Mind Wide Open: Your Brain, Neuroscience, and the Search for the Self [Hardcover]

Having read 'Everything Bad Is Good For You' by the same author straight through in under one week, my expectations were set suitably high for this book. It is, however, one of those books that is hard to read more than a paragraph at a time as there is so much to take in; lots of scientific terms, data, theories - revelations even. Essentially, it's about how technology can be used to improve the performance of the human brain by creating a clearer understanding of how the different areas, chemicals, neurons, etc. interact to create, well, our everyday view of the world. A new insight into the inner workings of the mind.

I found this book fascinating. I knew a little about how the brain works through my work as a teacher, but this took it further and in interesting directions. I was particularly fascinated by the idea of different 'attentions' and how it is not as straightforward as you think when you tell somebody to 'pay attention'. I read this as an e-book and am now going to buy the paperback to read again.

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 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 draws heavily on a wealth of secondary sources that he duly acknowledges. For 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 technoscie3ntific 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-door'
She'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 dozens of everyday situations that many of us find intriguing...and confusing. 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.