Stuff
Adobe DRM
Product Details
Scribner, January 2004
eBook, 288 pages
ISBN-10: 0743258797
ISBN-13: 9780743258791
Description
In this nationally bestselling, compulsively readable account of what makes brain science a vital component of people's quest to know themselves, acclaimed science writer Steven Johnson subjects his own brain to a battery of tests to find out what's really going on inside. He asks:
- How do we "read" other people?
- What is the neurochemistry behind love and sex?
- What does it mean that the brain is teeming with powerful chemicals closely related to recreational drugs?
- Why does music move us to tears?
- Where do breakthrough ideas come from?
Johnson answers these and many more questions arising from the events of our everyday lives. You do not have to be a neuroscientist to wonder, for example, why do you smile? And why do you sometimes smile inappropriately, even if you don't want to? How do others read your inappropriate smile? How does such interplay occur neurochemically, and what, if anything, can you do about it?
Fascinating and rewarding, Mind Wide Open speaks to brain buffs, self-obsessed neurotics, barstool psychologists, mystified parents, grumpy spouses, exasperated managers, and anyone who enjoys speculating and gossiping about the motivations and behaviors of other human beings. Steven Johnson shows us the transformative power of understanding brain science and offers new modes of introspection and tools for better parenting, better relationships, and better living.
Read more:
Table of ContentsSteven Pinker
Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of The Blank Slate and How the Mind Works
Mind Wide Open is a lucid and engaging travelogue from the frontiers of human brain science. Steven Johnson has an eye for the most interesting new ideas in this exploding field, and he explains them with insight and gusto.
John Horgan
author of The Undiscovered Mind and Rational Mysticism
My brain was tickled, fascinated, moved, surprised, and above all entertained by Steven Johnson's delightful tour through modern neuroscience.
David Shenk
author of The Forgetting: Alzheimer's: Portrait of an Epidemic
What good is living in an age of discovery if only a handful of people understand what's being discovered? With this book, Steven Johnson builds an extraordinary bridge between today's trailblazing neuroscientists and the rest of us. His mind-opening and potentially life-changing insight is that virtually anyone can now learn enough about brain chemistry and circuitry to personally explore -- and perhaps even reshape
-- the contours of his or her own mind.
Howard Rheingold
author of Smart Mobs
Johnson's first-person account of the experiential and neuroscientific aspects of daily life is lucid, illuminating, entertaining, and thought-provoking. You'll find yourself thinking about thinking -- while you are thinking
-- in a whole new way.
New York Times, February 6, 2009
...Steven Johnson (Nina Subin) Steven Johnson?s most recent book is ?The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America.? I?m in that transition ...
