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In an especially lively chapter, chapter 4 takes us to a collection of satirists engaged in a subgenre Keiser calls “the mock dissection.” By mocking scientific anatomies of the brain, they “pinpoint, with a surgeon’s precision, the signal challenges of a nascent neuroscience” by depicting “in a knowingly ridiculous manner, a natural philosopher digging into brain matter in the hope of exposing the mechanisms that make the mind tick”(143–44). Our protagonists here are Addison, the “Scriblerians”(some combination of Arbuthnot, Swift, Pope, Gay), and Prior. These sections—above all, the middle section on the Scriblerians—are especially effective at showing us how easily neuroscience’s accomplishments can be exaggerated by “hid [ing] absurdity beneath the appearance of scientific and empirical rigor”(161). With chapter 5, we encounter a fitting way into the work of Sterne, who, as Keiser argues, offers us a range of …