Overview

An all-star lineup of brain scientists reveal what the public needs to know States of Mind is a wonderfully accessible introduction to the most important recent findings about how our health, behavior, feelings, and identities are influenced by what goes on inside our brains. The book covers the sources of depression and how it can be treated; the effects of stress on our brains and general health; how memory works and the phenomenon of false memory; why we dream and the role dreams play in our lives; how genes and life experience combine to shape our personalities and temperaments; and more. Kay Redfield Jamison, bestselling author of An Unquiet Mind, on depression. J. Allan Hobson, author of the groundbreaking The Dreaming Brain, on dreams. Steven Hyman, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, on genes and environment. Jerome Kagan, director of Harvard's Mind-Brain Behavior Initiative, on temperament. Eric Kandel, director of Columbia's Center for Neurobiology and Behavior, on memory. Joseph LeDoux, author of the acclaimed The Emotional Brain, on emotions. Bruce McEwen, director of the Neuroendocrinology Laboratory at Rockefeller University, on stress. Esther Sternberg, head of Immunology and Behavior at the Naitonal Institute of Mental Health, on the brain and disease. From the Smithsonian Associates/Dana Alliance for the Brain Initiatives Series

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From Publishers Weekly Eight crisply written reports about groundbreaking advances in brain research form this accessible tome based on a lecture series. Joseph LeDoux, NYU brain scientist, describes his exciting investigations into the human brain's fear system for detecting and responding to danger. The workings of this quick-response system, which bypasses the higher, thinking parts of the brain, provide a neurological basis for Freud's theory of the unconscious, he asserts. At the opposite pole, Harvard psychiatry professor J. Allan Hobson argues that while dreams consolidate memories and learning, their strange images are merely incidental physiological by-products, rather than symbols fraught with emotional meaning. Noting the prevalence of manic-depressive illness and depression among renowned artists, writers and composers, Johns Hopkins psychiatry professor Kay Redfield Jamison suggests that the genes predisposing an individual to these disorders might also confer a proclivity for creativity. Attempts to get rid of or to mute these genes pose a dilemma for society, she declares, since they may constitute one source of artistic genius. Bruce McEwen of Rockefeller University reports that chronic stress not only exacerbates a host of illnesses but also damages the hippocampus, a brain structure involved with memory, and Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan explains why he believes our individual brain chemistries at birth predispose us to be outgoing or shy, bold or fearful. Based on a 1997 lecture series co-sponsored by Smithsonian Associates and the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, an organization of U.S. brain researchers, the volume is enhanced by chapter headnotes and illustrations ranging from a medieval medical woodcut to modern brain scans. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly Eight crisply written reports about groundbreaking advances in brain research form this accessible tome based on a lecture series. Joseph LeDoux, NYU brain scientist, describes his exciting investigations into the human brain's fear system for detecting and responding to danger. The workings of this quick-response system, which bypasses the higher, thinking parts of the brain, provide a neurological basis for Freud's theory of the unconscious, he asserts. At the opposite pole, Harvard psychiatry professor J. Allan Hobson argues that while dreams consolidate memories and learning, their strange images are merely incidental physiological by-products, rather than symbols fraught with emotional meaning. Noting the prevalence of manic-depressive illness and depression among renowned artists, writers and composers, Johns Hopkins psychiatry professor Kay Redfield Jamison suggests that the genes predisposing an individual to these disorders might also confer a proclivity for creativity. Attempts to get rid of or to mute these genes pose a dilemma for society, she declares, since they may constitute one source of artistic genius. Bruce McEwen of Rockefeller University reports that chronic stress not only exacerbates a host of illnesses but also damages the hippocampus, a brain structure involved with memory, and Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan explains why he believes our individual brain chemistries at birth predispose us to be outgoing or shy, bold or fearful. Based on a 1997 lecture series co-sponsored by Smithsonian Associates and the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, an organization of U.S. brain researchers, the volume is enhanced by chapter headnotes and illustrations ranging from a medieval medical woodcut to modern brain scans. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This book compiles public lectures by eight neuroscientists in a series sponsored by the Smithsonian Associates and the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, and edited by a former managing editor for Time-Life Books. Each lecture serves as a primer for the general reader. However, the coverage is a little skewed. While the experts here cut a wide swath in brain research - including development, learning, emotions, mental illness, addiction, and dreaming - nearly all emphasize the rote of stress, fear, anxiety, depression, and kindred downers as essential in building our brains. To be sure, without hardwiring of fear and our responses to it, we would lack the wherewithal to take arms against a sea of troubles. All the same, from Jerome Kagan's pioneering studies of shyness to J. Allan Hobson's comment that most dreams are unpleasant, one can't help but feel there must be more to the life of the mind. That said, much here is of interest. Kay Redfield Jamison provides a fascinating lecture on depression and manic-depression in relation to creativity; her examples include Byron, Woolf, and Hemingway. Such conditions have genetic components, and she offers evidence that the expansive thinking associated with elevated mood states may lead to making novel connections and combinations of ideas. Elsewhere, in pieces contributed by Bruce McEwen (stress and the brain), Esther Steinberg (emotions and diseases), and Joseph LeDoux (the power of emotions), contributors discuss how emotions can be conditioned and affect unconscious memory, along with the recurrent theme that our nervous systems are intimately connected to the immune and endocrine systems. Potentially, hormones can upset the balance of the immune system and contribute to hypertension, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and other chronic ills. But Steven Hyman, among others, reminds us that the brain is also extraordinarily plastic - capable of unlearning bad habits, as well as learning new tricks. Good as far as it goes. But it would be nice to also have a series of lectures that accentuates the positive. (Kirkus Reviews)

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Roberta Conlan is a regular contributor to the publications of the National Academy of Sciences.

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