Customer Reviews

The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Horgan leaves you open-mouthed at the breadth and depth of his reporting. From Prozac to psychoanalysis to PET scans, he puts all of mind science in place; and does it so deftly and entertainingly that you don't realize till later how much you have learned. He has made fewer waves with this book than with The End of Science, but if anything this one's even better. He is not the bad boy of science journalism (as he's been called lately) so much as the smart man --capable of handling any subject with grace, wit, and honesty, and appropriate levels of skepticism. Where he is skeptical he is judging scientists by their own standard: the evidence. My favorite chapter was his deconstruction of evolutionary psychology. I found myself less pessimistic than Horgan about the potential of neuroscience, but it didn't affect my enjoyment of the book. He writes with a point of view, which makes him interesting, but he doesn't abuse you with it.

Most of what Horgan says about mind science is, I think, correct. He is right that much of psychology isn't really moving toward a unified theory of the mind, and shows no signs that it really can get there. Horgan's solution to this problem is, he seems to suggest, that we should think of much of psychology as more akin to "philosophy and literary criticism" (his words)than to hard science. I think Horgan is right when he says this. But, the trouble I have is that he understands "philosophy" and litcrit in a superficial and condescending way- and therefore, psychology too, insofar as it is akin to these disciplines. He sees such disciplines as merely _less_than_ science. He defines them negatively, by what they _can't_ to, rather than what they can. For instance, he says that these disciplines, the humanities, are not empirical and don't have unified paradigms. So this is what they _don't_ have, but what about what they _do_ have and _can_ do, that science can't? I think the trouble here is that Horgan doesn't know an awful lot about the humanities. Horgan's offhand depiction of several philosophers (Kuhn, "French philosophers," etc.), for instance, is mostly amateurish, uncomprehending, and often not especially respectful. And in an encounter he depicts with some literary-oriented psychoanalysts, he quotes some of what they said and aggressively dismisses it as "obscure." If one looks at what he quotes to show this "obscurity," it turns out that the psychoanalysts were merely using the common diction of literary criticism discourse, which Horgan obviously does not understand. It is because of his lack of knowledge in these fields, I think, that Horgan really does not know what he is saying when he suggests that psychology is a lot like litcrit and philosophy. If he had a better sense of the special _kind_ of intellectual rigor and insightfulness that these disciplines have, Horgan might view them as equal, in their own way, to hard science. If this is the case, then if psychology is something like litcrit and philosophy instead of like physics, this is not a step down for psych, as Horgan implies, but merely a step sideways.

At a time when we are constantly bombarded with claims and counter claims about the mind in the media and the popular press, it is good to see someone finally rise above the hype and take a good critical look at the current state of Mind Science.

Opening with a discussion of the mind body problem or as Horgan calls it the "explanatory gap" and the difficulties in constructing a single theory of the mind, Horgan leaves the reader wondering if in the final analysis, such a thing is even possible.

While ultra critical, Horgan does not make the same mistakes as he did in his first book. He treats each argument fairly and reasonably. As one reviewer pointed out "Where he is skeptical he is judging scientists by their own standard: the evidence"

In my view he is at his strongest when critiquing Bio-Psychiatry and especially the pseudo- science Evolutionary Psychology, which he rightly points out its inability to perform experiments, and the impossibility of objectively determining what is a cultural or innate trait. He likens this budding "Science" to the now fading psychoanalysis, which has interesting views on human nature, but whose theories can never really be verified.

Finally, he tackles the old philosophical problem of consciousness, and highlights all the competing contradictory views on how to tackle the problem.

Of course ultimately we may solve the problems that Horgan thinks are beyond our grasp, but until then, Horgan's Critical rationalism will do just fine.

What a refreshing change from the usual stuff of science writing, which treats researchers with reverence and awe while failing to ask elementary questions about the limitations of the work. He provides a highly readable survey (a dance across the territory might be more accurate) of a broad field of knowledge. In the area where I knew the material and most of his sources, I can testify that he got facts just about right. As the self-styled "bad boy" of science writing, he sometimes skewers his subjects with deadly accuracy and at other points descends to sophomoric put downs and innunendo. But if anybody doubted whether Horgan was basically right about how little the neuroscientists in particular knew, the latest headlines prove his point: An experiment at Princeton showed that new brain cells appear ever day and are used for higher level mental functions. This is a little like spending several decades studying how automobiles work only to discover they have wheels. (Gosh, no wonder they move so fast).

After reading several scientific books on the neural basis of consciousness, this book was a breath of fresh air. Mr. Horgan was appropriately critical of all theories related to the study of mind (ie. neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, psychoanalysis, behavioral genetics...etc). I am tired of reading about the interesting sexual habits of song birds and how this has implications of understanding the evolution of human behavior. I'm frustrated at books that describe consciousness with literary nonsense eg. "being conscious of being conscious." I'm annoyed at behavioral geneticists trying to extrapolate from twin studies theories of human behavior. This book was one of the best attempts at pseudo-science bashing. I don't think that the explanatory gap will ever be filled. However I do not advocate the worst type of pseudo-science ie. DUALISM. The neural activity of the brain generates the mind. The best explanation of cognition will be a neural correlate. Thinking about "a lovely spring day" can and never will be substituted by any materialist theory. However a neural correlate describing the temporospatial binding of multiple brain areas/different neuronal populations would be, in my opinion, a worthy problem to solve. Building such bridges between mind and brain would be leap forward in science. I would envision a day when the the first day of class (high school, college, etc...) would be a discussion of what our brains do to generate our minds.

Dr. Shekar Raman, M.D. Neurologist

Horgan does an excellent job of pointing out in specific terms how the complexities of the human mind have not yet been captured by our sciences, and leaves us wondering whether such a thing is even possible.

The strength of this book is that Horgan was very careful about going to representative sources in each science, to show each in its best light rather than simply debunking them. This results in a very good review of basic neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, psychotherapy, psychopharmaceutical effectiveness, and other research areas of importance that claim to tell us something fundamental about ourselves. We don't get the sense in this book that Horgan is simply arbitrarily skeptical of science, but that he respects what science can accomplish yet finds some aspects of reality simply beyond our ken. Seemingly reasonable, yet easy to forget when we get caught up in the excitement over the stream of promising new findings from research.

The weakness of this book is that he doesn't give any indication at all that any view of the mind is better or more useful than any other, something of profound importance when we try to make decisions on what is known, such as deciding what to do when feeling overwhelmed and unsure of our sanity. The reader might be left at the end of the book in frustration with the conclusion that we don't really know _anything_ at all about the mind and brain, which wouldn't be true, even according to the contents of Horgan's books. It does however deserve a place on the bookshelf of anyone who suspects that we don't know everything yet, and who wants to better understand where the limits of our knowledge of the mind are now. It will probably attract many skeptics of science, but its real value is to remind scientists of our own limitations and the depth of the mysteries of nature.

Reading individual scientific works on brain/mind issues with the goal of gaining insight into how the mind works can be - well, mind numbing. I greatly appreciate John Horgan's journalistic, no-holds-bared approach to the subject. What does he discover? The field is wide open, massively complex and contradictory. And he lets you know it in a fast paced conversational style.

I enjoyed this book very much. In particular I enjoyed the interviews with James Austin and Susan Blackmore. I respect the imposition of Mr. Horgan's personal views. This is a book by a journalist, not a peer review. I recommend it to everyone with a general interest in mind studies.

It is often said that, in neuroscience, there are "hard problems" and "easy problems." The hard problems are scientific questions that are intimately bound up in issues of philosophy, such as "How is that we are aware of anything" or "Is consciousness a state that is unique to humans? Are nonhuman animals conscious? Could a machine ever be conscious?" The easy problems are probably answerable by more straightforward scientific approaches, and would include things like "What parts of the brain are crucial to the analysis of motion? How does the visual system construct a three-dimensional representation from two-dimensional input?"

This book is focused almost exclusively on the easiest of the easy questions; that is, on questions that can be answered without a lot of controversy by doing research that is really not that complicated. Do antidepressant medications work? Is psychoanalysis effective? These are the sorts of questions that this book is mainly concerned with. That's not necessarily bad, but it's not what was I expecting, and this book actually has almost nothing to say about recent scientific studies of the brain or mind (although it has a lot to say about the effectivness of Freudian psychoanalysis, which is not exactly a huge source of well-designed and well-controlled scientific research). If you're hoping to read a book describing recent findings in neuroscience and how those findings relate to mental experience, this is not the book for you.

The other shortcoming of this book is that it is largely made up of relatively straightforward reporting of interviews and scientific conferences, with not a lot of careful analysis. The end result, to my mind, is frequently quite superficial and leaves a lot of important issues uncovered.

A large part of this book is an evaluation of the effectiveness of various approaches to "mind-science," including psychoanalysis, psychopharmacology, evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, artificial intelligence, etc. Horgan interviews some of the main players and then evaluates their arguments. Understandably, the contrarian-minded author of The End of Science (1996), finds fault with all of them. What he doesn't do is set up any sort of pecking order of effectiveness among them. Thus the reader is left to conclude that those who advocate lobotomies and electroshock treatment, for example, are no further off base than those who advocate the use of Prozac or other SSRIs. Horgan actually suggests that all mind science approaches might be helpful (as in "All have won and all deserve prizes"-the "dodo hypothesis" from Alice in Wonderland that he seems to be making fun of in Chapter Three, but then adopts). He himself would try (for depression) "psychotherapy first, and the antidepressants. If they didn't work...I might give the shock therapy expert...a call."

John, I recommend placebo therapy first. And whatever you do don't go near those electrodes without the signed approval of your wife and kids, your employer, your lawyer, your publisher, and a good father confessor. Call your grandmother. If they all agree it's okay, call me. Also, you might reread your own book which includes the inescapable conclusion that none of these therapies is much better than the mere passage of time, something known, by the way, as you report, for many decades.

Another part of the book is about the issues in mind-science, especially the question of consciousness, an enigma Horgan doesn't expect to be solved anytime soon, if ever. I would like to say that the question of consciousness, like the question of God, is at first a problem of definition. The disputants are often talking about different things. To one, consciousness is akin to "awareness." To another it's something like "ego-identity." To a third it's something like "spiritual awareness." Just as the God of the Vedas, about which nothing can be said, is very different from the God of conservative Christianity, who has a bad temper and seeks to punish sinners, so too is the idea of consciousness as simply a degree of awareness a far cry from consciousness as self-identity. After the disputants agree on their definitions I would ask (and I think this is Horgan's feeling), how can an ant comprehend itself in its entirety? or Can a pillar of salt measure the ocean of Brahman?

Horgan also considers the question of machine consciousness or the consciousness of artificial intelligence. Here one can easily see the functionality of solipsism. If I have any doubt about someone else being conscious (of course I have no doubt about myself--I think) how much easier it is to doubt that a machine may be conscious. If I can't ever prove that anyone other than myself is conscious (and I can't), how am I going to prove that a machine is?

So I think Horgan's essential skepticism is largely justified. When, in some distant millennium, we finally do understand ourselves, we will no longer be what we are today. However, along the way, I think it should be noticed, for example, that evolutionary psychology has a much firmer scientific basis than say psychoanalysis. And it might be pointed out that one has to be pretty desperate to try "electro-convulsive therapy," which is what electroshock therapy is currently being called. That Horgan was able to describe the horrors of lobotomy and the currently popular surgical procedure, "cingulotomy" without once noting that such "treatments" are anything more than "controversial" (page 129) suggests a loss of perspective. On page 134 he allows that he is concerned "that drugs [Prozac, etc.], and to a lesser extent, shock therapy have been oversold." He adds that "the administration of psychiatric drugs to children has gotten out of hand."

"Oversold"? "Out of hand"? Horgan doesn't say whether a cingulotomy, in which a "marble-sized bundle of nerves" that links the frontal lobe (instead of the whole frontal lobe) is severed, is an "out of hand" treatment or even whether he would, as a last resort, choose such a treatment for himself should the other three fail.

On target however is the way he addresses the notion that physics is "the most fundamental--and thus most important--scientific research." (p 259) He calls on physicist Philip Anderson to point out that "Reality has a hierarchical structure...with each level independent, to some degree, of the levels above and below." Anderson adds, "At each stage, entirely new laws, concepts, and generalizations are necessary, requiring inspiration and creativity to just as great a degree as in the previous one." That the so-called soft sciences such as psychology are actually more complex than the so-called hard sciences is one of Horgan's implicit points, and one of the reasons he believes mind-science hasn't really accomplished much as yet, or indeed ever will. At bottom he believes that there is a clear limit to what we can comprehend. On this I agree. I just think that we still have quite a ways to go before we run out of ability. I think consciousness, for example, will eventually be seen as an illusion and a mechanism of evolution, a "trick," so to speak, that makes us so intently identify with our particular phenotype that we will do almost anything to keep it alive and well. How the mind works, how it apprehends and creates "reality," the details thereof, including the infamous "binding problem" may well be beyond the comprehension of any of us. However, together as a cultural entity in this world, with our electronic machines and other artifacts, we may as a species comprehend many things that we as individuals cannot.

For the first time, someone has managed to cut through the hype, the unfulfilled hopes, and the PR of the psychological community in order to offer a realistic look at the current state of the art as well as what can or can not be expected in the future.