Mind Wide Open
Categories: Science , Staff Picks , Nonfiction
It’s too bad Steven Johnson’s name is so generic. I just read his 2004 Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life from cover to cover before realizing that he is the same author who wrote two other recent favorites of mine.
You can look back at my entry on The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, which was a marvelous work of science history and big-picture thought. (Do you remember that old TV series, Connections, and how it tied together wide-ranging theories to explain the sweep of history? You’ll love The Ghost Map.)
The other book I didn’t post about, but I recommend it, too—in Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, Johnson argues persuasively that videogames and other much-maligned forms of popular culture are far more cognitively challenging than we credit.
In Mind Wide Open, he reviews the science of how our brains work.
You know this is a topic I find interesting anyway, but Mind Wide Open is distinguished by the elegant simplicity and clarity with which Johnson writes. At this point, I’d read anything he wrote.
The intriguing subjects Johnson covers include how we automatically use clues, especially in the eyes and face, to understand the emotions and intentions of others; phobias (again, how parts of our brains efficiently process clues to danger independently of—and often in defiance of—conscious thought); how the brain coordinates the different “modules” through which it processes our understanding our environment; and how our uses of chemistry (inborn, medical, and recreational) affect the brain’s work
He wraps up with an experiment with modern brain scanning technology in which he attempts to “see” a creative moment, the moment in which he composes a sentence for this book. And he argues that this new understanding of how the brain works doesn’t reduce its miraculous nature at all.
A splendid work of popular science covering a field that is bursting with exciting developments. Go and read it—and think about what a process that is!
