Mapping the Mind: Revised and Updated Edition

by Rita Carter

Today a brain scan reveals our thoughts and moods as clearly as an X-ray reveals our bones. We can actually observe a person s brain registering a joke or experiencing a painful memory. In "Mapping the Mind, " award-winning journalist Rita Carter draws on the latest imaging technology and science to chart how human behavior and personality reflect the biological mechanisms behind thought and emotion. This acclaimed book, a complete visual guide to the coconut-sized, wrinkled gray mass we carry around inside our heads, has now been completely revised and updated throughout. Among many other topics, Carter explores obsessions and addictions, the differences between men s and women s brains, and memory. Comprehensively updated for this edition with the latest research, case studies, and contributions from distinguished scientists Addresses recent controversies over behavior prediction and prevention Includes new information on mirror neurons, unconscious cognition, and abnormalities in attention spans

Genres: Science, Psychology, Neuroscience, Nonfiction, Brain, Medicine, Health

224 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Rita Carter is a science writer, lecturer and broadcaster who specialises in the human brain: what it does, how it does it, and why.

Reviews

[Lewis Weinstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am taking a one week course at Oxford (July 2012) ... The Brain and the Senses. This is one of the books to read in advance.

It is a fascinating journey through what is currently known (2010) about the way the brain receives information from the outside world, and how this information is categorized, stored and retrieved. There are many examples at an individual level to illustrate some of the experimental results. The graphics are brilliant.

The book is necessarily stronger on the receipt of information than it is on storage and retrieval. I have many margin notes asking the same question about memory, especially about how a memory is retrieved or, as the book argues, re-constructed. How is it done? How? How? This is the stuff of future research and understanding.

I think much of what we think we know on this subject is still in the nature of conjecture, based on research utilizing brain scans to show what part of the brain lights up when various stimuli and tasks are presented. The research field is new and rapidly evolving. In one of my previous lives, as CEO of a biomedical research institute, I learned a little about the objectives and practice of cutting-edge scientific research: everything we think we know is only tentative ... everything will eventually be disproved or at least significantly enhanced by new and better research ... sometimes proving something is not true is as important as an experiment which confirms your hypothesis ... better to have a working hypothesis than no hypothesis at all.

Funny, but my friend who has studied and taught history for over 50 years tells me the same is true of what we think we know of historical events and patterns. What really happened? It depends very much on what facts you are looking at and how those facts were assembled. Are they really facts? It should be humbling to understand the degree of uncertainty about our past as well as our future. Let alone the present, whatever that is.

Two fascinating thoughts (chosen from many possibilities) are particularly related to my experience as a novelist and my current novel-in-progress ...

... the process of retrieving memory of things which have actually happened is essentially the same as the process of imagining the future (and thus evaluating prospects and plans) or the process of inventing people and events which never existed (i.e., creating fiction).

... the killing of Jews by the Nazis required a distinct transformation in the behavior of individuals performing such acts which allowed them to carry out horrific acts of violence without being assailed by normal feelings of fear and disgust ... afterward, they fell into a state that precluded normal reflection and self-awareness and thus prevented them from acknowledging the awfulness of what they had done (and would do again tomorrow).

In her concluding paragraph, Rita Carter says, "the findings outlined in this book give only the sketchiest impression of the landscape of the mind ... yet I believe (it) is already clear (that) there is no ghost in this place (the mind) ...what we are discovering is a biological system of awe-inspiring complexity ... the world within our heads is more marvelous than anything we can dream up."

These are the kinds of thoughts stimulated by "Mapping the Mind." I recommend the book even if your scientific understanding is limited. It will make you think outside your normal box. It will make you more aware of what incredible potentials lie within all of us.

[VBergen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and bold. Remarkable phrases:
"I also hope that the ability to modulate brains will be used more widely to enhance those mental qualities that give sweetness and meaning to our lives, and to eradicate those that are destructive. Such an idea reeks of hubris today but future generations, I think, will be less frightened of taking control of our minds as we now seek to control our bodies. Far from diminishing human existence, I believe that this could make our lives immeasurably better".
"Yet I believe one thing is already clear: there is no ghost in this place, no monsters in the depths, no lands ruled by dragons. What today's mind voyagers are discovering is instead a biological system of awe inspiring complexity. There is no need for us to satisfy our sense of wonder by conjuring phantoms - the world within our heads is more marvelous than anything we can dream up"

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVED it - great intro to neuroscience. As one my professor described it (compared to the other textbook option on neuroscience):

"It's USA Today for the brain."

He was indeed correct about the accessibility of the text itself, the colorful visuals, and the memorable case studies depicting some of the most unusual behaviors and beliefs which are a result of the brain and its dysfunctions.

[☘Misericordia☘ ⚡ϟ⚡⛈⚡☁ ❇️❤❣ · Rating 4 out of 5]

'No dragons' here, huh? That's entirely too bad!

[Rossdavidh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this book in a bookstore called Waterstone's in London. I believe it sat in my "to be read someday" pile for about four years before I actually got around to it. What determines which books get read immediately and which languish for years? Nothing I can put my finger on exactly, certainly not anything related to how interesting it looks.

It's publication date, however, is 1998, so it was over a decade old before I read it. With a field as fast-moving as brain research, that could be fatal. However, I dove into it anyway, if for no other reason than to clear a spot on my "need to read" shelf (I have a self-imposed rule of not letting my purchases get further in advance of my consumption than this small shelf will hold).

Two things distinguish this book from others on the same general topic. One is the copious diagrams and illustrations. If you're a visual thinker, and have even a passing interest in how the different (physical) parts of the brain interconnect, the plenitude of pictures is a welcome breakup from what might otherwise be a forbidding wall of text. The very last-decade style of the computer-generated diagrams is kind of quaint, but not distracting, at least not to an old guy like me.

Secondly, there are several score of cameos in this book by other authors, brain researchers of one sort or another from different (mostly British and American) universities. Each lasts only for a few pages, but it is unusual to get so many different perspectives into one work while still maintaining some consistency in the overall narrative. It's a happy fusion of the best aspects of single-author and compilation.

The material is mostly still current and relevant, perhaps mostly because it deals with fundamentals. Popular science books in this field (the brain) can be roughly divided into introductory and advanced, and the best gauge (pun intended, see below) of which one you are reading is how much exposition is included when (not if) they start talking about Phineas Gage.

The unfortunate Phineas was a 19th century American railway worker who took a spike through his skull and survived, mostly. One part of his brain was obviously destroyed, however, and it turned out to be the part that is responsible for self-control. It was one of the first cases to demonstrate that different aspects of our personality reside in specific parts of our brain; that the mind is not a general ectoplasma that possesses the entire organ, but instead a society of mind-modules that each have more to do with some particular bits of tissue than others. This book mentions Gage in five different places. There's a reconstruction from his death mask of the angle and position of the spike that went through his skull, and it is shown from both front and side perspectives.

Rita Carter does a more than competent job of taking us on a tour through all of this, however. If you're wanting to know what the last two to three years of brain research has done to demolish our cherished illusions of free will and distinct identity, then of course an 17-year old book is not going to do. If you want a thorough, and thoroughly readable, survey of the overall landscape, it will do very nicely.

[Jan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Little by little, I read through this carefully and intentionally. I enjoy learning about the mind, and I found that this reinforced other works I've recently read. By no means is it difficult; Carter's style and explanations are both challenging and accessible to laypeople who want to learn more about the human brain, our potential, and relatively new discoveries. Still, it's not a narrative, though, and I want to focus on learning effectively rather than quickly when I take up this and similar other publications. Along with _Brain: The Complete Mind_ and _Brain Rules For Aging Well_ (both from earlier this year), I'll be using this for references and reinforcing what I'm learning. These all were illuminating and well-written, and Rita Carter's book fit in nicely with them. They all will remain within easy access as I find references for my own healing and brain development. Later I would like to read Rita Carter's _The Human Brain Book_, and I suspect I'll be taking the same approach with that.

[Jaymee · Rating 3 out of 5]

If one wants to learn about the basics of neuroscience or simply how the brain works, this book serves as a good introduction. It has wonderful, 3D illustrations, and the language is easy enough to understand. It (literally) copies the main ideas from the important thinkers such as Sacks, Ramachandran, Le Doux and others. (I'm not sure how science books deal with citing case studies and other important ideas, but although it mentions the names of these thinkers, it doesn't really cite them directly for it.) That said, it is definitely more interesting and rewarding to read about the ideas, theories and studies from the main sources themselves. Typographical errors aside, this book, read slowly, might serve to heighten one's interest in the neurosciences.

[Adibah Nur · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book worthy of its name - Mapping the Mind. I love that the author included graphics and labels on sections of the brain appropriate to the subject discussed. As I am no neuroscientist, images and colours (in case of comparison) helped a lot in visualising and understanding the context.

Now... here’s the thing - I thoroughly enjoyed reading about the brain, and while this undoubtedly *is* a comprehensive book on neuroscience, I find it a little annoying that many times I found myself lost in a sentence because a comma (where it should be) was non-existent. Or maybe it’s just me. But here’s an example :

“When the inner workings of MPD patients’ brains are displayed what appears is a pattern that suggests very strongly that ‘alters’(as the various different personalities are known) are not just acts. As one set of behaviours disappears and another takes its place the neuronal patterns change to match the altered demeanour.”

Or

“During the transition from one to the other the part of the brain that processes memories momentarily ’closed down’, as though it was shutting off one ‘bag’ of memories while switching to another.”

(Now try inserting comma(s) and see if you’ll understand the excerpt better)

The other thing is that... the intermittent pages/letters/views in the middle of a section. It’s distinguishable for the difference in page colours, but imagine you’re engrossed reading to the last line on the right-page, and when you flip the page to continue, what you find isn’t a continuation to your previous page, but rather a (sometimes up to 3-4) page(s) of something remotely related to the chapter discussed. Now, I’m easily distracted and unfortunately, possess a memory of a goldfish, so this sporadic ‘surprise’ pages - definitely not a fan.

Otherwise, all in all, a very interesting book and I can tell you that it’s true because I have lost count of how many of my friends have I recommended this book to.

So, 4.5/5.0.

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Our understanding of the brain has progressed somewhat since 1998, when this book was first published. Nonetheless, this book remains an accessible and fascinating introduction to the brain: how it works, how it goes wrong, and what it does that we don't yet understand. From autism to word deafness, from people who can't recognise faces to people who see their own face as a ghostly image floating in front of them, it covers both the normal and the weird, and attempts to explain it all in terms that anyone can understand.

[عبدالرحمن عقاب · Rating 4 out of 5]

رائع! أن تقرأ موضوعا على هذه الدرجة من التعقيد بنثل هذا الأسلوب السلس الجميل.
الكتاب غني بالصور التوضيحية والأمثلة المرضية التي تزيد وضوح المسألة.
الكاتبة قدمت كتابا ممتازا ويمكن الوصول من خلاله إلى فهم أعمق لعالم الدماغ والعقل

[Roy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I used to read everything I could about the brain, the mind, and psychology, back in the 90s. Mostly Scientific American, and books from the library. I don't think I read much in this book that I had not read before, but it was presented very clearly and succinctly, and was a great refresher and summary for me after 20 years of being away from the subject matter. Thoroughly enjoyed reading this book.

[Ragne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Võrratu raamat, kui oled huvitatud neurobioloogiast ja põnevatest küsimustest, mis püstituvad seoses eri käitumis- ning iseloomu maneeridega. Lisaks on raamatus palju kergesti haaratavat visuaalset materjali. Varasemad meditsiinialased teadmised tulevad kahtlemata kasuks, vastasel juhul võib tunduda liialt tuim lugemine.

[Zoë Moore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Detailed without sacrificing accessibility, Mapping the Mind is an excellent neuroscience primer choice. The 2014 version is a bit outdated compared to contemporary neuroimaging research and neuroethics, but the text as a foundation remains valuable.

Great diagrams!

[Macky · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a trip! Gave me answers to a lot of questions about consciousness, the illusion of free will, and where solutions in deviancy and bad behavior should reside.

[Andrea · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not sure how, exactly, to classify this book. It is essentially about what we have come to understand about specific brain regions and how they impact our thoughts and behavior (or vice versa). It is written, though, in a casual, journalistic style. The style makes it accessible, but also suspect. I found myself questioning the author and her flippancy several times. I also thought she was overly optimistic and naive about what we know so far and what we will know in the not-too-distant future. Granted, 25 years might make any work relating to science feel dated and somewhat ignorant. But having read a handful of other books on this topic, all from this same period of time, Carter stands out as evincing a cavalier bravado about where we are headed that doesn't age well.

In the introduction Carter writes, "When are brain maps are complete, however, it will be possible to target psychoactive treatments so finely that an individual's state of mind (and thus behavior) will be almost entirely malleable. It may even be possible to alter individual perception to the extent that we could, if we chose, live in a state of virtual reality, almost entirely unaffected by the external environment." Maybe I'm just not as visionary as the author. I, for instance, am not counted among the "more optimistic of today's brain explorers" who work toward a time when "each minute brain component has been located, its function identified and its interactions with each other component made clear" which, in their eyes will then reveal "all there is to know about human nature and experience."

Besides the wide-eyed, expectant tone of the book, my big problem with it was the incessant reliance on evolutionary theory for an explanation of absolutely every single feature of human behavior. It was just obnoxious. Only it wasn't conveyed as theory. It was conveyed as proven, unquestioned fact. There was not even a hint that evolution might not actually explain every facet of human nature. Indeed, even behaviors and mental functions that didn't immediately reveal an evolutionary benefit were subjected to all sorts of cognitive gymnastics to draw out any possible reason for why humans evolved to have x, y, z feature. On page 64, Carter writes, "This complicated system has evolved over millions of years and until recently it has worked for us pretty well...The trouble with evolution, however, is that it cannot keep pace with human ingenuity." So the argument for everything that doesn't fit neatly into the evolutionary theory of human nature is that we just somehow got too smart for our own bodies? I'm sorry. I just don't buy it.

On pages 145-146 Carter writes about music as being "generally regarded as one of the more elevated endowments of the human world." (ironic that she should use the word endowment considering that an endowment implies a giver) She says that "it seems to be one of the few things we do simply for pleasure." But, not to miss a single opportunity, she contradicts herself in the very next paragraph by declaring unequivocally, "There is no known mechanism by which purposeless functions come to evolve." Is it possible that the author thinks this is so because she, and others, have obsessively searched for and assigned evolutionary purposes to every function ever discovered? Naturally if everything we do has a supposed evolutionary basis, then nothing we do could be said to not have an evolutionary basis. This is an obvious case of circular reasoning. She goes on: "Music is therefore likely once to have had some survival benefit, and the most probable one is that it is a prototype communication system. Support for this idea comes from the fact that music appreciation seems to be wired into some of the dumbest creatures on earth..." Brilliant.

The lengths that the author went to to show how certain features served our ancient ancestors' survival was just absurd. The book could have been half its length if she would have stuck to what has actually been discovered about the brain and left all ridiculous editorializing out. I was going to say that, as a Christian, it's obvious that I'm going to take issue with this theory, but I guess that isn't so obvious these days. In any case, as a Christian, I acknowledge that my view of the world is biased toward the argument of intelligent design. I believe that the complexity we see in humans (and, man, are we complex!) is due to an infinitely creative, intelligent and powerful God. I have my own theories for why we are the way we are. The difference is that Christians are made to be transparent about their worldviews while those, like the author, whose god is evolution, are not. The evolutionary theory of man is no more proven than the infinite complexity of the mind is understood, but, to hear the author tell it, both are as sure as the sun rises. Carter is so dogmatic about evolution being the answer for everything that it feels like a religious text, but it's presented as neutral fact. This is simply not intellectually honest.

At the end of the book, the author gets philosophical. After all, after an apparently exhaustive, 200-page glorified magazine article about the vast intricacies of the human brain, we're all coming to the same conclusions. Right? And, so what if we are just highly evolved machines? That's not that bad of a reality, is it? Carter doesn't think so. It's actually a good thing. She writes, "By creating the illusion that there is a self-determining 'I' in each of us, it causes us to punish those who appear to behave badly, even when punishment clearly has no practical benefit. It also encourages us to see mechanical breakdowns of the brain as weakness of some non-material 'self' rather than illnesses of the body. These distorted views were probably useful once because they would have driven antisocial and ailing people away from the tribe. Now they just cause pain. At an emotional level we may continue to believe that we are more than machines, but that need not stop us from accepting the opposite on a rational level and adapting our customs to reflect that knowledge..."

Paradoxically, all this talk of being machines doesn't stop her from, in the end, hoping that "the ability to modulate brains will be used more widely to enhance those mental qualities that give sweetness and meaning to our lives, and to eradicate those that are destructive." What meaning could there be for we humans who are a mere "biological system of awe-inspiring complexity" or for people who have been "modulated" to only experience "sweetness"? Oh, don't worry about that. "The illusion of free will is deeply ingrained precisely because it prevents us from falling into a suicidally fatalistic state of mind — it is one of the brain's most powerful aids to survival." Phew! Dodged that bullet!

In literally the same paragraph as her final hopes for meaning, Carter again swings back the other way to conclude that "Future generations will take for granted that we are programmable machines just as we take for granted the fact that the earth is round." So. The end.

The brain is fascinating. Learning about our brains is humbling and thrilling. It helps us grow in compassion toward others who are not exactly like we are, and it helps us appreciate how intricate we are. It's definitely worth studying, but I don't recommend this book to do it.

[Denise · Rating 3 out of 5]

A delight of a book; it widens and exercises the mind: I bought this book two years ago. It is the only non-fiction text I have not ben able to put down. The subject itself is fascinating, but Rita Carter shares her own excitement with us. The text is daring in that it deals with difficult concepts and makes no concessions to those of us who gave up science more years ago than we care to dmit on public but Rita Carter has the gift of making clear in elegant ptrecise language concepts and processes that are not onl;y utterly absorbing to learn about, but also raise questions about what it is to be conscious, what religious experince really entails etc. I have to stop here. Though I've read the book several times, I no longer have it to hand. I am a secondary schoolteacher(of English) and I took my copy in to school to read at break. To my complete surprise, every student who came in the room wanted to see it. It was handed round the class, discussed - bits of biology fitted in...etc. Of course, I lent it out. A book they were pleading to read! (Tempted to take out a mortgage and buy them each a copy!) So many are on the list to read it, I shall have to get another copy for myself. It is patently not a student's book, but the subject obviously appeals so much that they are prepared to make the effort. In this, I think the visual layout of the book helps - difficult text is broken up with diagrams, case-studies etc and the pages are colourful. The many diagrams are especially well done. This is a book no 15yr old should feel ashamed to pinch from his teacher - a guaranteed cert to get your son reading, I would think. But read ALL of it first - you'll never get it back!

[Grumpus · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the comment from Liz’s review here where she says her professor described this book as “USA Today for the brain”. It sums up the book perfectly. The book is filled with awesome color, graphics, photos, and illustrations—just like USA Today.

This book is a technical manual (but written in everyday language) for understanding the workings of the brain and should be read in conjunction with Making a Good Brain Great: The Amen Clinic Program for Achieving and Sustaining Optimal Mental Performance for advice in taking care of this most important body part.

If you’re interested in any of the following topics and understanding how the brain works related to them, then this book is for you: tourettes, prosopagnosia (face blindness, the condition upon which the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales was based), illusions, amnesia, and autism. Overall great insight into the workings of the brain.

[Lloyd · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is very good,.. giving me the basics, which I certainly need more of this,.. but not as good as "The Other Brain, by Douglas Fields" because that has new info I never hear of since they just recently are using calcium to scan the brain with, a chemical brain scan, thus learning new info about the chemical mind,.. rather than the electrical imaging (CAT,PET,MRI,fMRI,NIRS,MEG,EEG,etc.) to scan the neurons. The glia cells have no electrical, only chemical, and people don't realize they are the ones incontrol of the neurons.

[L.R. Lam · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favourite non-fiction titles I've read this year. Really readable and fascinating.

The Kindle version, however, was unreadable on Kindle! The text was far too small and if I increased it, it was wider than the width of the screen so you'd have to scroll right to left. I had to download the Kindle app on my tablet and read it that way, which was fine, but I would have been well annoyed if I didn't have a tablet!

[Tom Hunter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This fascinating book started with a bang that it kept up for almost the first half of the book. Thereafter, it switched from a comprehensive building of the picture of how the brain works to discussing individual cases of brains gone astray.

Highlights:
"Long-term memories are distributed through the brain, encoded in the same parts of it that gave rise to the original experience. A childhood recollection of eating ice cream on a sunny day in the country with birds singing, for instance, would be stored in several sensory areas: the ice cream taste in the 'taste' processing areas of the brain, the feeling of the sun on your skin on the somatosensory cortex, the sound of the birds in the auditory cortex, the sight of trees in the visual brain and so on."

"The right hemisphere is also good at grasping whole, while the left brain likes detail." (This is not surprising since we know the right hemisphere processes information in a visual, simultaneous manner, like an image is captured, all at once. By contrast, we know the left hemisphere processes information in a linear-sequential manner, in a straight line, like the cars on a train move down the track: one after another with no way to jump the line.
A great insight I know, based on reading outside this book, it that every sensory input (eyes, ears, nose, sensation) is duplicated and the same information is sent to both hemispheres--left and right. They operate on that same information differently. The right, image-processing-optimized hemisphere looks to see all at once what the image represents. Using an identical set of sensory data, the opposite hemisphere (left) is processing the same thing but instead of trying to match it as an image it tries to classify it.

"Almost every mental function you can think of is to come extent lateralized. Precisely how it happens is not fully understood, but it seems that incoming information is split into several parallel paths within the brain, each of which is given a slightly different treatment according to the route it takes. Information that is of particular 'interest' to one side will activate that side more strongly than the other. You can see this happen in a brain scan--the side that is 'in charge' of a particular task will light up while the matching area on the other side will glow far more dully.
"Generally the tasks that each hemisphere take on are those that fit its style of working: holistic or analytical."

"In normal grains incoming sensory stimuli follow well-worn neural paths from the sensory organ to specific brain destinations. As the stimulus passes through the brain it is split into several different streams which are processed in parallel by different brain modules. Some of these modules are in the cerebral cortex. Others are in the limbic system where the stimuli generate the bodily reactions that give them an emotional quality--the thing that turns noise into music and a pattern of lines and contrasts into a thing of beauty.
"The cortical area for each sense is made up of a patchwork of smaller regions, each of which deals with a specific facet of sensory perception. The visual cortex, for example, has separate areas for color, movement, shape and so on. Once the incoming information has been assembled in these areas it is shunted forward to the large cortical regions known as association areas. Here the sensory perceptions are married with appropriate cognitive associations--the perception of a knife, for example, is joined with the concepts of stabbing and eating. It is only at this stage that the incoming information becomes a fully fledged, meaningful perception."

"However well constructed a sensory perception may be it is meaningless until the brain recognizes it.
"There are two distinct types of recognition: one is the cerebral snap of the fingers that happens when you hear a familiar piece of music. Getting a joke is a form of this type of recognition--a good punchline delivers a sudden jolt of recognition. ...
"This type of recognition is quite different from the other--the conscious acknowledgement of a correct answer that you arrive at if, say, you add a string of figures together. ...
"The automatic type of recognition happens when one of the many parallel streams of incoming information passes through the limbic system" [the brain for emotions, unique to mammals]. "Modules here register the emotional content of the information, including familiarity. It happens so fast that the unconscious brain recognizes something is known to it before the conscious brain has even decided what the thing is."

The understanding I have of neuroscience and ability to grasp the ideas related in this fine book is no doubt responsible for my delight in reading it. Lots of great insights. Putting the picture together.

[Minh Nguyen · Rating 5 out of 5]

What if you have a superpower, mind reading? Is Telepathy real? I think it is not real. But Insight is real! The ability of reading other people’s minds through insight and communication is the biggest difference between human beings and other species. The sixth chapter in this book explains very comprehensively about the mechanism of linguistic communication in our brain. This book has many fMRI images and colorful illustrations of the brain mechanism. Neuroscience proved that the best way of learning is through visual objects, so I recommend this book for you to understand the mechanism of the human mind. Finding this book too difficult to read? You don’t need to read all the chapters, the same recommendation as the first book. When you need to look into the mechanism of a particular functionality such as memory, emotion or consciousness, this book is a very good reference.

Author of the book, Rita Carter is a science and medical writer. She has twice been awarded the Medical Journalists' Association prize for outstanding contribution to medical journalism. She is the author of several books that have been published internationally, including Consciousness, Multiplicity: The New Science of Personality and Mapping the Mind, which was shortlisted for the Rhône-Poulenc Prize (now the Royal Society Prize for Science Books)

[Paul Marchand · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have an older edition (1998), so this may be a bit unfair. The book is beautifully written, but some of the thoughts are a bit dated. To speak to the good points, it is quite clear about cerebral cartography. The concepts are well-arranged and explained in solid detail making it difficult to dispute the author's command of neuroanatomy. Ms Carter also adds her own wry humor here and there just to keep the reader's attention. When some of us attend a conference in which a neuroanatomist (surgeon or neurologist) speaks (if we don't do neuroanatomy on a day-to-day basis) we get lost in the anatomy. Science's passion for neuroanatomy (more correctly cartography) peaked in the 1980s to year 2000. Understanding the concepts of anatomy makes the discussion of current neuroscience much more alive. I have found this book an excellent catch-me-up book for the 40 years or so since I left medical school, where I had to study neuroanatomy. After reading it I feel much more at ease with newer concepts. I would have given it a 5-star rating, in 2000. It is important to understand the concepts between these covers before moving on to newer ideas. Science is a cumulative thing so basic baggage should be learned first. That is to say, read it before you tackle the more up-to-date information.

[Mahsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is about how you work, from a neurological point of view. Knowing the underlying mechanisms of the mind helps you look at everything in a new light. I highly recommend it.



“In working out the meaning of a verbal message, for instance, the left hemisphere tends to root around in memory to see what the words are likely to signify, and then come up with what the person expects to hear. The right hemisphere, by contrast, is inclined to interpret the message in the context of the information that is coming in right then and there rather than prejudging what it means. This makes the left hemisphere very efficient at understanding messages - but not very smart; subtle discrepancies between the context in which something is said and its literal translation (the person who smirks as they say sorry, for instance) are lost on it. The right hemisphere, by contrast, might understand the whole message very clearly but be unable to describe how it knows it. The right hemisphere’s relative inability to articulate it’s knowledge means that they’re experienced as ‘hunches’ or intuitions rather than clear thoughts.”
- From the book

[Ellenore Clementine Kruger · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am a civilian. I did think google images were cheaper and better and less clutter. There were some offensive images here, and I do not feel there were actual effective maps, but I do know, despite flowery wording, there is a very small chance anyone might catch dopamine on a microscope. So I will take a shot in the dark here and assume this science is on the classified side. I would also say this is not concise, but it might encourage conversation to start some angles on psychology like, is this automatic and embarrassing or…? I don’t feel a lot is controlled easily nowadays, but maybe we can hope for a better future? I take medication, and it improved my life by the way. The trial and era is really difficult, though.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

A passable introduction, but only intermittently an engrossing one. The first hundred pages I found rough sledding, with little sense the author understood the facts being hauled out and stacked up. It got better. The last few chapters betray the common, poorly thought through materialist reductionism common in the field, no surprise, but the content of the final 200+ pages is mostly good. Autism, depression, and addiction come up, although the stock in trade is discussion of people with bizarre, tragic, but fascinatingly specific brain damage and what those episodes suggest about how all the different mental aspects of being human are spread about the brain.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

I said it in my comments, and I'll say it here too: this book should be required reading in every high school biology class.

We learn as a society slowly, over a long time. Because it takes a long time to get masses to understand what was once specialized knowledge. But so much of what is in this book affects our daily lives and our perceptions of ourselves and those around us. The world could be a better place for a 200 page book and a few hours' time.

[Elizabeth Shepard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book teaches you all about the brain in a non-textbook style. It contains a good mix of biological explanations of the brain’s structure/function and fun facts to keep you entertained. I was looking for a book to read while concussed and this book gave me lots of insight that I used to aid my recovery. I highly recommend.

[Andrew Emmanuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommend this book. The copy I have ends at 335 pgs. Heavy read. This is a great informative book. Heads up this can have you studing subjects within the book that'll leave you on one chapter for a while.

[Rachel Bodner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mixed feelings. Some portions were illuminating. Others didn’t hold my interest. It should be noted that this book is dated and some terminology borders on offensive (IE: “normal” being used to describe non-dyslexic brains and non-autistic brains, rather than neurotypical in that AREA)

[Promise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Está escrito de forma muy bonita, armónica. Y la información está presentada de forma clara, de repente hay terminología especializada, pero en general yo diría que lo pueden disfrutar personas que no tengan conocimiento de los temas.