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47 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Carter's Map Is A Tour de Force!, January 26, 2000
I am a retired neurobiologist who teaches a short course for adult learners entitled "An Operator's Guide To The Brain." I have used dozens of books from which to draw material, as well as my own research experiences on the cellular biology of neurons. None of these books is as valuable to me as Carter's "Mapping The Mind." The graphics are superb, and the layout of the book, where text, text boxes, the words of specialists, and graphics, are used to drive home the message, is remarkably creative. The information presented is very up-to-date, and there is so much to learn that the book lends itself to revisiting over and over. Of all my "brain" books, this is the one I would keep if only one had to be chosen. No doubt some will argue that the layout isn't as integrated and coherent as it might be, what with text boxes popping up here and there to interrupt word flow, and others might quibble about Carter's take on this or that, on the whole this is a truly remarkable book. In ten years some of it will be outdated by new findings in a fast-moving field, but the work nevertheless is truly inspired.
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142 of 160 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A beautiful and fascinating analysis of the human brain, April 29, 2000
This book is part textbook, part coffee table decorum, and part lavish work of art, but the overriding scientific data and lively prose string all the parts into a reasonably cohesive whole that is well worth the price. Carter covers the functions of the brain more clearly than any other cognitive neuroscience book around, and since she doesn't push any specific theory, but simply reports what is known and what is not (almost always indicating a delineation between speculation and knowledge--such as in the chapter on consciousness), her book is refreshingly objective in a field too often dominated by competing theories and egoic arrogance. Best of all, the book is profusely illustrated with enough truly artistic paintings, photos, and diagrams to almost override the text itself in terms of usefulness and information value. As an illustrated textbook on neuroanatomy and as a comprehensive primer on neuropsychology, you can do no better. This book accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do, and for that I recommend it highly. Unfortunately, like the vast majority of modern psychology and neuroscience texts, this book suffers from the gravest of metaphysical mistakes--namely the egregiously reductionistic approach known variously as scientific materialism, positivism, physicalism, scientism, and material monism. The first line of the book summary says it all: "Today a brain scan reveals our thoughts, moods, and memories as clearly as an X-ray reveals our bones. We can actually observe a person's brain registering a joke or experiencing a painful memory." The fallacy in the first sentence should be obvious. There is absolutely no empirical device that reveals the specific content of thoughts, moods, or memories. No EEG, EOG, EMG, PET, CAT, or MRI will tell you what I'm thinking or feeling. They might tell you _that_ I'm thinking, but not _what_ I'm thinking. No empirical procedure can determine whether I'm thinking about picking up litter on Earth Day or planning a local bank heist. Thoughts, moods, and memories are _not_ revealed by a brain scan as clearly as an X-ray reveals bones. They aren't revealed at all! Thoughts, moods, and memories--unlike bones--are not physical, empirical quantities. They don't have simple location in the physical worldspace. What a brain scan detects, rather, is the objective _correlate_ of a subjective experience. A brain scan will show you what parts of the brain are involved in the experience of thinking and feeling; a brain scan will not, however, tell you the nature or content of those thoughts and feelings. What a brain scan reveals is electrochemical activity in a physical organ, not anything remotely resembling "thoughts" or "moods." To simply reduce conscious experience to brain activity is to completely obliterate it: thoughts and feelings are reduced to electricity and neurochemicals; quality is reduced to quantity; interior is reduced to exterior; subject is reduced to object; depth is reduced to surface; the heads side of the coin is reduced to the tails side; and what remains is a flat and faded one-dimensional cosmos, wherein mathematics and logic, spirituality and philosophy, art, morals, truth, and beauty are all reduced to physics and empiricism without remainder. The resultant world is, as Whitehead put it, "a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly." Scientific materialism is, therefore, the insane position of saying that empirical reality alone is the "true reality" (even though there is no empirical basis for such an assertion), and it is always self-contradictory. Carter's book expresses this viewpoint, and says, in effect, that all conscious experience is ultimately reducible to nothing but systems of biochemical activity within the physical brain and body. But if that is actually true, and that statement itself is a product of conscious experience, then it is self-denying, simply because it claims to be "true" at a level where truth and falsehood have no existence (there are no "true" biochemicals versus "false" biochemicals; there are simply biochemicals). Thus, the existence of the very idea of scientific materialism proves that scientific materialism is fundamentally incorrect. That aside, Carter's book is still the best of its ilk in the entire field of cognitive science, and if you want an introductory text on the subject of neural functioning, beautifully illustrated and reasonably informed, this is the book you need to get. (For an explicitly nonreductionistic approach to consciousness research--but without the lavish layout and brain mappings--check out _Integral Psychology_ by Ken Wilber.)
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27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brillant overview, May 13, 2001
This review is from: Mapping the Mind (Paperback)
Rita Carter’s work makes it abundantly clear what a good journalist has to offer the scientific and technical worlds. Normally I have my doubts about writers delving in areas in which they have little or no expertise; however, I also have great difficulty plowing through the sometimes arcane and ponderous prose of professionals. Ms Carter’s careful work and her collaboration with respected researchers in the field of neurophysiology and neuropsychology make her work a very reliable and useful overview of the current knowledge in those fields. When I first purchased Mapping the Mind for a class on mind and the brain, I looked at some of the illustrations and thought "..., this is going to be dull as dust!" Since it was on the "suggested reading" list, I ignored it until the class was completed and didn’t manage to get back to it again until just recently. Wow! Was I wrong. Instead of a boring recitation of anatomy-phys and a collection of totally unmemorable biochemical detail, the book is a fascinating compendium of what is known of brain anatomy and it’s function and how these combine to create what we consider to be the "I" of me. Most of the information has been compiled over years of research on the unfortunates of this world, individuals who have suffered accidents, malignancies, occlusive strokes or cerebral bleeds in or to clearly defined areas of their brains. By studying what nature and happenstance have put in their path, neuroscientists have been able to produced a map of the brain and of the mental or physical deficits that arise from the malfunction of any given region of it. More recently both normal and aberrant psychological states and even the facility for language have been studied using PET scans which illuminate the portions of the brain active during specific tasks. The patterns associated with musical ability, abstract thought, memory and other mental skills have also been subject to study in a way that was not possible before the invention of noninvasive medical technology. While nowhere near the point of a "complete" understanding of brain function--let alone how it works together to create consciousness and what we consider the individual mind--scientists have managed to make great strides in that direction. If they continue to make as many discoveries as they have over the past decade, they may even get to a point where some severely disabling psychological states, like clinical depression or schizophrenia, could be treatable. As a nurse I have had experience with patients just recently who have had electrical devices implanted in their brains. Much like pacemakers and internal defibrillators for heart disease, this equipment stimulates certain areas of the brain associated with depression in an effort to prevent it. This was made possible only by virtue of some of the research covered so expertly and readably by Carter in her book Mapping the Mind.
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