Customer Reviews

Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I read this book before Steven Johnson's later works, The Ghost Map (2006) and Where Good Ideas Come From (2011) and then re-read recently, before composing this commentary. Because Johnson is a very serious thinker with an almost insatiable curiosity, he devotes uncommon time and thought to what he writes and draws heavily on a wealth of secondary sources that he duly acknowledges. For this book, there are generously annotated notes (Pages 217-255) and an extensive bibliography (Pages 257-262). Other reviews have offered insightful reasons for holding this book in high regard. I agree with those reasons and see no need to recycle them now.

Here in Dallas, there is a Farmer's Market near the downtown area where several merchants offer slices of fresh fruit as samples of their wares. In that same spirit, I offer a selection of brief passages representative of the high quality of Johnson's skills.

'Unlike so many technoscie3ntific advances, the brain sciences and their imaging technologies are, almost by definition, a kind of mirror. They capture what our brains are doing and reflect that information back to us. You gaze into the glass, and the reflection says to you, 'Here is your brain.' This book is the story of my journey into that mirror.' (Page 17)

'The attention system works as a kind of assembly line: higher-level functions are built on top of lower-level functions. So if you have problems encoding, you'll almost certainly have problems with supervisory attention. When people notice attention impairments, they're usually detecting problems with the focus/execute or supervisory levels, but the original source of the problem may well be farther down the chain, or it might be localized to a particular sensory channel.' (Page 93)

'Understanding the roots of laughter requires a kind of hybrid of the Darwinian and Freudian models. We laugh primarily because laughter is a crucial component of the emotional glue that connects parent and child during the vulnerable years of development. Children who laugh and roughhouse and tickle with their guardians create powerful bonds of affection with those grown-ups, and the bonds help them survive.' (Page 127)

'For reasons probably both generic and cultural, I am not much of a mystic, but these flashes of insight [while writing this book] were the closest thing I had to the experience of mysticism. These sparks were the transcendence that Keats sought when he commanded us to 'open wide the mind's caged doors.''

Note: The quotation is from the beginning of John Keats's poem, 'Fancy':

'Ever let the Fancy roam,'
Pleasure never is at home'
At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,'
Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;'
Then let winged Fancy wander'
Through the thought still spread beyond her:'
Open wide the mind's caged-door'
She'll dart forth, and cloudward soar.'

'To me, one of the most moving discoveries in the brain sciences ' after a century f Darwinian conflict and Oedipal struggle ' has been the emerging understanding of the brain's affiliative systems. Our brains are designed to love and connect as much as they are designed to flee and fight.' (Page 264)

To his great credit, Steven Johnson relies on layman terms (to the extent possible) to explain dozens of everyday situations that many of us find intriguing'and confusing. For example, How to 'read' people accurately? Why and how do we devise self-delusions? How to explain what I characterize as 'the invisibility of the obvious'? What is the neurochemistry behind love, hate, joy, rage, and other extreme emotions? With what does a brain 'teem'? Why and how can great works of art (painting, sculpture, music, ballet) move us to tears? And in anticipation of a book Johnson wrote years later, where do breakthrough ideas originate?

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to read Steven Johnson's later works as well as Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, Gerald Edelman's Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit, and Jonah Lehrer's Imagine.

Easy to understand for beginners in neuro psychology....very interesting for advanced people too ! Witty, well written and very accurate.

A highly entertaining, thought provoking, and pleasant read. It's sort of a blend of science and popular philosophy, the musings of a creative and bright guy. Mr. Johnson addresses a subject that is of great interest to me, namely neurotransmitter systems such as serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine. He also touches upon Peter Kramer's "Listening to Prozac" and the neurotransmitter personality model of C. Robert Cloninger. Mr. Johnson points out that low serotonin may be the cause of the psychological condition of rejection sensitivity, although this may actually be caused by a high level of norepinephrine as well. My only significant criticism is that Mr. Johnson may be speculating a bit much, and making somewhat of sweeping generalizations to suit his own ideas. Nonetheless, this book is well worth reading. Author of Adjust Your Brain: A Practical Theory for Maximizing Mental Health.

I'd recommend this highly to anyone who wants a lucidly written book on what we know about the brain. Actually I'd go further than that. The author spells out how neural chemistry shapes our emotions and our behaviour. This book is a nuts-and-bolts owner's manual to everyone who has a brain. Philosophers have always urged us to "know ourselves". Science is now at the point where the beginnings of wisdom can start with an understanding of the amygdala and the role of serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin and norepinephrine. The only reason I don't give this book five stars is because of the last chapter where the author attempts to "reconcile" neuroscience with Freud. This is like trying to reconcile modern chemistry with Aristotle, or astronomy with Ptolemy, not particularly interesting.

A delight and a disappointment. Steven Johnson opens the door (briefly) to many of the brain's multi-level functions and then closes it before the reader can fully grasp the significance and inter-relation of the areas and functions. True, the end-papers do help but I'm still left than more questions than an answers. Maybe it's really a "teaser" for the sequel.
Still, I would recommend it for anyone like myself who is interested in the how the brain functions but doesn't have a Phd in the neurosciences.

Maybe I shouldn't dock the book a star or two on account of the sheer drudgery and pointlessness of the final 35+ pages, but unfortunately, it was like having a tasty meal and then finding a cockroach in your dessert. I don't know whether the publisher insisted on the author tacking on the Conclusion section or if it was more organically contrived by the author himself, but it doesn't work. We have essentially up until page 183 some interesting anecdotes and introspections from the author related to developments in brain science. These I enjoyed quite a bit. Johnson took the tact, fittingly, of an investigative reporter in subjecting himself to neurofeedback measures and MRI scans. I found it very interesting to hear about procedures in great detail that have been heretofore only terms in passing to me. His writing style is fluid, and he manages to not get overly-techie in his descriptions. He dotes perhaps a little too much on his gift of writing, but while a tad annoying, that was certainly a forgivable sin.

It's when we get to that rather lengthy Conclusion section that Johnson hits the wall and seems suddenly out of his element and expertise. At least my expectation was that he would synthesize his analysis from the previous chapters into some kind of cogent summary or at least speculate based on his findings about the path forward for neuroscience. Instead, it becomes largely an odd hommage to Freudian ideas, purveying Freud as a greater visionary than he's been given credit in recent years. It was tedious and not particularly insightful. For one, the author clearly recognizes the infirmity of what he's saying. He consistently adds qualifiers about how Freud's model strains here and there, about how we have to "fiddle" with aspects of Freud's theories to make it applicable to what we now know about brain science. I kept asking myself "why are we doing this exercise?" Like any good astrological writeup, Freud's ideas were often sufficiently vague and verbose as to be extrapolated to explain just about anything. Any theorist with untestable theories puts himself in the position as Freud did to continue cobbling on ideas to account for more and more of the exceptions to his theory that are discovered. Simply because Freud wrote and expounded a lot in terms that were difficult to operationalize and empirically measure does not mean that he had any greater insight into what modern-day neuroscience tells us than any other theorist. Johnson simply abandons his logic too often in this section and tries to make a Freudian connection to neuroscience that feels contorted and artificial. With such an affinity to the father of psychoanalysis, I wouldn't be surprised if Johnson is planning a future book to further elaborate on Freud, that is, unless the Conclusion chapter for this book got it out of his system. Read the book and you'll probably enjoy it...up to page 183.

It is the most complicated object in the solar system, and each of us gets to carry one around at all times. The complications of the human brain, however, have ensured that among all the organs of the body or other objects of investigation, it is the slowest to yield its secrets. Especially over the past two decades there have been intense inquiry and surprising new tools for studying the brain, and in _Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life_ (Scribner), Steven Johnson has made himself a test subject for various means of looking at the brain. He is a technology writer for Discover magazine, so he gets to try out gadgets for which most of us will never be guinea pigs. His is a personal view of a universally fascinating subject, and a fine introduction to current brain science for those not familiar with the field.

The tests Johnson puts himself through and describes so openly are good subjects for his amused reflection. For instance, a few years ago he was hooked up to a biofeedback machine, sensors attached to hands and forehead. The machine was set to monitor adrenaline levels. He felt nervous, and as is his habit, he deflected the nervousness by making jokes, to the audience of the biofeedback guy. (His writing is loaded with good humor, too.) And every joke he made showed up on the monitor as an adrenaline spike; suddenly the jokes "... seemed less like casual attempts at humor and more like a drug addict's hungering for a new fix." Here was a little chemical subroutine his brain had been putting itself through every day for almost all his life, and he had not known a thing about it. He still could not explain why the adrenaline rush felt the way it did, but that's not important. He wondered how many such little chemical subroutines his brain ran every day, or at any given moment, and what would he learn about himself if he could see them like his adrenaline spikes. Each chapter here is a sampling of how he got to see another subroutine at work. He looks at his capacity to mind-read, based on judging the emotions shown in pictures of eyes. He tries on a neurofeedback helmet that has the potential for increasing attention, and thus decreasing the large amount of medicines children are taking to increase their attention spans these days. He spends a session in a $2 million MRI machine, takes sojourns into different brain chemicals, recounts traumatic fears triggered when a window of his house was blown in almost catastrophically by a storm, experiences natural highs, and examines the biological and social importance of laughter.

Johnson winds up with a tribute to Freud, who realized that beneath the surface of our consciousness, there are all sorts of processes going on of which we are unaware. The trouble with this, of course, is that while this insight was correct, the sorts of unconscious processes that can be looked at by the gadgets which Johnson describes are very far from the ones Freud thought were active. The brain is full of busy neurons and designated centers for specific sorts of thought, but it "is not seething with incest fantasies suppressed by the restrictions of civilized societies." (In fact, the incest taboo seems more likely to be in our DNA, not in our cultures.) But still, we all have so many "...voices in our heads, all of them competing for attention, that it's a miracle we ever get anything done." Just so. Johnson has produced an entertaining, idiosyncratic introduction into brain function, highlighting the ways that brains are now open to us in ways they never could have been before. Anyone with a brain will find that _Mind Wide Open_ makes aspects of that miraculous brain a little clearer.

In MIND WIDE OPEN, Steven Johnson gives new meaning to the phrase, "you ought to have your head examined." Through his guided journey into the depths of the human brain, he not only reveals how cutting-edge neuroscience presents us with a new set of tools for understanding our minds (p. 184), but he also reveals how a more informed understanding of the "brain's internal architecture" can change the ways we think about ourselves (p. 8) in post-Freudian ways (pp. 185-214). Along the way, Johnson submits himself to the latest in neurological testing techniques and gadgetry--empathy tests, neurofeedback, and an fMRI scan, for instance--sharing his resulting insights about emotions, memories and consciousness. He demonstrates how the brain works more like "an orchestra than a soloist" through the chemical and electrical interactions resulting in memory, fear, love, and alertness.

On the subject of chemicals, in Chapter 5, "The Hormones Talking," Johnson reveals that the pleasure drugs otherwise found "in a dime bag or a coke spoon"--heroin, morphine, codeine--occur naturally in the brain (p. 136). "Your brain is nothing but drugs," Johnson writes; "right now, as you read these words, you are under the influence of chemicals, molecularly speaking, almost indistinguishable from drugs that could get you arrested if you consumed them openly in a public place."

Reading MIND WIDE OPEN will not only stimulate and delight your gray matter, it will cause you to rethink your very thinking process.

G. Merritt

Steven Johnson's study of the neuroscience of everyday life features cutting-edge brain research, blending experiential reporting and personal storytelling with scientific insights to reveal how the brain works, its routines and structures, and how attention and knowledge is achieved. Unusual in Johnson's Mind Wide Open: Your Brain And The Neuroscience Of Everyday Life is the author's inclusion of himself as his own test subject, participating in a battery of attention tests such as learning to control brain waves and scanning his own brain with a MRI machine. All this is related to everyday reaction and thinking habits, making Mind Wide Open a recommended pick.

The author got curious about how his brain (and human brains in general) worked. He decided to find out. His experiences alongwith background information form the contents of this book.

He divides his narrative according to different neurological aspects of everyday life: mindreading(social interactional cues); handling and emotional aspects of fear; observation and attention handling; humor; mood and stress management; and finally his experiences under a fMRI scanner.

There are some pretty nice observations correlating bioochemical activity to qualia and behavior but this book is not a detailed observation and analyses of cognitive activity. Readers familiar with popular neuroscience won't find much new material here. The prose is lucid and the book can be fun for newcomers to neuroscience.