Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life by Steven Johnson
stevenberlinjohnson.com
PD Smith
(The Guardian, Saturday 15 May 2004 Article), explores the fascinating frontiers of neuroscience in Steven Johnson's Mind Wide.
The final frontier lies not in outer space but inside your skull. Understanding the matter of the mind preoccupies
today's most brilliant brains, some of whom have concluded that the secret of its subtle complexity may forever elude our own grey cells.
Ironically, self–understanding may be impossible for the smartest animal on the planet. Perhaps wisely then, Steven Johnson steers clear
of the ultimate questions about consciousness. Instead he focuses on the practical advances being made by neuroscientists in mapping the
"brain's inner geography" and tries to discover what neuroscience can tell him about his own mental landscape. To do this Johnson sets himself
the novel task of tracking down "as many charts, real–time displays and three–dimensional–models of my mental life as
I could find".
With the help of a new neurofeedback device called Attention Trainer, he learns how to control his own brainwaves. Developed as a non–chemical
alternative to Ritalin, it teaches children with Attention Deficit Disorder to train their brains to pay attention. "It feels like telepathy,"
says Johnson, as he makes a computer–generated cyclist pedal furiously using just mental muscle. Later a neuropsychologist teaches him how to
use brainwaves to improve his "brain self-regulation". The mental focus of a Tiger Woods or the meditative peace of mind of a Buddhist monk
are all down to using the right brainwaves.
His journey concludes inside a state–of–the–art fMRI scanner. Functional magnetic resonance imaging allows scientists to study brains in action,
and Johnson wants to see what his looks like "as it comes up with a new idea". Lying in the scanner, he reads a sentence from a draft of Mind Wide
Open and begins formulating his next chapter. Later, looking through the "mesmerising" scans of his brain, it strikes him as the "ultimate exercise
in postmodern hall–of–mirrors self–reflection: you, dear reader, are reading a book describing a brain reading the book you're reading being read
by a $2m magnet." Rather disappointingly, all the scans reveal is that he has a "well–orchestrated brain". But, according to Johnson, "knowing
something about the brain's mechanics – and particularly your brain's mechanics – widens your own self–awareness as powerfully as any therapy
or meditation or drug".
Neuroscientists now view the brain as an orchestra made up of "dozens of players". Forget the idea of the brain as a unitary supercomputer
and think instead of an assemblage of different modules and chemicals (or "molecules of emotion"), each specialised for a different task.
They are not always easy bedfellows. Freud correctly viewed the psyche as a battleground of warring forces, although, according to Johnson,
he underestimated the degree to which the self is a "mêlée of competing drives". Freud was also right to emphasise the role of unconscious urges.
Emotions are processed in a part of the brain called the amygdala. From "intuiting a spouse's bad mood from a subtle look in her eye" to
controlling phobic reactions, "your amygdala directs your appraisal of the world", says Johnson. And when we have an irrational fear, the
amygdala is in conflict with the rational neocortex, just as in Freud's notion of a clash between our civilised superego and our primal id.
But Freud might have been wrong about one thing. Neuroscience suggests that the talking cure can actually make some traumatic experiences worse:
"reliving events only makes them stronger".
Johnson offers a refreshingly personal take on an endlessly fascinating subject. His title comes from Keats's line "open wide the mind's cage–door".
But it was Keats (and not Yeats, as Johnson says in an unfortunate slip) who feared that science wanted to "unweave a rainbow" and strip the world
of its wonder. Keats would perhaps have been horrified by attempts to lay bare the mysteries of the mind. But for Johnson, understanding the brain
makes it more "magical", not less. Writers and philosophers once "led the way in widening our understanding of the brain's faculties", but now, he
argues, neuroscience has given us a "new grammar for understanding our minds". Mind Wide Open brings that grammar vividly alive.
Neuroscience Online Website
