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

~ (Author) "UNFORTUNATELY, OUR BRAIN isn't very proficient at probability estimation..." (more)
Key Phrases: fixed decks, anxiety episodes, anxious person, New York, Mountain Climber, Gambling Task (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

If it's true that we live in an age of anxiety, says Restak, a neuropsychiatrist and professor at George Washington University Medical Center, then our best defense is to learn as much as we can about anxiety and what causes it. Restak (Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot) examines anxiety from both a cultural and physiological point of view. Unlike fear, which is based on a real, external threat, anxiety is an emotion of tension or dread originating from within. Restak details research conducted with animals and, in some cases, humans that reveals the workings of various brain parts involved in the creation of anxious feelings. The amygdalae (two small structures on either side of the brain), for example, receive and evaluate signals that trigger hormonal and chemical responses. In our age of information overload, overstimulated amygdalae can lead to overproduction of anxiety. Restak believes some anxiety is necessary—studies show that people with certain kinds of brain damage have no anxiety and act impulsively and self-destructively. But excessive anxiety can spark phobias, panic attacks and other anxiety disorders. Although this is not a self-help guide, the author does suggest strategies for relieving anxiety, such as avoiding TV hype and instead seeking solid information about anxiety-arousing events.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Restak has written extensively about the brain and mental health, and in this brisk volume, he addresses anxiety. Explicating this vague but palpable emotion, Restak differentiates it from its kindred feeling of fear, which is intense but transitory, whereas anxiety asserts a more diffuse but continual presence in the mind. Restak illustrates anxiety both with social examples (such as dread of a terrorist attack) and individual cases from his medical practice. Making the point that it has effects both beneficial (alerting a person to genuinely dangerous situations) and incapacitating (fretting about catastrophic but statistically improbable situations), Restak exudes empathy with instances of his personal experiences. That style will engage readers throughout as he explores significant experiments in neuroscience on anxiety; several clinical diagnoses, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder; and various medications commonly prescribed for anxiety. On the other side of the anxiety coin, Restak discusses risk-taking folks who intentionally court anxiety. For general readers, Restak dispels worry about worry and tenders sensible strategies for quelling it. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Harmony; First Edition edition (November 23, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400048508
• ISBN-13: 978-1400048502
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,201,353 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Two things this book is NOT, January 17, 2007

By	E. Piccione "cliffrose" (anytown, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars This book gave me anxiety, March 31, 2006

By	Simon Cleveland "Author of 'The Basenji Revel... (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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

4.0 out of 5 stars Don't judge a book by its cover, July 22, 2009

By	David Caperton "Speaking of Joy" (Columbus, OH) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.