In Splendors and Miseries of the Brain, leading neurobiologist Semir Zeki, explores the huge price humans pay, in terms of happiness, for the enormously elegant and efficient machinery of the brain.

The book has two main interrelated themes. One is that an overall function of the brain is to obtain knowledge about the world and that it does so by using and forming concepts. These are of two, intimately linked kinds: inherited concepts, which organize inputs into the brain to create meaningful experiences from them, and acquired ones which result in new, synthetic concepts. Inherited concepts such as color vision, are not modifiable by experience. By contrast, acquired ones are being continually modified through the acquisition of new experience. For example, our concept of,a plane or a house is the synthesis of all the planes or houses which we have experienced.

A second theme of the book suggests that in order for us to understand how the brain works, we should go beyond the traditional disciplines that neurobiology has used - those of physiology, anatomy, biochemistry, pharmacology, mathematics and computer science, to name but a few - and study scientifically the products of the brain in literature, music, art and other fields. These products can only be understood in terms of the knowledge-acquiring machinery of the brain and its capacity to form concepts. The author shows, in addition, that by studying these fields, we can reach important conclusions, which are not readily derived from the traditional fields of neurobiology, about how the brain functions.