A psychology class about railway engineer Phineas Gage’s behaviour change after a metal rod speared his brain in 1848 led Chantel Prat, author of The Neuroscience of You , switching disciplines. Chantel Prat researches individual differences in language processing and cognition at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her first book, The Neuroscience of You, explains how human brains work, how they help us to survive and why we should embrace our uniqueness. Published last year, it has been

Neuroscientist Gina Rippon describes how and why she tackled the nature–nurture debate in her book The Gendered Brain , and the media furore it caused. Early research into schizophrenia alerted neuroscientist Gina Rippon to what she now calls the myth of the gendered brain, a term she used in the title of her first book. By examining examples taken from brain–behaviour research during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, right up to contemporary studies, the book, published in 20