Mind Sculpture
Your Brain's Untapped Potential
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
Listen. Can you hear an aircraft passing overhead? A dog barking? The twittering of birds? In straining to listen, you have just sent a surge of electrical activity through millions of brain cells. In choosing to do this with your mind, you have changed your brain - you have made brain cells fire, at the side of your head, above the right eye. By the time you've read this far, you will have changed your brain permanently. These words will leave a faint trace in the woven electricity of you. For 'you' exists in the trembling web of connected brain cells. This web is in flux, continually remoulded, sculpted by the restless energy of the world. That energy is transformed at your senses into the utterly unique weave of brain connections that is YOU.
New research has demonstrated the way in which the brain is shaped by experience and sculpted by our interactions with the world around us. As one of the world's leading authorities on brain rehabilitation, Ian Robertson is uniquely placed to explore these ground-breaking discoveries, that free us from the currently fashionable genetically determinist view. Mind Sculpture is a singularly accessible and imaginative book which communicates the excitement and challenge of the most recent research, its consequences for how we understand the brain and how we perceive ourselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In an engaging hybrid of scientific inquiry and personal discovery, Robertson, who teaches psychology at Trinity College in Dublin and has worked as science correspondent for the London Times, examines the functioning of the human brain. Presenting his ideas with energy, humor and clarity, Robertson's argument that "life sculpts your brain" runs counter to a fairly recent trend in brain research that assumes most, if not all, human behavior is already "hard-wired" through evolution and genetics. Instead, Robertson claims there are many ways we can all "sculpt" our own realities by knowing how to exercise our brains in certain ways, thus affecting the "patterns of connections between neurons." For example, education actually builds stronger connections between brain cells, according to Robertson, as neurons fire within the "trembling web" (the 100 billion brain cells that "make up `you'"). Retirement and lassitude, on the other hand, can diminish the number and strength of these connections. To support his central point that "cells that fire together, wire together," Robertson draws mostly upon clinical case studies. In several chapters, he portrays an intriguing cross-section of the population who have experienced abnormal relations between brain and body (e.g., phantom limbs) or who have severe memory blockages. In other chapters, Robertson discusses the effects of trauma, fear and hatred on the brain's neural connections. His theory about the power we all possess to shape our own life experiences has far-reaching implications for all aspects of society, including the treatment of illness, education, the workplace and human relationships.
