Mind Wide Open
Why You Are What You Think
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
From the author of Emergence and The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open: Why You Are What You Think takes us on a journey to the frontiers of brain science and reveals exactly how we're hardwired to think and feel.
'You are part reptile, part mammal, part primate. You are a dopamine fiend. You are a walking assembly of patterns and waves, clusters of neurons firing in sync with one another...'
Experimenting with the latest technology, Stephen Johnson discovers (among other things) that everything we do - from falling in love to forming a sentence - is caused by neurons firing and chemicals swirling around our heads; that there are gadgets which can enable us to control our own brainwaves; that everyone's mind, like their fingerprint, is unique; and this can help us understand our own mental foibles - and see ourselves in a totally new way.
'As Steven Johnson explores his inner world . . . we have a new sense of what it means to be human' The New York Times
'Refreshingly personal . . . endlessly fascinating' Guardian
'Steven Johnson has an eye for the most interesting new ideas in this exploding field, and he explains them with insight and gusto' Stephen Pinker
Steven Johnson is the author of the acclaimed books Everything Bad is Good for You, The Ghost Map, Where Good Ideas Come From, Emergence and Interface Culture. His writing appeared in the Guardian, the New Yorker, Nation and Harper's, as well as the op-ed pages of The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He is a Distinguished Writer In Residence at NYU's School Of Journalism, and a Contributing Editor to Wired.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's the rare popular science book that not only gives the reader a gee-whiz glimpse at an emerging field, but also offers a guide for incorporating its new insights into one's own worldview. Johnson, the former editor of the Webzine Feed and author of the acclaimed Emergence (2001), does just that in his fascinating, engagingly written new survey. Applying what he calls "the 'long-decay' test" to gauge the information's enduring relevance, he chooses a handful of current neuroscience concepts with the potential to transform our thinking about emotions, memories and consciousness. In a charming device, the writer subjects himself to the latest in neurological testing techniques, from biofeedback to the latest forms of MRI, and shares the insight he gains into the moment-by-moment workings of his own brain, from the adrenaline spike he gets from making jokes to his intense focus when composing sentences. The structure is fluid almost to a fault, as Johnson illustrates, elaborates on and returns to his view of the brain as a modular, associative network, "more like an orchestra than a soloist." He introduces the amygdala, for example, as a small region in the brain implicated in our ongoing, nearly automatic interpretation of the emotional states of others (called "mind reading"), a function impaired in autistic individuals. But the amygdala, the brain's source of "gut feelings," returns in the following chapter as important in encoding fearful memories, a connection that helps explain why fearful or traumatic memories are so much more tenacious and detailed than emotionally neutral ones. Always considerate of his audience, Johnson weaves disparate strands of brain research and theory smoothly into the narrative (only a concluding section on Freud's modern legacy feels like a tangent), which leaves readers' minds more open than they were.
