Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life.

Steven Johnson. Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life. New York: Scribner, 2004.

Steven Johnson believes that learning about the brain's mechanics can widen one's self-awareness as powerfully as any therapy or meditation or drug. In this book, he sets out to prove this by becoming his own test subject--this includes participating in a battery of attention tests, learning to control video games by altering his brain waves, and scanning his brain with a $2 million MRI machine. Johnson also explores how we "read" other people, how the brain processes frightening events, the neurochemistry that links love and sex, the similarities between endogenous and exogenous drugs, why music evokes powerful emotional responses, and where our most important ideas come from.

Johnson suggests updating Freud's taxonomy of id, ego, and superego (roughly parallel to the unconscious, conscious, and preconscious) with a neuroanatomical equivalent--Paul Maclean's model of the "triune brain." This model consists of: a) the brainstem--controlling metabolic functions like heart rate and breathing; b) the limbic system--the seat of emotion and memory, comprising chiefly the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the hypothalamus; and c) the neocortex--the most distinctly human component of the brain's architecture that allows us to engage in abstract thought and communicate in complex sentences. Johnson asserts that mankind's evolutionary march from "brain stem, to limbic system, to neocortex--as E.O. Wilson put it, from heartbeat, to heartstrings, to heartless--is certainly a more accurate assessment of the psyche's inner divisions than the old mythos of id, ego, and superego." (To understand the brain's inner life, Johnson maintains we should also examine the molecules of emotion and affect: ocytocin, cortisol, serotonin, etc.--these chemicals constitute the raw material of the brain's value system.)

Mind Wide Open is a lucid and compelling overview of brain science and its impact on the individual. If your brain wants to learn more about itself, I highly recommend you read this book.