Steven Berlin Johnson’s Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life (Hardcover) was a Christmas gift, straight from my wish list. (Thanks, Alexis.)
Mind Wide Open covered much of the same ground as the other recent book about the brain I read. Only better, and more interesting. Still, the concepts of the limbic brain or the triune brain were nice background for Johnson’s book. He explains them, but doesn’t belabor the point. His examples and anecdotes are more personal, more curious, and generally more interesting.
Page 184 of the hardcover edition had this summing passage:
The argument of this book has been that modern neuroscience presents us with a new grammar for understanding our minds. You don’t need a Ph.D. to speak this language; with the right tools, and the right translations — some of which I’ve attempted over the preceding pages — you can get to a level of fluency that will make you a more informed, more self-aware inhabitant of your own head. For a hundred years, much of Western society has 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, with equally insightful results: going under the fMRI scanner, or hooking up to a neurofeedback machine, or just reading a book about brain science.
Hmmmm…I wouldn’t have claimed this book as therapy. But I do feel like I’m learning more all the time, both about myself and others.
I certainly look forward to reading The Ghost Map, Johnson’s most recent.