Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(20)
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3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Mind Wide Open is a remarkable, very entertaining, and complex read. This is not a 'science' book; nor is it a self-help manual. It is about all of us and each of us; about the human condition that we experience each moment, day, and life. It is a precise expose of the marriage between our mind and our soul, told in the voice of discovery. Perhaps the best testimony that I can give is this: as I read Mind Wide Open, I could not stop thinking about the many and very different people that I wanted to recommend it to. Whether you are a poet or a parent, a teacher or a tradesman, this book will enthrall you.

Part of this is the the author's style. Johnson is funny, personal, and earnest. He alternates between sharing his own musings and vulnerablities and recounting what he has carefully learned and experienced. When you read this book, you may feel the astonishing sensations that I did; your mind thinking about your mind within the context of your own experience and Johnson's perspectives. This was a visceral experience for me.

As much as Mind Wide Open will stimulate you, it is also a book that begs to be read more than once. Rarely do I read a book that I want to completely re-read again; I suspect that many others will feel the same.

I must admit to having scant, if any, interest in 'brain science' before reading this book. That has changed. What lies in our head not only influences our thinking; it catalogues our evolution and our pursuit of life's meaning. Mind Wide Open is a book that allows the reader to understand him/herself in ways that we have never explored before.

This is a superb book. I highly enjoyed it, I look forward to enjoying it again, and I give it my highest recommendation.

Let me begin by saying I read this book from cover to cover. I'll also mention that I'm a grad student in neuroscience. This book contained a few moderately interesting insights, but overall covered astonishingly little information. It's so full of the author's anecdotes about who he met and how he came to his conclusions that it leaves little room for his actual theses. It's a lot of flash and little substance. It's definitely well-written though.

There are so many incredible things to learn about neuroscience that are accessible to non-scientists, yet he focused most of the book on electroencephalograms (EEG), which is ancient technology and alone yields little information about the brain. He drew broad conclusions from specific data and consistently overinterpreted results. This is not surprising considering he has no degree. I should have noticed this before I bought the book. He's like the Ken Burns of neuroscience. You can't study neuroscience part-time for a year or two and expect to write a deep book on it. It's like trying to fly a space shuttle after a summer internship at NASA.

So in conclusion, if you know nothing about neuroscience, you'll probably get something out of this book. Don't waste your time on it though, because if you want to have your mind blown, read "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat".

Johnson does a good job of taking concepts that could potentially be very confusing, and lays them out in an easy to read format. He does a great job of relating chemical and electrical activities in the brain with events in everyone's everyday life.

Mind Wide Open is a great book if you're new to the field of psychology or simply aren't too familiar with the actual chemical workings of the brain. The detail in the main text isn't all that deep but the end notes make up for much of the "overlooked" information. I give this book 4 out of 5 stars because while it was informative and quite revealing I think that Johnson slightly oversimplified the issues at hand. If you come into this book with anything much above a beginners understanding of brain biochemistry you won't walk away with any new ideas.

I recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a beginners guide to theories of how the brain functions.

I decided to check out Steven Johnson's "Mind Wide Open" after reading an article of his in Discovery magazine, where he claims that video games can be more mentally stimulating than reading books. As a huge GTA: San Andreas fan and reader, part of me was intrigued by the idea, part of me saw it as a blatant ploy for the couch-potato South Park generation.

I would recommend this book as an extremely breezy read for those curious about what's going on in brain science. Johnson describes how our brains are always on endogenous drugs, be they the love potion oxytocin, the stressor cortisol, the confidence-building serotonin, etc. He also recounts some pretty interesting experiments where his mind is connected to electrodes and fMRI machines and his mental processes monitored. I have to admit, though, I wanted something a little meatier and substantive about the human mind, and wasn't quite sure if the book was limited by the state of brain science or Johnson's attempt to simplify for the everyman. Most people are aware that the mind is a neurochemical network, so there isn't anything particularly revelatory here.

Johnson rarely gets abstract. He discusses the "qualia" of consciousness only to sidestep it. (I found myself wondering why the metaphysical qualia of consciousness is even necessary; the illusion of a unified "I" must have some evolutionary advantages over a machine-like processor.) At the end he tackles Freud, but I found his attempts somewhat simplistic against the godfather of psychoanalysis.

In sum, while an interesting read, the book stretches out a little bit of information a long way. A lot of this information could have been in one magazine article. And I did fear that Johnson was trying to dumb it down a bit; I wouldn't mind more intensive scrutiny of the actual neurochemical components of the mind.

In MIND WIDE OPEN, Steven Johnson gives new meaning to the phrase, "you ought to have your head examined." Through his guided journey into the depths of the human brain, he not only reveals how cutting-edge neuroscience presents us with a new set of tools for understanding our minds (p. 184), but he also reveals how a more informed understanding of the "brain's internal architecture" can change the ways we think about ourselves (p. 8) in post-Freudian ways (pp. 185-214). Along the way, Johnson submits himself to the latest in neurological testing techniques and gadgetry--empathy tests, neurofeedback, and an fMRI scan, for instance--sharing his resulting insights about emotions, memories and consciousness. He demonstrates how the brain works more like "an orchestra than a soloist" through the chemical and electrical interactions resulting in memory, fear, love, and alertness.

On the subject of chemicals, in Chapter 5, "The Hormones Talking," Johnson reveals that the pleasure drugs otherwise found "in a dime bag or a coke spoon"--heroin, morphine, codeine--occur naturally in the brain (p. 136). "Your brain is nothing but drugs," Johnson writes; "right now, as you read these words, you are under the influence of chemicals, molecularly speaking, almost indistinguishable from drugs that could get you arrested if you consumed them openly in a public place."

Reading MIND WIDE OPEN will not only stimulate and delight your gray matter, it will cause you to rethink your very thinking process.

G. Merritt

This delightfully well written book uses everyday English to explain an incredibly complicated subject. In his introduction, Johnson states the obvious - that most Neuroscience books assume a certain baseline knowledge of the brain which your average person lacks. He wants this to be an approachable book, so he keeps the technical terms to a minimum, always explaining them first and using real world examples of how they apply.

Many scientists would criticize his methods - namely, using himself as his primary test subject. If he were trying to prove new science rather than explain information to a new audience, I would agree. Instead, I found his quest to understand the inner workings of his own brain fascinating. I found myself wondering what a fMRI would reveal about me, wondering what I'd learn from neurofeedback, wanting to try the various attention tests he describes, and wanting desperately to play computer games controlled by my own brain waves.

In addition to being well written, I find this book well organized. Johnson starts with a broad introduction, a sort of guided tour of the brain. He then breaks the brain up into numerous modules, explains how those modules work individually and more important, how they work in concert with other brain modules. The end result is incredibly complex without any individual stops on the tour being overwhelming.

Unlike many pop science books, he doesn't try to lump people into distinct categories, instead opting to present everything as a set of overlapping spectrums. He furthermore suggests you have the power to change where you are on spectrums through conscious choice. Moving from one end to another might be wishful thinking, but becoming a little more this or a little less that just requires determination and work.

For me, the most significant parts of the book were the explanations of the autism spectrum and the facial expression reading skills. Johnson warns that after you learn a little about these, you'll find yourself analyzing your friends and family. That's very true. For the first time, I found myself capable of understanding and even enjoying the company of someone I know with Aspeger's. A little context made a world of difference.

If you're not familiar with neuroscience, this book can have a real impact on how you perceive people around you - in my opinion, for the better.

I don't casually pick up books on neuroscience, so I was pleasantly surprised by just how good this one is. It's one I know I'll read again. I can't recommend it enough.

Johnson is a remarkable popular science writer, with a talent for language and metaphor comparable to that of a very good novelist. He is also very bright, objective, personable and does his research well. Even when I was familiar with a particular subject area, I learned a lot or understood things better. While my background is better than some, this is a book accessible to all. Johnson's objective for "Mind Wide Open" is to help the reader live a better life by providing the kind of understanding that leads to more aware self-examination - not the usual kind of objective for a popular science work. I believe this objective, as well as Johnson's own enthusiasms, may have led him a little astray. The chapters I liked least were on bio-feedback (Johnson is on the board of a bio-feedback company, as I learned from one of his footnotes), and functional brain imaging. Both chapters centered on Johnson's personal experiences, not as a way to explain science, as elsewhere, but as some kind of personal adventure which is supposed to demonstrate the potential of these tools for generating self-awareness. The rest of the book is so interesting, I really begrudge the loss of what could have been in 2 additional chapters. Mind Wide Open is particularly strong in its discussion of memory and emotions (fear, love) and on the role of the body's owns drugs, which cocaine and the like mimic. As part of his summing up, Johnson has a wonderful discussion of how Freud can be updated to provide a modern theory of psychology.

This popular scientific account explains a handful of concepts in modern neuroscience for the non-scientist. In the process of writing this entertaining book, Johnson subjects his own brain to countless examinations as examples of his topic. He does a great job in detailing how this information is relevant to our everyday lives. Among other things, he explains how we perceive other peoples' faces, what happens in the brain when we fall in love, why music causes strong emotional reactions, and how ideas are generated. And, it is a very entertaining read.

This a fine book that does a good job of connecting our experiences with recent studies of the brain and the ways in which it gives shape to our minds and personalities. I would highly recommend this book to laypeople who would like to have a better understanding of what physical processes help create our personalities, what comes "natural" to humans, and some ways in which we differ from one another.

I am however a scientist (in another field) and am hardly a layperson. I found it frustrating at times to read about an interesting idea and not have sufficient information allowing me to judge the soundness of the research and it's applicability to the human mind (or describe it to colleagues with any sense of credibility). I also kept wishing for more "in depth" coverage, for more details including the explanation of more complex processes and use of neuroscience (or general biology) jargon. This however is not necessarily a criticism of Johnson's book -- for more material and in depth coverage, I suppose I should consult textbooks or more focused books about the mind. Joseph Le Doux's book "The Synaptic Self" for example is one such book -- it focuses on the self as an evolving network of weaker and stronger synaptic connections (a synapse is a sort of gap which neurons overcome with the help of neurotransmitters to connect to (and excite) other neurons or other cells). Le Doux's book has the level of details I crave (as the director of the center for Neural Science at NYU, he is certainly qualified to provide them), but I would not recommend it to people with no prior knowledge of neuroscience, because it will be too dense and serious for the average person juggling career, family and friends and reading for less than 1/2 hour per day.

Johnson's book "Mind Wide Open" is excellent for anyone curious about what makes us what we are, but unwilling to get a degree in neuroscience (or spend years reading more or less easily digestible books) to get it. The author has a gift for engaging his readers fully, tying up personal experiences and bits of humor to the scientific findings and technological inventions of the field. He takes you on a journey of curiosity, one that stops at research labs (but does not shy away from some "less scientifically justifiable" enterprises); throughout you feel like an explorer in your own head

Mind Wide Open is a personal narrative of author Steven Johnson's journey to better understand himself and others by educating himself about science behind human behavior. Johnson begins each chapter with an anecdote or hypothetical situation to introduce a new topic and then proceeds to detail his quest to understand the topic, and shares with the reader what he learned.

In one chapter, Johnson explores the field of neurofeedback. Neurofeedback employs a device called an electroencephalogram, which, as Johnson explains, measures the frequency of electromagnetic pulses generated by the brain. These frequencies correspond to different states of consciousness. Johnson writes about his experience with borderline-New-Agey neurofeedback specialists who have created some unique neurofeedback applications. During a visit with one such specialist, Johnson plays a computer game in which he has to lower his "theta wave levels" by remaining in a very attentive state in order to pedal a virtual bicycle. He then explains the possible therapeutic potential of such an application: if children with ADD/ADHD practice this game, they may be able to hone their attention skills to the point where medication is unnecessary.

In the introduction, Johnson explains that he used a "long-decay test" to determine which topics he would include in his book. To pass the test, he explains, a particular topic or insight must "reverberate for weeks or months after you've first encountered it; it has to pop up in conversation or in moments of self-reflection." Mind Wide Open, compared to rest of the popular science genre, is relatively non-technical, and therefore might disappoint a reader looking for hard science. Regardless, every piece of information in this fun and revealing book passes the long-decay test with flying colors. Highly recommended.