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Title: Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life by Steven Johnson ISBN: 0-7432-4165-7 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 10 February, 2004 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.56 (9 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Cognitive Psychology Lite
Comment: This is a nicely written but fairly insubstantial book on cognitive psychology, filled with personal anecdotes (prepare to hear about Johnson's children on every third page) and tentative attempts at practical advice. Johnson is particularly intrigued by biofeedback and the fact that an fMRI test confirms that he's generally smart but "no rocket scientist." The book should be subtitled, "My Very Short Experience as a Cognitive Psychology Dilettante." Steven Pinker blurbed the book, and readers who are interested in something more substantial should follow that link to Pinker's own work, particularly How the Mind Works.
Rating: 4
Summary: Interesting read into some aspects of mind's functioning
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Open wide the mind's black box.
Comment: 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
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Title: The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought by Gary F. Marcus ISBN: 0465044050 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 16 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson ISBN: 0684868768 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 10 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality by Brian Greene ISBN: 0375412883 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 10 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $28.95 |
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Title: Soul Made Flesh : The Discovery of the Brain--and How it Changed the World by Carl Zimmer ISBN: 0743230388 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 06 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness by Gerald M. Edelman ISBN: 0300102291 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: 10 March, 2004 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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