Customer Reviews

Mapping the Mind

5 star:		(35)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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 In ten years some of it will be outdated by new findings in a fast-moving field, but the work nevertheless is truly inspired.

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.)

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.

I just got and read this book because of some of the more recent and enthusiastic reader reviews. But I beg to differ with their assessment, since this is not the first book on the subject I have read. The author, a journalist, is over her head in this subject matter and apparently does not realize it. This becomes apparent in the context of other neuroscience literature.

Compared to serious works on the subject written by neuroscientists who actually do some of the research upon which their books are based, this is a quick read. I zipped through it in a few hours. By comparison, it takes me days to get through a work of the same length by Drs. LeDoux or Damasio, who are both absolute authorities. The quick overview can of course be most helpful, but be aware that the real scientists are harder to read for a reason. It's because they have very deep subject-matter knowledge coupled with fine sensitivity to what can be claimed without distortion. They know *all* of the pertinent studies on their topic, not just a small subset. They're cautious, and thorough in their explanations. The journalist tends to wish to make sweeping statements on the basis of insufficient knowledge, since she doesn't have years to master such a complex discipline and the summary style is more digestible for a broad audience. I am a scholar-researcher and academic journal editor myself, and have also done quite a bit of newspaper writing, so I know intimately both sides of the writing spectrum. In Ms. Carter's case, after not too many pages I began not to trust her pronouncements. Too many are simply too glib.

Carter treats too many aspects unevenly and incompletely. Music, for instance, gets only about two pages of text, over half of which is devoted to the tingle-thrill sensation, probably because the author found a catchy anecdote in an experiment about chickens and music. It's a cute story for a newspaper, but if you wish to understand music and the brain, this is not even a bare introduction. See instead any publication by Isabelle Peretz, a psychologist-neuroscientist specializing in music at the University of Montreal (she has lots of PDFs on her departmental website), who is very authoritative yet writes accessibly. Carter does not mention Peretz anywhere in the book.

I was surprised when Carter identified the amygdala as the "source of negative emotions of anger, fear and sadness" (p. 103). And she writes: "the amygdala, as we have seen, does not convey concepts, it simply creates emotional feelings." These are misleading formulations that you'd never read in anything written by Antonio Damasio. While it is strongly implicated in the fear reflex, I have not read elsewhere that the amygdala is so clearly involved in sadness or anger. And a neurologist would not say "creates emotional feelings" -- rather, it contributes to a piece of the process of feeling. In his books, Damasio is always careful to point out that any one small area of the brain is rarely completely responsible for anything. Rather, brain functions are typically distributed over networks of brain regions that work together in complex processes and pathways that are still mostly imperfectly understood. Damasio conscientiously presents his entire books as hypotheses in need of further research, whereas the journalist is not nearly so hesitant. The occupational hazard of every journalist is the impossible obligation to get up to speed on a new topic quickly, without any of the formal training that topic experts have, yet present a lucid and balanced explication to a wide readership. In this instance, as happens daily in the newspaper, the summary simplifies the story but often twists the facts and their implications.

On the plus side, the illustrations are numerous, pertinent, and quite helpful in assisting the reader to visualize many of the abstract and difficult concepts in this book.

This is a beautifully written overview of the current thinking in neuroscience. What is stunning about this "everymans overview" is that it presents information that you may not even find in the very latest research. Bearing in mind it was written in 1998 some of the research presented seems to be more advanced than that presented in many current specialist publications and it does so with clarity and simplicity.

The problem with the field of neuroscience (and this is true of other scientific fields) is that, to put it in brain disorder language, often quite literally the "right hand does not know what the left hand is doing". What this means is that researchers often have very deep knowledge of specific areas but no overall view of the subject. This is crucial in neuroscience which deals with a highly interconnected system like the brain.

It is usual that an overview text on a particular field will be published five years or so behind the current leading research. However this book turns that on its head to some degree because it makes connections between different areas that need to be consistant with one another. I am somewhat baffled as to how an overview can have more information than specialist publications and be published before them. I am a neuroscientist and I just wish I had known about and read this book when it came out, it would have saved me a good deal of time!

This is a great read for anyone at any level.

I ordered this book without having seen it, intending it as a sort of casual review of current trends in neuropsycholoical knowledge and research- more for casual reading than serious study. I'd taken my last neuro course in grad school nearly 20 years ago, and thought of Carter's book more as casual reading than something for serious study.

I was surprised to discover that Carter has written a book that, while an enjoyable read, is one of the best introductory text's I've ever come accross in the field. I showed it to a few academic friends who agreed that yes, this would make a fine adjunct to an introductory cource in neruopsychology or neuroanatomy. Quite an accomplishment.

I would strongly recommend this book to both the casual reader with an interest in mind and anatomy, and the serious student looking towards a career in psychology, medicine or neuroanatomy.

Students and enthusiasts of the brain/mind should look no further. This is a very good overview of recent ideas, research and argument regarding that complex organ of ours-the brain-and what and why it does what it does. The brain is incredibly complicated, but neuroscience in particular, in the light of evolutionary theory, magnetic resonance imaging and powerful computer modelling, is beginning to unravel its secrets.

The text covers a wide range of topics including: epilepsy, memory, hyper-religiosity (very brief-I think the authors are leaving that touchy topic for the future), neurotransmitters and their relation to various mental disorders, left/right brain functions and relations, left handedness, the "alien hand" (ala Dr Strangelove), Tourette's syndrome, "blindsight", syndrome E, amnesia, obsessive compulsive disorder and its variants, schizophrenia, addiction, sex, hunger, autism, expression, emotion, fear, phobias and how they are unconsciously learned, synaethesia (crossover between the senses eg `hearing colours'), agnosia (lack of recognition-eg of faces, objects etc), illusions and prejudice (skeptics take note!), aspects of language, gossip, 'states' of mind, false memories, depression, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, and A.I. (briefly discussed). Many case examples are given of various disorders, and the spectrum of their expression.

A number of altered brain `states' and mental disorders are described and analysed in the light of brain modularity and evolutionary theory, in particular. Evolutionary theory is indeed providing useful answers as to how and why many unusual behavioural states/malfunctions/mechanisms occur in the brain, some of which seem to be purely `malfunctions', whilst others seem to be side-effects of other evolved mental mechanisms, whilst still others are probably there for a specific reason. One of the most interesting apsects for me is the *spectrum* that exists in many of the brain's 'disorders', and where slightly unusual brain functioning, or a weak version of a particular disorder may occasionally give a benefit in another area, and may have evolved for that reason.

This book is probably the most comprehensive, rounded and best in the genre of brain/mind science that I have read. It is complimented with impressive colour illustrations and a prose that is light and readable, for the enthusiastic, but non-brain specialist like myself. Excerpts and comments from related fields such as philosophy, psychiatry, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, and even archaeology etc have been inserted in highlighted boxes, which provide welcome and complimentary notes. For me, other books I have read which deal more specifically on philosophy and evolutionary psychology for example, whilst very useful, don't *for me* provide the same cutting and specific insights as neuropsychology itself is providing, and I have read a few.

Other books recommended in this general 'neuroscience' genre include "the Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat"-a readable short paperback of anecdotes, "Why God Won't Go Away-Brain Science and the Biology of Belief"-neuroscience-obviously focussing on religious predispositions, and "States of Mind"-focussing on altered brain states such as schizophrenia and depression.

Rita Carter and Christopher Firth have put their heads together and come up with a very comprehensive yet accessible review of brain research. Carter's style, backed up with Firth's broad and deep knowledge of the field has yielded a most enjoyable and useful book.

Having followed many of the individual areas of research in the popular scientific press as they unfolded, I had a patchwork understanding of what has been done in the past ten or so years, especially since MRI and PET scans became common, but I did not have a complete and lucid picture.

Carter, with the support of Firth and many distinguished researchers in the field providing Cameo vignettes throughout, succeed in offering the layperson having little more than an interest in the field, an excellent read and a good high level reference source.

The overall design and illustrations in the large format softcover edition is very attractive and encourages reading.

I highly recommend this to anyone vaguely interested in how the mind works from a neuroelectrochemical perspective as well as from an anecdotal, human perspective. This is not a psychology book nor what I think of as a traditional cognitive science book and is much the better for it.

This is a good book, covering a lot of ground, introductory, that discusses a lot of research. It certainly would not hurt someone that is not a begginer to check it out, because it sumarizes a lot of information.
The book starts off with general functional neuroanatomy. Next it explores issues in hemispheric specializations. It talks of split-brain research, among other things. Presents a nice overview, not being affected by the popularization (and simplification) of the "left-brain, right-brain" idea. The next section covers the labour that the limbic system does, namely regulating and emotive functions. THere is also some neuropharmacology. Next the book dicusses perception and sensation, does a good job in presenting neuropsychological, neurobiological and cognitive evidence. There is a chapter on language, its mechanisms and disorders. Next comes memory, its different types, concentrating on neurological underpinnings, hipocampus, temporal cortex, molecular changes. LTP etc..Finally there is the frontal lobes. They are characterized as the seat of reason, consciousness etc.

To me the most intersting part of the book are the contributions made by prominent authors. There are sections on consciousness, by Penrose and CRick. Damasio talks of convergence zones as binding mechanism. LeDoux talks of emotions, Rose of molecular bases of memory, and Richard Gregory of perception, among other contributions.
The other thing that makes this book worthwile are the ilustrations, clarity, typography and presentation of the book.

_Mapping the Mind_ is a comfortable and engaging introduction into what is known so far about how the brain works. You will learn (or review) the different parts of the brain, their place in human evolution, and the role of each in the myriad of activities and abilities we all take for granted. Revealing case studies are cited of how damage to a particular part of the brain may impair the sufferer in a very specific and sometimes bizarre way. Carter poses pointed questions about human free will, and to what extent we really have such. This book is a good launchpad for further reading on the brain, e.g. by Damasio and Ramachandran.

The illustrations all have a surrealistic, computer-generated look about them which doesn't entirely appeal to me, but does help unify the overall page design. Most are clear, but for some it may take a while to establish the orientation - L to R, R to L, or looking up from underneath.

Actually, I would give this book four and a half stars; there are various glitches of editing, like repeated material in the same chapter, and some very minor typos and formatting quirks. And the prose takes on just a faint shade of purple here and there, in the spirit of Diane Ackerman (_A Natural History of the Senses_), though I realize this was part of Carter's effort at enhanced readability, and mostly it comes off OK.

Overall, this book is a good plunge to take if you're interested in yourself and why and how you do what you do - and who isn't?