Customer Reviews

The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of the Subjective Experience

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The subtitle of this one is "an introduction to the neuroscience of subjective experience." It is intended for the non-specialist, and they deliver on that wonderfully. The writing is compact but clear; the first section is "Introduction to Basic Concepts" that are necessary to understand the rest of the book. Frankly, it is the clearest discussion of brain anatomy, neuronal structure, and chemistry, that I have ever read. It was time to go to bed when I had finished, and I lay there going over the material in my head it was so attractively clear. Solms has been a mover in getting people to relate together neuroscience and psychoanalysis (he is trained in both).

Their second chapter on "Mind and Brain: How do they relate?" is a clear outline of the "mind-body problem" from the philosophical point of view, and a compact discussion of the various options (various monisms, interactionism, and parallelism). The chapter is set up with the distinction philosopher David Chalmers makes between the "easy" mind-body problem and the "hard" mind-body problem. The `easy" problem is what Francis Crick, in "The Scientific Search for the Soul," deals with: the neural correlates of consciousness. They agree this is an approach with great promise (except for its Crick's reductionism). The "hard" problem is how consciousness actually emerges from matter. (On this question they remain agnostic and tend to believe it is not soluble scientifically.)

They wind up with a "world view" (their term) that underlies their work and that provides the context in which they do their work while not itself being adjudicable scientifically. They call it "dual-aspect monism" : "We are made of only on type of stuff (that is why it is a monist position), but . . this stuff is perceived in two different ways. In our essence we are neither mental nor phyhsical beings. . Dual aspect monism implies that the brain is made of stuff that appears physical when viewed from the outside (as an object) and "mental" when viewed from the inside (as a subject). . . This distinction between body and mind is therefore an artifact of perception."

Finally, they believe hard-nosed AI is on the wrong track. "It is relatively simple to produce a computer that displays some degree of intelligent behavior and may therefore pass the Turing test under certain circumstances. . . But generating intelligent behavior is vastly different from generating a mind. . . A computer must be able to generate `joys and sorrows, memories and ambitions, and a sense of personal identity and free will (to paraphrase Crick) before we are persuaded that it possesses a mind. The fact that we are not persuaded vividly illustrates the gulf that separates the `easy' and the `hard' problems in cognitive science."

I've gone on too long already. At the end of the book Solms and Turnbull weave together the two methods, of neuroscience (body) and psychoanalysis (mind) to mount a more adequate approach to the dual-aspect beings which we are.

Solms and Turnbull do a remarkable thing: offer a panoramic introduction covering all of the basics about all of the central aspects of inner experience that have been researched so far -- dreams, emotions, memory, identity, etc. -- and they do it in an extremely clear and readable way. All of the defined terms are highlighted in the text and clearly described. There is very little fluff at all; every paragraph and practically every sentence is necessary. The first chapter -- a basic overview of the anatomy and function of the brain -- is the best general introduction I have yet come across.

This is the most significant book on psychoanalysis I've come across in a couple of decades. Solms is a neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst working in New York, London, and South Africa, and co-author Oliver Turnbull has worked extensively with him. Solms has mounted a sustained effort to put psychoanalytic theory together with what we are learning about the brain. He does this by doing a neurological workup of patients and then interviewing them psychoanalytically.

Solms' basic idea is that we now have (as Freud did not) two ways of looking at mind. One is Freud's way: we use free association, interpretation, etc., to look at mind subjectively. The other is the neuroscience way: objective studies of the changes in behavior wrought by changes in the brain. To find out fully about mind, we have to put these two methods together. And he does!

Frankly, this growing movement of neuro-psychoanalysis seems to me the only thing that will stave off the impending death of psychoanalysis. Solms addresses quite directly the afflictions affecting psychoanalysis and offers hope, very concrete grounds for hope. Also, the book can serve as a very nice introduction to neuroscience.

Let me put it quite bluntly: Anyone seriously interested in and concerned about psychoanalysis who doesn't read this book is simply nuts!

Norman Holland, University of Florida

The subtitle of this book is "An introduction to the neuroscience of subjective experience" and as such, it is one of the finest books of its kind. Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull [henceforth, MS & OT] have come through with a very accessible introductory text aimed at non-specialists (the text can also serve as a useful review to slightly more experienced students). In the span of ten, information rich chapters, MS & OT manage to give an overview of everything from the very basics of neuroanatomy, neurochemistry and neurophysiology to such issues as the neural bases of emotion, consciousness, memory, dreams and hallucinatory states and more. Some space is also devoted to the elementary philosophy of mind issues. For example, after discussing Chalmers' "hard problem" of consciousness and surveying the variety of proposed stances on the problem of consciousness, they explore at some length their own position (dual-aspect monism). This view holds that there is only one kind of stuff (thus, it is a monist position) but that there are two different ways of accessing/experiencing the underlying `psychic apparatus' - it can be introspectively accessed (as mind) and/or it can be observed from a third-person perspective and objectively studied by science (as brain tissue). Perhaps, similar to the way in which physicists have come to accept that it is equally plausible to speak of light as a wave AND a particle, those in the field may come to view mind/brain as just two sides of the same coin - the seeming dissonance between subjectivity and matter may simply be an incidental artifact of our perceptual systems.

The dual-aspect monist position becomes important to the rest of the book as MS & OT make the case that the underlying `psychic apparatus' can and should be studied both from a mind and a brain perspective. In this regard, MS & OT agree with Kandel (the Nobel prize winning neuroscientist) that in many ways psychoanalysis, since having emerged as a discipline in the late 19th and first half of the 20th century, continues to provide a remarkably comprehensive theory of mind and that mutual benefits could accrue from fostering cross-dialogue between psychoanalysis and neuroscience (Freud's abandoned "Project"). According to the authors, it is inconceivable that two separate disciplines should be studying the same underlying thing (the `psychic apparatus') while remaining completely isolated from each other. MS & OT take up the challenge of merging the two and in the book they show how some of the neuroscience data can be smoothly integrated with psychoanalytic theory. MS who was trained both as a neuropsychologist and a psychoanalyst in particular has been a key figure in forming an international neuro-psychoanalysis society - its board of editors is populated by key figures from neuroscience (Kandel, Libet, Llinas, LeDoux, Damasio, to name just a few) and psychoanalysis. Of course, it is to be expected that this endeavor has generated controversy as well, more so in some circles than others, but it is up to the reader to judge the relative strength of the argument made by MS&OT.

The work of different researchers is spotlighted in the book including that of Damasio, Panksepp, LeDoux, Hobson, and Solms' own research on the neuropsychology of dreaming. MS&OT have the chance to focus on some of the newest neuroscientific discoveries such as the topic of mirror neurons and the potential neurological bases underlying psychiatric treatment (both pharmacological and psychotherapeutic). This is a great introductory book; it gives a comprehensive and reasonable overview of the relevant issues in the field.

This book is a gem. It is clearly written so that the layman can understand the intricate workings of the brain. However, it is not just the biology of the brain that Solms addresses but the very meaning of SELF. What makes us who we are? The book is fascinating, making every life understandable, including all our quirks and dreams. Excellent book.

Not sure how to review such books, really, but I want to pay my dues (plus, Amazon keeps bugging me).
Seems to me like this book has just the right balance of deep and accessible to a non-professional. Very good read, understandable, systematic, easy to expand upon interesting topics based on the book from other sources.
I learned a lot.
The treatment of AI seems unfair (e.g. some of the things that are shown as incompatible between mind and AI seem to actually compatible and they don't touch on the possibility of simulated environment), but that topic was not my main reason to read the book. Then again, I don't have nearly as much background in either neuroscience or AI, so now I can treat some of my pop-sci opinions with a bigger grain of salt :)

This is a very well written, engaging book which clearly explains some of the hottest topics in neuroscience today. Students in my grad psych class like it as it integrates the latest on how mind and brain interrelate.

This book provides an excellent explanation of how the brain acts as a mediator between our experience of the outside world and our response to it. However, Solms and Turnbull would have done well to bring in a Jungian psychoanalyst as a consultant. Jung, in addition to being a much better scientist than Freud (who described himself as a writer first and foremost), went much farther into the issue of just how much memory and personal experience affects perception. To leave Jung and the Jungians out of the discussion is like having a discussion on human travel while leaving out the Wright brothers and all methods of flight.

As electrical engineer I have always been very much interested in the duality problem of wave-particle which I think I solved in 1991, when I realized that energy is the underlying substance, which we cannot perceive directly and that can manifest itself as a wave or as particle. When I found this excellent, easy to read book, by Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull, it was not a surprise for me what is written in its second chapter:

Dual-aspect monism accepts that we are made of only one type of stuff(that is why is a monism position), but it also suggest that this stuff is perceived in two different ways(hence dual-aspect monism)

It seems that perception, or a higher perception, is the clue to a better understanding of the mind-body problem, which should be near to the buddhist concept of bare attention, as described by Nyanaponika Thera, in his book the Heart of Buddhist Meditation, but that attention attends just to bare facts of perception presented either through the 5 physical senses or through, not the mind, but the 5 additional inner senses of the Higher Mind, which would include the 5 outer and 5 inner senses, but this is just a working hypothesis for a science that has started to understand the inner world of the brain.

"The Brain and the Inner World", by Solms & Turnbull, is a very didatic and accessible text on how the neuroscientific functioning of the human brain and mind is able to create full human expression, and how the brain's neural net supports and enables the emergence of psychic conscious and unconscious phenomena. I recommend it as a textbook for my students.