Smart phones track our movements, automatic call machines demand answers and offer us options, and social networks steal away our information. Machines are changing the human species, argues The Sunday Times journalist Bryan Appleyard, stripping away natural human complexity and replacing it with a barren simplicity.

But Appleyard also celebrates the human complexity that cannot be read by a machine, in particular the way that poetry and art can illuminate the human imagination. He reflects on interviews with Bill Gates, James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, Marilynne Robinson, Shigeru Miyamoto, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and many others. The child of a scientific family, Appleyard has written extensively about science and art, and The Brain is Wider than the Sky is for lovers of both.