Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life by Steven Johnson (PDF)

Description

BRILLIANTLY EXPLORING TODAY’S CUTTING-EDGE BRAIN RESEARCH, MIND WIDE OPEN IS AN UNPRECEDENTED JOURNEY INTO THE ESSENCE OF HUMAN PERSONALITY, ALLOWING READERS TO UNDERSTAND THEMSELVES AND THE PEOPLE IN THEIR LIVES AS NEVER BEFORE. Using a mix of experiential reportage, personal storytelling, and fresh scientific discovery, Steven Johnson describes how the brain works — its chemicals, structures, and subroutines — and how these systems connect to the day-to-day realities of individual lives. For a hundred years, he says, many of us have assumed that the most powerful route to self-knowledge took the form of lying on a couch, talking about our childhoods. The possibility entertained in this book is that you can follow another path, in which learning about the brain’s mechanics can widen one’s self-awareness as powerfully as any therapy or meditation or drug. In Mind Wide Open, Johnson embarks on this path as his own test subject, participating in a battery of attention tests, learning to control video games by altering his brain waves, scanning his own brain with a $2 million fMRI machine, all in search of a modern answer to the oldest of questions: who am I? Along the way, Johnson explores how we “read” other people, how the brain processes frightening events (and how we might rid ourselves of the scars those memories leave), what the neurochemistry is behind love and sex, what it means that our brains are teeming with powerful chemicals closely related to recreational drugs, why music moves us to tears, and where our breakthrough ideas come from. Johnson’s clear, engaging explanation of the physical functions of the brain reveals not only the broad strokes of our aptitudes and fears, our skills and weaknesses and desires, but also the momentary brain phenomena that a whole human life comprises. Why, when hearing a tale of woe, do we sometimes smile inappropriately, even if we don’t want to? Why are some of us so bad at remembering phone numbers but brilliant at recognizing faces? Why does depression make us feel stupid? To read Mind Wide Open is to rethink family histories, individual fates, and the very nature of the self, and to see that brain science is now personally transformative — a valuable tool for better relationships and better living.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐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 it 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 how well he writes it, drawing heavily on a wealth of secondary sources that he duly acknowledges. In 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 technoscientific 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-doorShe’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 the neurological context of dozens of everyday situations. 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.

⭐I am in the process of reading all of Steven Johnson’s books and it was fun to go back and get a more historical perspective on he and his family as it related to this topic. It was also fun to read about him being the guinea pig in what was at the time “revolutionary” tools for neuroscience. He is such a talented and engaging author and this book differed from the others I’ve read because it was more personal and because he was able to tie in some more psychological research with his writing which is a deviation from his typical focus on history. This is still worth the read if you are looking for an interesting book. Johnson is one of the best!

⭐Like Steven Johnson’s earler book “Emergence,” his “Mind Wide Open” is one of those books wished for by every aficionado whose interest in, not to say passion for science exceeds his expertise in the subject treated or science in general. Like “emergence” and related subjects “self-organization” and “complexity,” so likewise “neuroscience” is one of those more recently fascinating but too often mysterious areas of science which, just a few decades ago, had not even been heard of beyond a small circle of passionate fanatics. What neuroscience has discovered is that every “movement” of our psyche, whether conscious or unconscious, rational or emotional, is accompanied not to say caused by a physical, electro-chemical movement in our brain, detectable by CAT scans, fMRI scans etc. Now indeed, “neuro-science” has gotten a bad name among many, being regarded as reducing all thoughts, ideas, feelings etc. to “nothing but” electro-chemistry in the brain, even as some early 20th-century scientists reduced “love” to mere “chemistry,” etc. But such reductionism is by no means necessary, being more a philo-sophical than a scientific conception. But Johnson’s “Mind Wide Open,” by giving you and enlightening but painless introduction to neuro-science, will enable you to leave all such worries about “reductionism” far behnd you. It cannot be too highly recommended.

⭐Utilizing the strength of his genuine inquisitiveness and the backdrop of his personal and intimate reporting style, Steven Johnson causes the “science of the mind”—the subject matter of “Mind Wide Open”—to feel more immediate and engaging than most writers on the subject. Based upon Western medicine’s chemical-mechanistic model about how our bodies work, Johnson tours the terrain of the working mind, as it acts and reacts to various stimuli. Multiple theoretical models are presented, encouraging readers to draw conclusions of their own. This reader’s only residual wish is that Johnson had included more information on the electrical nature of the mind-body relationship.

⭐Great sharing of life, it’s pressures on our psychi that has also been preformed in our birthing. Intelligent and capturing.

⭐This is not a technical science book. It is a work of narrative non-fiction that profiles a tool every one of us has: the brain. Johnson provides an excellent layman’s understanding about the way the brain works. He subjects himself to all kinds of neurological tests (like any good journalist covering the brain should), and writes about his experiences. Johnson tries out neuralfeedback helmets, takes an fMRI brain scan, talks to “mind-reading” experts, and tries out many other things. The author is obviously fascinated by the brain and its abilites, and this fascination comes through in the writing. After reading Mind Wide Open I have been motivated to dig deeper into this fascinating subject. If you treat this book as a primer on the fascinating world of neuroscience, you can’t go wrong.

⭐Great service, great book!

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