It's seriously bizarre and uncanny. I highly suggest it to you, I started it this morning, and I'm almost done with it, it's a very easy read. I honestly think the whole thing is interesting, but i'm going to quote this one part for you:
"If the modular nature of the mind is often hidden to us, how can we see behind the curtain of the unified self and catch a glimpse of those interacting components? Several avenues are available to us. There are studies of pathological cases popularized by books such as Oliver Sacks's "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat", in which we detect the existence of modules through patients who have suffered targeted brain damage that takes out one or two modules but leaves the rest of the brain functioning normally. Or we can experience the modularity of the brain more directly by taking drugs that throw a monkey wrench into its machinery, causing individual modules to take on a new autonomy. Or you can gaze inside your brain directly, using today's brain imaging technologies."
This part struck a particular chord because I just read Oliver Sacks's book this past summer during a roadtrip, often engage in recreational drug use purely for the mental and perceptual exercise of it, and also earlier this year helped a colleague out with an experiment and got a full MRI .DICOM rendering of MY OWN BRAIN. He gave me all the imaging files and also the imaging software, so I can sit here and look at my brain from any possible angle, in black and white, in color, in 3D, or I could just look at the vasculature alone. I can even put it on rotational animation and cut whatever slices I want out of it. I can't really explain what it feels like to be able to visually explore your own brain. I really think I picked the perfect thing to major in! I love it.
Anyway pick up the book, it's cheap, and you'll love it, and then we can discuss it.
kudos!
Jo
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Just yesterday I was having a discussion with Anjuli about intuition and some of the fascinating innate skills we've developed as human beings to read each others' facial expressions, body language, hand movements, and intonations. How it's so much more than just words. And then I opened up the book and the entire first chapter was exactly what we had just discussed the night before. Stumbling across this is kind of disconcerting/exciting, as if I'd been writing a poem only to find that the exact poem had already been written.
I think what I like best about the book is how well it explains the profundity of 'knowing your brain'. I'm going to quote again, forgive me.
"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 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.
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."
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Can't recommend it enough. Go out and get it, for christ's sake.
 | Currently Reading : Mind Wide Open : Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life By Steven Johnson Release date: By 03 May, 2005 |
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