Synaptic Self [Paperback]

The book is well written, flows nicely until the near end,(drags a little just after chapter 6 however, that is why a 4 not a 5 rating) i'd recommend "synaptic sickness" be moved to an appendix if it couldn't be integrated into the body of the book better. The scholarly apparatus is kept to a minimum yet the push to ratify/justify the new knowledge via experimental data and reference to other scientists work is clearly evident and makes the book a good intro to the field, as further study is facilitated. I found the use of concrete experimental examples and the prolific use of diagrams (especially figures 6.4 - 6.6) particularly good(very superior), the book was always engrossing and a stimulating read, not common in books written by scientists who are not teachers as well.

As to particularly important ideas: i would point to chapter 6= "small change" and the systematic analysis of Hebbian plasticity and how long-term potentiation supplies the synaptic justification for memory and learning the key chapter in the whole book. The chapters before are introductory prologue to this idea, and the chapters subsequent are particular examples of how Hebbian plasticity and synaptic change unlie the circuits of the brain and hence become who we are.

And unusual emphasis(compared to the field as a whole) is on the emotional side of the triad: cognition, emotion, motivation, this is due to the author's interest and last book as a result of his professional research into fear circuitry. I appreciate the emphasis as a long overdue correction to neurology being somewhat, like philosophy of the mind, concentrated on the cognition part of the equation. With this emphasis and direction much of the book dedicated to showing fear circuits and like analysis means this ends up with teaching you a wider view of the brain than most introductory books. A good thing.

So i wholehearted recommend the book to anyone who had the patience and interest to finish reading this review. thanks.

We have a corporeal body. It is a physical entity, subject to all the laws of physics. Yet, we experience ourselves, our internal lives, external events in a manner which provokes us to postulate the existence of a corresponding, non-physical ontos, entity. This corresponding entity ostensibly incorporates a dimension of our being which, in principle, can never be tackled with the instruments and the formal logic of science.

A compromise was proposed long ago: the soul is nothing but our self awareness or the way that we experience ourselves. But this is a flawed solution. It is flawed because it assumes that the human experience is uniform, unequivocal and identical. It might well be so - but there is no methodologically rigorous way of proving it. We have no way to objectively ascertain that all of us experience pain in the same manner or that pain that we experience is the same in all of us. This is even when the causes of the sensation are carefully controlled and monitored.

A scientist might say that it is only a matter of time before we find the exact part of the brain which is responsible for the specific pain in our gedankenexperiment. Moreover, will add our gedankenscientist, in due course, science will even be able to demonstrate a monovalent relationship between a pattern of brain activity in situ and the aforementioned pain. In other words, the scientific claim is that the patterns of brain activity ARE the pain itself.

Such an argument is, prima facie, inadmissible. The fact that two events coincide (even if they do so forever) does not make them identical. The serial occurrence of two events does not make one of them the cause and the other the effect, as is well known. Similarly, the contemporaneous occurrence of two events only means that they are correlated. A correlate is not an alter ego. It is not an aspect of the same event. The brain activity is what appears WHEN pain happens - it by no means follows that it IS the pain itself.

A stronger argument would crystallize if it was convincingly and repeatedly demonstrated that playing back these patterns of brain activity induces the same pain. Even in such a case, we would be talking about cause and effect rather than identity of pain and its correlate in the brain.

This vade mecum is unlikely to end the debate but it provides a firm, fact based, evidence oriented foundation for its contnuance. Sam Vaknin, author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited".

First, a caveat. Although I'm not a professional neuroscientist, I have a strong background in both psychology and the neurosciences, so I didn't find the book difficult to read. But most people would be advised to try a more popular book on the brain before tackling this one. A couple of other reviewers here also mentioned that.

But on to my main comments. This book attempts to explain the self in neurobiological terms. Influenced perhaps by 2400 years of philosophical and psychological speculation on the subject, neuroscience has recently taken on the task of trying to explain it too. Without getting too far into all the technical details, what has become clear from recent research is that consciousness isn't a unitary phenomenon in the classical sense--it results from the coordination and integration of distinct and separate brain areas and mechanisms. Hence, the classical idea--and our normal perception of consciousness as a discrete and unitary entity--is an illusion. And the same goes, as Ledoux shows, for the phenomenon of the self.

So far so good. My only problem with this is that consciousness and the sense of self, although they impress us as the most important and immanent aspects of our mental life, may be ultimately unimportant. Although interesting, it is quite possible that they are simply an "epiphenomemon" or side-effect of a brain that is complex and highly evolved enough to contain an internal representation of itself, as if one had programmed a big computer to act like it was self-aware. In other words, although consciousness is nice, it may not be important or necessary to our survival. (And considering all the suffering that consciousnesses and selves are subjected to in this life, perhaps we'd all be better off without them). :-)

Although not the main focus of the book, I'd like to say a few things on the subject of biophysical reductionism before I conclude this review. Many people seem loathe to consider themselves just a collection of atoms, molecules, synapses, and nerve cells--perhaps because it doesn't seem to leave much room for the soul. Ask yourself, since the brain consists of over 14,000 major and minor brain areas and nerve pathways, where exactly would the soul be located? In the frontal cortex, with its relation to personality and long-term motivations? In the thalamus, with its function as a sensory relay and termination station (some sensations are processed in the thalamus--such as orgasms)? Or how about the limbic system, with its important functions in more primitive motivations and drives? The main point is that all brain areas have specialized functions. Being "the soul" doesn't seem to be part of the picture.

But getting back to the reductionism question, the fact that we can't totally reduce behavior to biology doesn't mean this isn't the case. It just means we don't know enough yet. However, even if we never learn enough to rigorously reduce behavior to biology (and I suspect that will be the case, given that the brain has 60 trillion neurons with between 3,000 and 100,000 connections each, so we'll probably never get the entire brain mapped), it seems pretty obvious that consciousness still depends on the brain. This is clear from the many degenerative brain diseases that progressively damage critical areas needed for memory, personality, and ultimately the self, to the point where the person is no longer conscious and eventually becomes completely brain dead, with the amount impairment being proportional to the amount of nerve damage.

Well, I didn't mean to dwell on such a morbid subject, but I can't think of a better demonstration that we are all basically our "brains."

Overall, this is a well written, interesting, and enjoyable account on a fascinating subject for those with some background already in the neurosciences.