Brain Wars

The author

Mario Beauregard is a Canadian neuroscientist known for brain-imaging studies of religious and mystical experience and for advocating a "nonmaterialist" or "spiritual" neuroscience. He is associated with the Manifesto for a Post-Materialist Science and with organizations promoting research into consciousness beyond the brain, positions that place him outside the scientific mainstream on the mind-body question.

The book

Brain Wars frames its subject as a battle between reductive materialism and the reality of an active mind. Beauregard builds his case from phenomena, placebo, neuroplasticity through neurofeedback, meditation, hypnosis, near-death and psi experiences, and argues they cannot be explained if the mind is merely the brain's output.

How it has aged

Reception was sharply divided, and this is where honesty matters. Sympathetic outlets welcomed it, but critical reviewers, including Kirkus, faulted Beauregard for presenting contested claims as established fact, for relying on sources such as parapsychology journals, and for veering, as one reviewer put it, "straight into pseudoscience." A common charge is that he misrepresents opposing experts and offers arguments that are not testable or falsifiable. Readers should approach it as advocacy for a fringe position, not as a neutral summary of the evidence.

For more context

For the mainstream neuroscientific view, pair with works like Stanislas Dehaene's Consciousness and the Brain; for the skeptical treatment of psi and near-death claims, see the wider critical literature.

Sources

• Brain Wars (Kirkus review)
• Publisher listing (Amazon)
• Critical review (What's in a Brain)