Customer Reviews

Poe's Heart and the Mountain Climber: Exploring the Effect of Anxiety on Our Brains and Our Culture

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1- Literary Criticism
2- Self Help (despite offering some anxiety minimizing suggestions),

This book explores the experience of anxiety from a neurological point of view. It is a fascinating historical and scientific exploration of the structure and function of our brain as it relates to anxiety.

I enjoyed it thoroughly. Students of the neurological and cognitive sciences will probably do so as well.

I should have paid more attention to the small shrift in the title of "Poe's Heart and the Mountain Climber : Exploring the Effect of Anxiety on Our Brains and Our Culture" by Richard Restak. Generally, the book is Neither about Poe Nor about Mountain Climbers. IT IS ABOUT ANXIETY and is heavily geared toward scientific enthusiasts and/or medical students. I seriously believe that if an anxiety suffering patient picks up this book by the time he/she reaches the end, he/she would've experienced an increase in anxiety symptoms.

For me it started unexpectedly with the lengthy exploration of how best to define what anxiety is...page after page, test after test...But I quickly brushed aside any fears of growing anxiety associated specifically with my worries of wasting my time yet again with a bad book and proceeded to read.

More pages followed with more definitions and tests and again the same feelings creped up on me of time wasted again. This time I listened to these feelings and found them to be true especially after the medical terminology kneed me in the groins of my brain with statements like

"... the next time you're feeling anxious, think about the brain circuitry that underlies your anxious responses: the role of the amygdala, the conditioning responses, and, most of all, the power of the frontal lobes to override or at least moderate the ..."

or
"...During the evolution of our brain, the massive growth of the prefrontal cortex resulted in an increase in back-and-forth traffic between that area and the amygdala...."

and also

"...But despite their inability to recall seeing the fearful face, PTSD veterans show an exaggerated amygdala response on íMRI testing, a response that varies directly with the severity of their PTSD symptoms..."

By the time I reached the Epilogue, I was hyperventilating. Thankfully, it proved the most helpful portion of the book and it is in this portion that the author redeems himself from causing my anxiety.

While in his "Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot: Unleashing Your Brain's Potential" mr. Restak give frequent and helpful advices within each chapter of the book, he does this only in the Epilogue of this book. My advice, unless you absolutely need to know how anxiety is linked physiologically with your mind, skip to the Epilogue. My overall impression is that a lot of the information in this book is unnecessary unless you are planning to go to med school or are preparing for a scientific conference on the brain and its imbalances.

- by Simon Cleveland

As with Restak's other works on neuroscience, this book provides fascinating examples and insights into the the way the brain experiences the world. This time the emphasis is on the sometimes destructive and sometimes surprisingly useful experience of anxiety to mental and physical health. Restak is a highly respected neurologist and the author of over a dozen books, so I'm sure the information contained within is well researched and credible, but there is one superficial yet glaring flaw in this edition that, were it not for Restak's excellent body of work, might have made me wonder about the reliability of the information inside. That flaw is the image on the cover of Poe above the image of a mountain climber reaching a mountain summit. The problem is that the image is not Edgar Allan Poe, but Mark Twain. It was such a distraction that I finally had to remove the cover to enjoy the book. I guess you could say that it caused me anxiety (say, maybe it's one of the author's clever experiments). Disregard the insult to Twain (he was never a fan of E.A. Poe), and you'll be enlightened and surprised by the insights of a brain expert who not only knows and loves his subject, but knows how to make it accessible to the layperson.

If you want to learn about the life of your favorite author, Edgar Allan Poe, go buy a biography of him and read it. It may help you understand why Dr. Restak chose to allude to Poe in the title of a book on anxiety disorders. You have to admit, Poe's history of abandonment by family members and rejection by critics would certainly predispose him to the kind of anxiety and depression Restak explains and palliates in this book.

For people who suffer from panic attacks or chronic anxiety, there comes the shock of clarity and the comfort of understanding. One's symptoms are described and the brain chemistry that causes them is explained in detail. With anxiety there is often a sense of guilt that one cannot "suck it up" and take life's curveballs like so many others seem to. As Restak explains, this is caused not by inherent weakness of personality, but a combination of genetic predisposition and the body's chemical response to life events. It is relieving to know that one's seemingly irrational problems have a completely logical and measurable cause. What's more, steps can actually be taken to improve!

Tragically, this book comes over a hundred years too late for its own namesake. Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart"-the one that never recovered from the triple loss of his mother, stepmother, and wife- proved too fragile to withstand the stress of his own life and Poe died an early and still unexplained death. Thankfully, it is not too late for the reader, who can put into practice the exercises outlined in this book and learn how to cope with a mind predisposed to anxiety.

This book provides some interesting information about anxiety from the medical viewpoint. The author, an MD, discusses synapses, brain lobes, seratonin, etc., in relation the causes of anxiety. He goes into I think too much detail in that area and in the area of research experiments on mice and other animals regarding anxiety. The outcomes are illustrative but the narration of the experiments and intracies of the brain were dry. He takes a similar approach to medications for anxiety.

The title of the book refers to Poe's "Tell Tale Heart" narrator who suffers from extreme anxiety and mountain climbers who are indicative of people with little anxiety about risks. Unfortunately, there is little additional discussion that includes such illustrations. He writes of four stories of patients suffering from ranges of anxiety problems. What to do about anxiety is left to the epilogue that is short and basically offers the suggestion that one should take medication for anxiety and stay on it.

This book provides a general overview of what is behind anxiety and the differences between anxiety and fear. But overall it is dry and not very stimulating.

Craig STephans, author of Shakespeare On Spirituality: Life-Changing Wisdom from Shakespeare's Plays

I chose this book because E. A. Poe has always been one of my favorite writers, though most of his things are morbid. He used one of Poe's stories to show the consequences of abject anxiety (and guilt). Another of his recent renderings concerns Mozart's Brain.

There is a big difference between stress and anxiety, which is not a mental illness, but a prevalent and painful part of life. Stress relates to all the unpleasant things which can happen to us. Anxiety is how we relate to and handle such stress. You can be anxious and fearful. One is stressed and yet may not feel anxious.

The roots of anxiety involve perceptions and interpretations. Situations which cause this unpleasant emotion are: conflicts and frustration, a threat of physical or emotional harm, and challenges to our self esteem. Worry, dread, fear, apprehension are sympthoms of anxiety. In 'angst' we confront 'fundamental precariousness' of existence. We're in a state of being fragile, Our anxious dread renders us helpless.

When we anticipate the bad things which might happen, we experience anxiety. It is only undesirable when it becomes extreme. Inheritance plays a major role in how much anxiety we experience and how we manage it, which is useless as we can't choose our parents.

Anxiety is something we sometimes have to endure when things get too bad. How, I ask, can one transform something so debilitating into positive, creative energy. Medications blunt the symptoms but don't cure the pain.

Dr. Restak is a psychiatrist who had a few phobias of his own. He has written thirteen other books, most about the brain. He teaches at George Washington University Medical Center.