound, a group of letters, a hand movement in sign language, a
picture on a road sign? The brain鈥檚 ability to make sense of what we hear is
even more amazing than the physiology of the human throat鈥攃ustomised for
speech, at the risk of choking. We know exactly what is meant by 鈥淚 scream, you
scream. We all scream for ice cream.鈥�
Finally, The Ben Franklin Book of Easy & Incredible Experiments
by Lisa Jo Rudy (Wiley, 拢18.99, ISBN 0 471 07639 2) encourages
children to use their heads. Don鈥檛 be put off by the bald black text and absence
of interesting pictures. It鈥檚 approach is sophisticated Blue Peter, and
the experiments require little more than the standard-issue washing-up liquid
bottles and sticky-backed plastic. The aim is to help children to solve problems
in a creative way by observing what happens. One experiment deals with
鈥渃losure鈥濃�攈ow the brain can fill in parts of a picture that the eyes don鈥檛
see. Children are asked to draw a simple picture for their friends, gradually
omitting details until the drawing is no longer recognisable.
Any child dipping into one of these books will be left with clearer ideas of
how the brain and body work. They will be left in no doubt that the brain is in
charge and that really weird things happen when something goes wrong. Newson
quotes a description by a patient with damage to Wernicke鈥檚 area telling how he
felt about going into hospital. 鈥淏oy, am I sweating, I鈥檓 awful nervous you know,
once in a while I get caught up, I can鈥檛 mention the tarripoi, a month ago . .
.鈥�