Exploring recent discoveries in neuroscience, this book provides new insight into the origins of human creativity and innovation. By integrating cross-disciplinary findings, it examines the neural processes and evolutionary development of imagination and abstract thinking.

This is an informative and easy-to-read book that relates new discoveries to help us understand the origins of creativity. I found it particularly interesting that there's a strong link between memory and imagination, stressing the importance of lifelong learning.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

I have always been fascinated by the function of brains, and reviewed a pre-release copy of Min Jung's book, compliments of NetGalley.

This book is a very thorough and scientific look at the brain. It includes in-depth information on the hippocampus - what it does, how it does it - and other neurological functions, like abstract cognition via the prefrontal cortex. The section on encoding and storage of memory, including the concepts of false memory and manipulation of memory, was fascinating. The book includes scientific study results, including diagrams, artwork and charts.

There were parts of the book that were fairly "accessible" to a layperson reader. But taken as a whole, the book is extremely technical, and definitely targets a scientific community well versed in neuroscience concepts and research. My daughter is a neuroscience major in college, and I can easily imagine a book like this could be the basis for an entire class, if not two.

Because some of this information is so valuable, I would love to see parts of it translated down into a more commercially relevant book. The parts on memory, for example, should be must-reading for anyone in the legal profession, and the connection of sleep-states to memory encoding, could be interesting to many. There were other sections that delved into popular current topics, like neural networks, that would be nice to have a simplified explanation of.

Kudos to the author for aggregating this powerful information to be released as a book. I hope it gets a lot of attention among researchers, academics and students. Would love to read a slightly less technical version in the future.

4-stars. Pub date 12/12/23. 240 pages (kindle).

Thank you, Columbia University Press, and NetGalley, for providing an eARC for review consideration. All opinions expressed are my own.

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Brain for Innovation by Min W. Jung is an intriguing analysis of brain research in order to better understand the uniquely human phenomenon of innovation. According to Jung, "humansa are particularly innovative because they have the high capacity to imagine freely using high-level abstract concepts" (p. 3). Two critical brain components for innovation include the hippocampus (responsible for memory and future imagining) and neural networks (responsible for abstract thinking). However, it is not enough to think of an innovative idea, it also has to be communicates to others. Jung ends her text with the idea that while human innovation has had a critical impact on the environment, human innovation can also undo what we have done.

Overall this is a very solid read. Jung had strong analysis of brain research and its relationship to in innovation. At times it seemed too technical for an everyday reader and did have some repetitive information.