I'm not going to thoroughly review Mind Wide Open by Steven Johnson; you can read about it on Amazon. Better yet, if you want to know how your own brain affects you and acquire greater self-understanding, buy it and read it.
Johnson has a second book out right now, Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. Now that's a title that attracts me, and others who are a bit rebellious. Maybe in some ways TV and games are the 'dumbing down' of the USA, but in some ways computers and other tech gadgets are improving our minds. I'll read that one next, with my mind wide open.
Anyway, there are two things I like about this book even though I'm only 1/4 way through it. First, he starts out with his personal experience of his own brain as he cracks a joke while wired up to a neurofeedback machine. Perhaps out of boredom, perhaps out of habit of his own personality, Johnson was able to see how his humor gave him a rush, all the more powerful because he could see it being charted out on a graph.
And in that instant he acquires deep self knowledge about his drug of choice: humor, and how he uses it - often inappropriately - whenever bored, just to get that rush.
So he is tying in all this new knowledge about the brain with his own personal experiences. Another story further on in the book tells of when a storm blew out an 8-foot high window in his NY apartment, narrowly missing him and his wife. His sharp experience of fear stayed with him whenever he heard wind or other sounds similar to that fateful day.
So the book makes the research on the brain clear and personal. Whether he is discussing the two channel pathway of fear experiences, the amygdala, serotonin, or the differences in men and women's brains, Johnson writes with clarity and curiousity.
His purpose with this book is to make all this new knowledge of the brain applicable to daily life and show how it leads to a better understanding of ourselves.
He says what is new about the mapping of the brain doesn't really impact our lives or self-understanding. Neither does evolutionary theory, only where it is needed to understand drives or habits that seem unduly powerful to shake. Here's is what he says about his book:
The ideas I've assembled here have direct relevance to ordinary minds, minds untroubled by the extreme conditions profiled in so much of the scientific literature: amnesia, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, manic-depression, and the many forms of aphasia. The most powerful theories of mind have always had something useful to contribute to generally healthy minds and not just troubled ones... I believe modern neuroscience deserves to be seen...as relevant to the healthy as it is to the ill, as relevant to those of us wrestling with the small triumphs and tragedies of everyday life as it is to those battling more forbidding demons.
Knowing something about the brain's mechanics - and particularly your brain's mechanics - widens your own self-awareness as powerfully as any therapy or meditation or drug. Brain science has become an avenue for introspection, a way of bridging the physiological reality of your brain with the mental life you already inhabit. The science and technology today are no longer limited to telling us how the mind works. They also have something to say about how your mind works.
And this is the kind of stuff I sincerely want to bring to readers of Brain-FX blog:
- What's new about the brain
- How does that affect our understanding of ourselves and our actions & thoughts
- What's the best way to maintain a healthy, sharp mind
- How can I use that new knowledge to understand myself better and improve the quality of my life and those I love
Stay tuned for more...
Yes! It's so important for everyone to recognize that what we are learning about the brain isn't important only for people with brain disorders...all of us can benefit from this.
In my neurofeedback practice, about half my clients are people interested in "peak performance" -- optimizing and "tuning-up" their brain's abilities.
They are amazed when they start discovering how much in their lives can be changed "just" from changing their brains.
I look forward to being able to share your blog entries with my "Neurofeedback on the Brain" readers!
Dr Karen http://neurofeedback.blogharbor.com
Posted by: Dr. Karen Shue | July 12, 2005 at 05:05 PM