Scientific American is one of those magazines or journals that just gets it right every time, with the right balance of science and writing that informs, entertains its select audience, and leaves one wanting more.

This book is no exception, filling a niche, even for those of us who thought we had gleaned every article they published in our field.

Bloom has chosen well.  The Brain space in recent years has literally expanded by exploding, and despite psychiatry lagging behind, brain science is offering new paradigms and models and places for even industry to go and to grow.

It's not just the insights of the genome project, its everything to do with the brain in one book, with a who's who representative of brain genius in the world in the past years.

So even though some of the articles are seriously outdated, its like keeping a classic mustang in the garage, to be taken out and looked at and read often.

The list of contributory articles harvested from prior issues is remarkable:

Kraft, George, Solms, Zimmer, Damasio and Kandel address Mind issues.  Logothetis, Bower and Parsons, Hickok et al, Andrich and Epplen, Gage, Hyman, Nestler and Malenka, Javitt and Coyle, and Dobbs talk of Matter in counterpoint, and the third section draws on the wisdom of Hallon, Thase, Markowitz, Kurzweil, Nicolelis and Chapin, Neumann and Birbaumer, Boahen and finally Hall to discuss what was then tomorrow's brain space.

Kraft has a look at the phenomenon of how creativity is unleashed by disarming the controlling effect of executive functions.  George ponders what the likely effects of magnetic field induction around the cortex might be, as well as more invasive stimulation of other areas, such as the Area 25 stimulation that affects depression, or of the tenth cranial nerve in other attempts to change the electric conductivity of various sections or nerves.  Mark Solms has become ubiquitous in reviving and re-exploring the metaphors that Freud created, and of both he and Freud's devotion to understanding psychoanalysis in brain terms, not always a popular topic in the way it is received, but necessary, see other reviews such as that of Kandel's Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, And The New Biology Of Mind  (Metapsychology 10:5) and also a popular topic for compendiums such as Mauro Mancia collection Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience (Metapsychology 11:19)

Solms thus sets out to show that Freudian psychoanalytic theory was not all cigar smoke and mirrors, but is set to return as neuroscience scales up its capacity to demonstrate that the core of Freudian ideas has a solid base to it, derived as it was from Freud's neuroscience.

Seeking after what might constitute the conscious awareness of the existence of our internal self, Zimmer looks at both healthy brains as well as the erosion of the self that occurs for instance with dementia.  Damasio reviews some of his own work, and ideas of the correctness of the terms Mind and Brain, and the role of emotions and how they and other details are represented in the brain, as it re-creates the outside world from chemical traces and creates a sense of conscious, emotional self.  Kandel's work is taken from his own compendium, (referred to above).  He refers to the new science of mind, and agrees with Damasio, that mind is brain.  I am often fascinated when I see for instance Russ Barkley writings entirely in keeping with say, Gualtieri, or here with Damasio and Kandel, but with little reference to each other. For Kandel, mind is brain, and mental states are brain states, but of course we still see comments in other work where experts prefer to separate functional and organic states as if they were not one and the same sourced phenomena, creating confusion.

Logothetis embarks on the same problem, that of consciousness, but now we are focused on the anomalies of visual perception and the meaning the brain can bring to these observations that often yield curious cognitions, such as Eschel's Gyri.  The dark continent of the brain is the huge structure at the base, the cerebellum, and in 2003 two authors, Bower and Parsons entertained us with their musings on the role of this massive structure in learning, skills acquisition, the filtering and dampening role in autism and schizophrenia, and other capacities it was never thought to have, coming out in the literature.  We can live with out such an organ, but interestingly we don't coordinate as well as we think we could, without it.  Hickok, Bellugi and Klima have studied deaf sign language practitioners, only to discover that signing is a language all of its own, as we believed, with the usual culprits in the brain underpinning its understanding and production, and with regional variations bedeviling travelers and underpinning the reality of Babel.  Despite being a visual-spatial language, it is more similar to spoken language than we thought.

Andrich and Epplen go hunting for Huntington's genes and examine how mutation may ruin neurons in all such conditions.  In the opposite camp is Gage, looking at how brain might repair, in 2003 he was well up on what today's researchers such as Gould are doing, and the insights of others in his field and in the different contributing mechanisms in brain plasticity.  Steve Hyman, the previous NIMH boss, looks at psychiatric illness and the process of diagnosis in 2003, and the challenge of throwing darts in the dark in the DSM-IV way, with the lack of objective tests meaning we can easily fail to observe mental illness, or mistake one for the other.  Nestler and Malenka look at addicted brains, and the fascinating dopamine-sated interplay between the nucleus accumbens, the ventral tegmental area, glutamate GABA and the drug. The graphics here are brilliant, and one reaches for the scanner….

Dobbs tries to find the answers which might come when one tries to switch off depression, meaning Helen Mayberg's work on Area 25 with a stimulator may have unprecedented value when compared to medication effects for instance, balancing outcome with intrusiveness of treatment.  This flows into the work of Hollon, Thase and Markowitz, and from these names you will have guessed that this is about the treatment efficacy of yet another, least invasive intervention, psychotherapy. 

Another intervention is much more scary, and examined elsewhere as well (see the review of Toward Replacement Parts for the Brain: Implantable Biomimetic Electronics as Neural Prostheses in Metapsychology 11:6)

Is the idea of the cyborg, the merging of human and machine, examined here by Kurzweil, envisaging emotionless and picture perfect memory playback.  Nicolelis and Chapin show how their monkey could operate a mechanical arm with its mind, in the room, and simultaneously 600miles north, in another laboratory.  As noted in the above URL, the idea of thinking aloud, or having your thoughts monitored, is scary stuff, but Neumann and Birbaumer take a close look at that prospect.  If that is possible, why not electrical impulses from microchips that respond to light for those who cannot do that, namely the blind? Boahen thinks it can happen.  And if a pill can be good for sick people, is there a pill that can enhance the normal mind to not be so usual, that is, so prone to error.

For that is our brain, tempered by evolution, now perhaps out of date and needing bolstering, the brain has given risen to so many of these articles, most from 2003 or so, presaging the future while contemplating the then, and now in one book for all to buy: all should buy, these are classic works.  They are seriously outdated, but that is their charm, and for those who have not followed this space, this is an absolute necessity for the bookshelf, given the clarity of writing and the intensity of the news and review articles.

For those who teach Neuroscience and for those who they teach, this is a necessary purchase.  I hope there are more to come.

© 2007 Roy Sugarman

Roy Sugarman PhD, Director of Clinical and Neuropsychological Services, Brain Resource Company, Ultimo, Australia

Categories: General