Active Learning Spaces. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, Number 137

Based on Rob Newman’s live stand-up show and new BBC Radio 4 comedy series, his thought-provoking and wryly amusing new book explores the scientific breakthroughs that have turned received ideas of brain science upside down.After imagining volunteering for a brain-imaging experiment meant to locate the part of the brain that lights up when you’re in love, comedian Robert Newman emerged with more questions than answers.In Neuropolis Newman argues that the current claim that the brain is just a complicated computer derives from science, but from a combination of philosophical stowaways and a version of evolutionary biology that owes little to Darwin. He questions why brain science is devoted to such a peculiarly reductionist world view, when really exciting advances in neuroscience go untold, such as awe-inspiring discoveries about the origins of memory in ancient oceans. He also shows that our brains are inextricably and profoundly intertwined with our bodies, the natural world and the world we have made, including hilarious accounts of his own participation in neurological experiments.Debunking the common, even brainless interpretations of brain science, he celebrates the more intriguing and underreported advances in neuroscience with zest and wit.

The women’s movement has transformed British society since the 1960s. In this contentious and controversial book leading feminist writer Ros Coward asks, is it now holding us back?When women set out to change the world and their place in it in the 1960s and 1970s it seemed they had a long struggle ahead. Educational standards for girls were lower, they were not expected to take on serious jobs, women did not get paid as much as men in identical jobs, they were not given maternity provision (not least because they were not expected to work after getting married, let alone having children). Women’s health was not researched as thoroughly as men’s, there were few women doctors, politicians, senior managers…Within a generation, our world has been transformed into one in which women are assumed to be the equals of men. Indeed, many feminists continue to argue that women are superior to men. But in a world in which girls consistently attain better exam results than boys, achieve a higher percentage of university places, are more likely to get jobs and whose expectations – of flexible working lives – are more attuned to the needs of the modern workplace, such a suggestion seems as discriminatory as the world of the 1960s was to women.In this controversial, hard-hitting and myth-debunking book, Ros Coward looks at feminism’s achievements and asks that most un-PC of questions: do we need feminism any more? Or is it damaging of real relations between men and women, demonizing men and denying them the right to understanding and equality in a world that is harsher for them than ever before?

An unusual and authoritative 'natural history of languages' that narrates the ways in which one language has superseded or outlasted another at different times in history.The story of the world in the last five thousand years is above all the story of its languages. Some shared language is what binds any community together, and makes possible both the living of a common history and the telling of it.Yet the history of the world’s great languages has rarely been examined. ‘Empires of the Word’ is the first to bring together the tales in all their glorious variety: the amazing innovations – in education, culture and diplomacy – devised by speakers in the Middle East; the uncanny resilience of Chinese throughout twenty centuries of invasions; the progress of Sanskrit from north India to Java and Japan; the struggle that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe; and the global spread of English.Besides these epic achievements, language failures are equally fascinating: why did Germany get left behind? Why did Egyptian, which had survived foreign takeovers for three millennia, succumb to Mohammed’s Arabic? Why is Dutch unknown in modern Indonesia, given that the Netherlands had ruled the East Indies for as long as the British ruled India?As this book engagingly reveals, the language history of the world shows eloquently the real characters of peoples; it also shows that the language of the future will, like the languages of the past, be full of surprises.

A startling investigation of what it means to be human.Human beings know how to make machines. But what kind of machine is a human being? And could we ever make one?In order to answer these questions, other questions get in the way:What is it like to be a human being?What is it like to be some other kind of animal?What is reality?What is consciousness?Is there a God?What is love?Why live?The questions proliferate.But all these questions can be viewed as facets of a single question:What is science?In ‘How To Make a Human Being’ Christopher Potter shows how, at every scale of description, human beings escape the net of scientific reductionism. What it is to be human can be glimpsed in the details: in the opening of a window, in a shared joke. But cannot be caught by any reductive scientific description.

TV presenter and all-round car nut Ant Anstead takes the reader on a journey that mirrors the development of the motor car itself from a stuttering 20mph annoyance that scared everyone’s horses to 150mph pursuits with aerial support and sophisticated electronic tracking.The British Police Force’s relationship with the car started by chasing after pioneer speeding motorists on bicycles. As speed restrictions eased in the early twentieth century and car ownership increased, the police embraced the car. Criminals were stealing cars to sell on or to use as getaway vehicles and the police needed to stay ahead, or at least only one step behind. The arms race for speed, which culminated in the police acquiring high-speed pursuit vehicles such as Subaru Impreza Turbos, had begun.Since then the car has become essential to everyday life. Deep down everyone loves a police car. Countless enthusiasts collect models in different liveries and legendary police cars become part of the nation’s shared consciousness.Ant Anstead spent the first six years of his working life as a cop. He was part of the armed response team, one of the force’s most elite units. In this fascinating new history of the British police car, Ant looks at the classic cars, from the Met’s Wolseleys to the Senator, the motorway patrol car officers loved most, via unusual and unexpected police vehicles such as the Arial Atom. It’s a must-read for car enthusiasts, social historians and anyone who loves a good car chase, Cops and Robbers is a rip-roaring celebration of the police car and the men and women who drive them.