Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life
Written by Steven Johnson
Narrated by Alan Sklar
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
Using a mix of experiential reportage, personal storytelling, and fresh scientific discovery, Steven Johnson describes how the brain works - its chemicals, structures, and subroutines - and how these systems connect to the day-to-day realities of individual lives. For a hundred years, he says, many of us have assumed that the most powerful route to self-knowledge took the form of lying on a couch, talking about our childhoods. The possibility entertained in this book is that you can follow another path, in which learning about the brain's mechanics can widen one's self-awareness as powerfully as any therapy or meditation or drug.
In Mind Wide Open, Johnson embarks on this path as his own test subject, participating in a battery of attention tests, learning to control video games by altering his brain waves, scanning his own brain with a $2 million fMRI machine, all in search of a modern answer to the oldest of questions: who am I?
Along the way, Johnson explores how we "read" other people, how the brain processes frightening events (and how we might rid ourselves of the scars those memories leave), what the neurochemistry is behind love and sex, what it means that our brains are teeming with powerful chemicals closely related to recreational drugs, why music moves us to tears, and where our breakthrough ideas come from.
Johnson's clear, engaging explanation of the physical functions of the brain reveals not only the broad strokes of our aptitudes and fears, our skills and weaknesses and desires, but also the momentary brain phenomena that a whole human life comprises. Why, when hearing a tale of woe, do we sometimes smile inappropriately, even if we don't want to? Why are some of us so bad at remembering phone numbers but brilliant at recognizing faces? Why does depression make us feel stupid?
To read Mind Wide Open is to rethink family histories, individual fates, and the very nature of the self, and to see that brain science is now personally transformative - a valuable tool for better relationships and better living.n the country...
Steven Johnson
Steven Johnson is the internationally bestselling author of several books, including How We Got to Now, Where Good Ideas Come From, The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map and Everything Bad is Good for You. The founder of a variety of influential websites, he is the host and co-creator of the PBS and BBC series How We Got to Now. Johnson lives in Marin County, California, and Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and three sons.
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The Ghost Map Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Innovator's Cookbook: Essentials for Inventing What Is Next Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
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Reviews for Mind Wide Open
153 ratings10 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is what Ive been searching for... Im telepathic. Dont know if its magic or just hypersensitive neurologic transfer....
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A very strange novel, utterly weird and eccentric and inventive. We start off with a seance, but that's gritty realism compared to the goings-on related after, on the planet Tormance. The author would have us imagine two new colors: Jale and ulfire. New body parts grow. At death, corpses grin hideously, and this is called the Mask of the Crystalman. There's some sort of strange Jungian theme lurking at the ending. But this was written before Jung did most of his work, no?I've never read anything else quite like it. It's one of those odd fantasy novels that remain sui generis. It's as far from Tolkien as Cabell is from C.S. Lewis . . . perhaps much farther. Still, it is fantasy, and it should be read by all who love myth for its own sake, for the thrill down the back of the spine.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is the first book in a planned trilogy about Valentine Roncalli, shoe designer extraordinaire. This novel has all the Trigiani trademarks: wonderful writing about food, family, romance, and women's struggle to balance boyfriends and career. And where would we be without a trip to Italy? This story left me hungry for more...
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Breezy book about the various chemicals and processes involved in memory, recognizing others’ facial expressions, feeling fear, etc. Insists that there are profound differences between men and women not because we’re from different planets but because we’re on different drugs (testosterone and estrogen/oxytocin). Meh.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Engaging, fun inquiry into the brain and how it works. I learned some things about how I think and why. Johnson personalizes what he talks about, and I found that it added to my enjoyment to hear how he applied what he learned to his own life. Not stringently scientific, but worth a read.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Johnson is a very engaging writer, with a keen turn of phrase and an ability to connect complex theory with everyday experience (the story of the windblown window is particularly affecting). Here he covers many of the current investigations into neuroscience with considerable learning and appealing humour. But at the end - and I lost momentum about 3/4 of the way through - I was left feeling this is a collection of really interesting magazine articles, rather than an integrated whole. Good journalism, but not quite best in class.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I found this book to be an uphill slog after the first chapter. Although there were moments of interesting tidbits when he would introduce a new topic (I particulary was interested in his description of "mind-reading", knowing what someone is feeling by watching their facial expressions and how autistic people are deficient in this ability), but for the most part the author seemed overly preoccupied with explaining to the reader what the results were of the tests he took. As in something to the effect of, "the results showed that my brain processes the blah blah blah in the xy quadrant..." At one point after an fMRI scan where the machine took pictures of him reading someone else's work and then of him reading his own writing, the latter of which showed up as lit up areas in the brain far more than the former, the researcher (laughingly) said when asked how she would describe the results "And this one- I'd say this one was someone reading his favorite author". In response, the author chuckled "It was a vanity project from the beginning." I feel that statement nailed the whole book, not just that experiment. I did push on through the book as I am interested in learning as much as I can about neuroscience, and the technology he explored is good to know about, but it was really tedious reading him going on so much about himself. In addition, it seemed that after introducing a subject in a fairly direct, understandable manner, that he would then expand on it unnecessarily, using a multitude of everyday examples that really beat the horse dead. I found myself saying "I get it already, get on with it" many times. The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge was a far more interesting book, which I would highly recommend over this book.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5In a nutshell, this is Johnson’s story about his foray into locating the secrets of the/his human brain (at least per available technology circa 2003) with the ultimate goals of both offering his audience a basic understanding of the chemical nature of mental activity and reframing Freudian thought in the context of a more sophisticated understanding of these processes (positioning the Freudian model as essentially empirical and necessarily metaphorical as a distant precursor to certain technologies at our disposal today).As horrible as this description might sound, Johnson is typically an engaging writer, so I went for it. I was not disappointed. His narrative follows a series of research “discoveries” such as the “Attention Trainer” neurofeedback helmut, utilized to analyze and possibly treat the omnipresent ADD syndrome (I can’t help but think of Ferris Bueller’s Principal cycling through the suburbs) and the two-foot diameter fMRI tube that enables brain slice imaging to locate neural hot spots as they relate to different mental tasks (sounds most uncomfortable). Discussions of the role of the amygdala and brain chemicals such as oxytocin are articulated through a personalized lens (instilling his fear instinct as 9/11 unfolded blocks away and enabling his wife’s “tending instinct” towards their baby, respectively). It’s all quite interesting and well worth the 30 cent late fee.He also mentions the Simon Baron-Cohen Autism Quotient Test. If you personally sense a certain social retardation – regardless of phone number memorization skills – I would warn you to refrain from Googling this one.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Not as good as Emergence (Steven Johnson's other book). I'd like to take the 'eyes = mind reading' test that is described in this book. I'm going through a 'brain' phase. This book, "the Man who mistook his wife for a hat", "Mind Hacks", and "On Intelligence"
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Johnson sheds some light in the subject of the way our mind works. He covers a lot of subjects and go in a personal journey to meet the most proeminent experts in the field. The result is a book that never stop telling you something amazing or new. And, of course, it is kind of a mythbuster. Some people will be sad to know that somethings that they thought was magic is just biochemistry. Beatiful and smart.