This extraordinary comic is a collaboration between the neuroscientists Uta and Chris Frith, their writer son, Alex, and the artist and graphic novelist Daniel Locke. Have I ever read anything like it before? No, I’m certain that I haven’t. Each page is a visual delight: as colourful and as joyful as a book for children. It’s extremely easy to read and often very funny. And yet you finish it with your mind blown. Simply by virtue of the fact that it makes some pretty cutting-edge brain science seem almost straightforward, it subtly expands the world of the reader. Afterwards, I wasn’t only more attentive to my own thought processes (hmm, I thought, as I watched my hand reach for the bottle of sauvignon); armed with a bit more insight into the way people around me might be thinking, it’s possible that it may also have liberated me, just a little, from some all too human anxieties (what are they thinking? Doesn’t she like me? Why hasn’t he called me?).
Uta Frith, an emeritus professor of cognitive development at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, and Chris Frith, emeritus professor at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London, are not only two of the most distinguished academics in Britain; they have also been married for 50 years. In Two Heads, their son sets out not only to tell their story – it opens with the couple, hand-in-hand, arriving at the cluttered, book-filled house in London where they’ve lived for more than three decades – but to enable them to explain to the layperson some aspects of their research (Uta is known for interest in autism and dyslexia; Chris once worked on the cognitive basis of schizophrenia). Along the way, they deliver many snappy explanations of how the brain works and some potted scientific history. The result is extremely rich, but never forced. It’s as if the brain is a fabulous gallery or museum, and they are simply taking us on an access-all-areas tour.
