The Oasis Within
The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being by Daniel J. Siegel. W. W. Nor ton, 2007 ($26.95)
For thousands of years, spiritual traditions around the world have emphasized the importance of living “mindfully”—using prayer and meditation techniques to free ourselves from daily distractions, enabling us to look inside ourselves, to become sensitive to what is happening around us and to live compassionately. Anecdotal evidence has suggested that these practices have a positive influence on people’s emotional lives and physical health, but science has only recently begun to investigate their effects. The impact of mindfulness on the brain is, for the most part, still a mystery.
Enter Daniel J. Siegel, a psychiatrist and co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. Siegel has both a meticulous understanding of the roles of different parts of the brain and an intimate relationship with mindfulness. He brings these strengths together in The Mindful Brain to come up with insightful proposals, bolstered by preliminary research data, for how mindful awareness might engage parts of the brain in novel ways and lead to permanent neurological changes. His speculations are interesting in and of themselves, and they also may provide neuroscientists with ideas for experiments that could test the effects of mindfulness on the brain.
Throughout the book, Siegel also shares his own deeply personal experiences with mindfulness techniques, such as the challenges he faced the first time he attempted to meditate. To those who are unfamiliar with such experiences, his detailed descriptions might seem overly sentimental and tedious, but those who have similar stories are likely to welcome his wisdom. Toward the end, Siegel—who at times seems to be uncertain about who his audience is—discusses the ways in which mindful awareness can inform education, clinical practice and psychotherapy.
As both a scientist and an avid promoter of mindfulness, Siegel walks a fine line of credibility. But he is to be commended for repeatedly pointing out that his ideas about the mindful brain are just that—ideas. Although he is confident that mindfulness effects beneficial neurological change, he also acknowledges that it could be a long time before science agrees, if indeed it ever does. Nevertheless, in bringing together what we know and have yet to learn about this fascinating subject, Siegel offers an exciting glimpse into an uncharted territory of neuroscience. —Melinda Wenner
Why We Believe
Six Impossible Things before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief by Lewis Wolper t. W. W. Nor ton, 2007 ($25.95)
Humans have been called the believing animal. Obsessed with fi nding explanations, we fashion viewpoints about the world and then cling to them tenaciously, even if they are self-contradictory and incoherent.
In Six Impossible Things before Breakfast, biologist Lewis Wolpert of University College London tries to get to the bottom of why we are such ardent believers, how we form our notions, why they are so often wrong and how we sometimes get them right. (The title comes from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, in which the White Queen explains to Alice that believing in impossible things merely requires practice.)
Wolpert argues that, unlike animals, humans have “causal beliefs,” which address the mechanisms by which a cause leads to an effect. A chimp can learn that wind shakes fruit out of the trees, but, according to Wolpert, only a human will figure out he can shake the branches himself when he is hungry.
So how did we get this way? Wolpert thinks our believing brains arose because of tool use. He argues that people had to understand basic mechanical principles to make and use even simple implements efficiently. Good tool users were more likely to survive than incompetent ones were, resulting in the evolution of humans who could think in terms of cause, mechanism and effect.
Wolpert makes an interesting argument, but he is not completely convincing. Are human ideas about the world really of a different kind than those of other animals, or are we just smarter and better at reasoning things out? Wolpert himself admits that many researchers do not agree with the distinction he draws. Likewise, his argument for tool use as the driving factor seems plausible but not conclusive.
The book also suffers because the author meanders across a number of topics—faulty reasoning, false beliefs, the paranormal, religion and rationalism—which, though interesting, do not cohere into a unified argument.
Although readers will probably wish that Wolpert had managed to better discipline his material, they will find much to enjoy in his fascinating explanations of human and animal reasoning. —Kurt Kleine
Senior Moments
Carved in Sand: When Attention Fails and Memory Fades in Midlife by Cathryn Jakobson Ramin. HarperCollins, 2007 ($24.95)
We’ve all had the experience: the name we can’t recall, the face we can’t place, the lost keys that once lived in the kitchen drawer. Everyone forgets things. But to Cathryn Jakobson Ramin, a seasoned science journalist, these ordinary incidents became unacceptably common shortly after she “crossed the threshold to middle age,” in her mid-40s.
“There was no way around it,” she writes. “Something was happening to my mind.” She felt foggy and forgetful, losing track of dates, names, faces and directions—and she soon felt alone, alarmed and desperate.
Carved in Sand chronicles the quest she embarked on to understand why her memory was fading. Blending personal anecdotes with research literature, Jakobson Ramin delves into such areas as stress, insomnia, diet, menopause, anxiety, depression, substance abuse, attention-defi cit disorder and Alzheimer’s disease. She also explores why some people remain sharp well into their 90s.
As part of her quest, she subjects herself to a battery of tests, drugs, procedures and studies. She has ECG, MRI and PET scans and undergoes hearing and visual tests. She tries meditating, sleeping, staying awake and exercising. She solves crossword puzzles and plays computer games. She takes antidepressants, stimulants, memory enhancers, hormones and thyroid drugs. She eats more (or less) protein, carbohydrates, fruits, vegetables, meat and fish. She even memorizes poems and goes salsa dancing— activities that reportedly sharpen memory. In short, she tries every strategy that she can think of and that sufferers or professionals recommend.
The result: “People ask me all the time if I’m ‘better,’ and honestly, I can say that I am.” Among other things, she learns that a mild traumatic brain injury she suffered early in life (the result of getting whacked on the forehead accidentally by a broom) increased her vulnerability to memory trouble, and she also discovers a thyroid defi ciency. Yet, for the most part, she is normal and benefi ts from a variety of memory-enhancing treatments.
Ultimately, Jakobson Ramin’s insightful and well-researched journey through memoryland offers some valuable lessons. For one, forgetfulness is commonplace and need not impair one’s life. Moreover, there is no single cause or treatment for forgetfulness, which can arise from a wide variety of biological and psychological causes, ranging from trauma or hormonal imbalances to anxiety or depression. But the good news is that many treatments work. And in her case, “the fog has lifted.” —Richard Lipkin
Scientific Self-Discovery
Head Case: How I Almost Lost My Mind Trying to Understand My Brain by Dennis Cass. HarperCollins, 2007 ($24.95)
During a frightful case of writer’s block, Dennis Cass had a sudden insight. A simple, clear thought entered his mind: How can you expect to live by your wits if you have no idea how your wits work? Delighted with this question, Cass, a journalist who specializes in writing about popular culture, politics and food (and who avoided any topic approaching science), decided to learn as much as he could about his brain.
In Head Case, Cass describes his fumbling attempts to visit with scientists, wiggle his way into research studies, perform mind-numbing experiments and play amateur neuroscientist in his office, which he begins to call his lab. Part of the author’s charm is that he does not pretend to be an expert. This book is meant to entertain. But as the story unfolds, Cass begins to grapple with questions that lie at the heart not only of science but also of humanity itself.
Cass had never imagined that learning about the brain might be frustratingly difficult or that it could eventually undermine his view of the world and himself. As he begins to understand the science of fear, attention, stress, addiction and consciousness, he relates his revelations to his own experiences and troubled past. With compassion and humor, Cass examines his strained relationship with his stepfather, whose selfish and grandiose ideas sent his family into financial and emotional hardship. He finds solace in the controversial views of evolutionary psychology, realizing at last that everyone shares the same flawed “prehistoric brain” and that his stepfather’s lifelong substance abuse problems were the result of mental illness rather than a weak moral character.
Although Cass has come far in understanding how his wits work, he errs on the side of reductionism by explaining almost all the brain’s processes as cascades of biochemical reactions triggered by outside stimuli. In doing so, he largely ignores the nuanced ways in which genes and biology interact with experience to influence brain function. By presenting this simplified picture, however, Cass leaves room to show something even more important: the human side of science.
Head Case is a wonderfully entertaining account of Cass’s venture into neuroscience, revealing that we all can learn about our brain as long as we put our mind to it.—Thania Benios
The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being by Daniel J. Siegel. W. W. Nor ton, 2007 ($26.95)
For thousands of years, spiritual traditions around the world have emphasized the importance of living “mindfully”—using prayer and meditation techniques to free ourselves from daily distractions, enabling us to look inside ourselves, to become sensitive to what is happening around us and to live compassionately. Anecdotal evidence has suggested that these practices have a positive influence on people’s emotional lives and physical health, but science has only recently begun to investigate their effects. The impact of mindfulness on the brain is, for the most part, still a mystery.
Enter Daniel J. Siegel, a psychiatrist and co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. Siegel has both a meticulous understanding of the roles of different parts of the brain and an intimate relationship with mindfulness. He brings these strengths together in The Mindful Brain to come up with insightful proposals, bolstered by preliminary research data, for how mindful awareness might engage parts of the brain in novel ways and lead to permanent neurological changes. His speculations are interesting in and of themselves, and they also may provide neuroscientists with ideas for experiments that could test the effects of mindfulness on the brain.
Throughout the book, Siegel also shares his own deeply personal experiences with mindfulness techniques, such as the challenges he faced the first time he attempted to meditate. To those who are unfamiliar with such experiences, his detailed descriptions might seem overly sentimental and tedious, but those who have similar stories are likely to welcome his wisdom. Toward the end, Siegel—who at times seems to be uncertain about who his audience is—discusses the ways in which mindful awareness can inform education, clinical practice and psychotherapy.
As both a scientist and an avid promoter of mindfulness, Siegel walks a fine line of credibility. But he is to be commended for repeatedly pointing out that his ideas about the mindful brain are just that—ideas. Although he is confident that mindfulness effects beneficial neurological change, he also acknowledges that it could be a long time before science agrees, if indeed it ever does. Nevertheless, in bringing together what we know and have yet to learn about this fascinating subject, Siegel offers an exciting glimpse into an uncharted territory of neuroscience. —Melinda Wenner
Why We Believe
Six Impossible Things before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief by Lewis Wolper t. W. W. Nor ton, 2007 ($25.95)
Humans have been called the believing animal. Obsessed with fi nding explanations, we fashion viewpoints about the world and then cling to them tenaciously, even if they are self-contradictory and incoherent.
In Six Impossible Things before Breakfast, biologist Lewis Wolpert of University College London tries to get to the bottom of why we are such ardent believers, how we form our notions, why they are so often wrong and how we sometimes get them right. (The title comes from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, in which the White Queen explains to Alice that believing in impossible things merely requires practice.)
Wolpert argues that, unlike animals, humans have “causal beliefs,” which address the mechanisms by which a cause leads to an effect. A chimp can learn that wind shakes fruit out of the trees, but, according to Wolpert, only a human will figure out he can shake the branches himself when he is hungry.
So how did we get this way? Wolpert thinks our believing brains arose because of tool use. He argues that people had to understand basic mechanical principles to make and use even simple implements efficiently. Good tool users were more likely to survive than incompetent ones were, resulting in the evolution of humans who could think in terms of cause, mechanism and effect.
Wolpert makes an interesting argument, but he is not completely convincing. Are human ideas about the world really of a different kind than those of other animals, or are we just smarter and better at reasoning things out? Wolpert himself admits that many researchers do not agree with the distinction he draws. Likewise, his argument for tool use as the driving factor seems plausible but not conclusive.
The book also suffers because the author meanders across a number of topics—faulty reasoning, false beliefs, the paranormal, religion and rationalism—which, though interesting, do not cohere into a unified argument.
Although readers will probably wish that Wolpert had managed to better discipline his material, they will find much to enjoy in his fascinating explanations of human and animal reasoning. —Kurt Kleine
Senior Moments
Carved in Sand: When Attention Fails and Memory Fades in Midlife by Cathryn Jakobson Ramin. HarperCollins, 2007 ($24.95)
We’ve all had the experience: the name we can’t recall, the face we can’t place, the lost keys that once lived in the kitchen drawer. Everyone forgets things. But to Cathryn Jakobson Ramin, a seasoned science journalist, these ordinary incidents became unacceptably common shortly after she “crossed the threshold to middle age,” in her mid-40s.
“There was no way around it,” she writes. “Something was happening to my mind.” She felt foggy and forgetful, losing track of dates, names, faces and directions—and she soon felt alone, alarmed and desperate.
Carved in Sand chronicles the quest she embarked on to understand why her memory was fading. Blending personal anecdotes with research literature, Jakobson Ramin delves into such areas as stress, insomnia, diet, menopause, anxiety, depression, substance abuse, attention-defi cit disorder and Alzheimer’s disease. She also explores why some people remain sharp well into their 90s.
As part of her quest, she subjects herself to a battery of tests, drugs, procedures and studies. She has ECG, MRI and PET scans and undergoes hearing and visual tests. She tries meditating, sleeping, staying awake and exercising. She solves crossword puzzles and plays computer games. She takes antidepressants, stimulants, memory enhancers, hormones and thyroid drugs. She eats more (or less) protein, carbohydrates, fruits, vegetables, meat and fish. She even memorizes poems and goes salsa dancing— activities that reportedly sharpen memory. In short, she tries every strategy that she can think of and that sufferers or professionals recommend.
The result: “People ask me all the time if I’m ‘better,’ and honestly, I can say that I am.” Among other things, she learns that a mild traumatic brain injury she suffered early in life (the result of getting whacked on the forehead accidentally by a broom) increased her vulnerability to memory trouble, and she also discovers a thyroid defi ciency. Yet, for the most part, she is normal and benefi ts from a variety of memory-enhancing treatments.
Ultimately, Jakobson Ramin’s insightful and well-researched journey through memoryland offers some valuable lessons. For one, forgetfulness is commonplace and need not impair one’s life. Moreover, there is no single cause or treatment for forgetfulness, which can arise from a wide variety of biological and psychological causes, ranging from trauma or hormonal imbalances to anxiety or depression. But the good news is that many treatments work. And in her case, “the fog has lifted.” —Richard Lipkin
Scientific Self-Discovery
Head Case: How I Almost Lost My Mind Trying to Understand My Brain by Dennis Cass. HarperCollins, 2007 ($24.95)
During a frightful case of writer’s block, Dennis Cass had a sudden insight. A simple, clear thought entered his mind: How can you expect to live by your wits if you have no idea how your wits work? Delighted with this question, Cass, a journalist who specializes in writing about popular culture, politics and food (and who avoided any topic approaching science), decided to learn as much as he could about his brain.
In Head Case, Cass describes his fumbling attempts to visit with scientists, wiggle his way into research studies, perform mind-numbing experiments and play amateur neuroscientist in his office, which he begins to call his lab. Part of the author’s charm is that he does not pretend to be an expert. This book is meant to entertain. But as the story unfolds, Cass begins to grapple with questions that lie at the heart not only of science but also of humanity itself.
Cass had never imagined that learning about the brain might be frustratingly difficult or that it could eventually undermine his view of the world and himself. As he begins to understand the science of fear, attention, stress, addiction and consciousness, he relates his revelations to his own experiences and troubled past. With compassion and humor, Cass examines his strained relationship with his stepfather, whose selfish and grandiose ideas sent his family into financial and emotional hardship. He finds solace in the controversial views of evolutionary psychology, realizing at last that everyone shares the same flawed “prehistoric brain” and that his stepfather’s lifelong substance abuse problems were the result of mental illness rather than a weak moral character.
Although Cass has come far in understanding how his wits work, he errs on the side of reductionism by explaining almost all the brain’s processes as cascades of biochemical reactions triggered by outside stimuli. In doing so, he largely ignores the nuanced ways in which genes and biology interact with experience to influence brain function. By presenting this simplified picture, however, Cass leaves room to show something even more important: the human side of science.
Head Case is a wonderfully entertaining account of Cass’s venture into neuroscience, revealing that we all can learn about our brain as long as we put our mind to it.—Thania Benios
