The New Brain - How the modern age is rewiring your mind

by Richard Restak

From Publishers WeeklyRestak (Mozart's Brain), a neurosurgeon and popular science writer on the brain, focuses on new technology for examining the physiology of the brain (such as MRI) and how it allows us to monitor and control a far wider range of activities than was formerly possible. Recent work holds the potential for, among other things, reducing the use of psychopharmacological drugs that have unpredictable side effects; substituting one sense (touch) for another (sight); and direct repair of brain and other neurological damage. Restak also demonstrates how the brain is modified the old-fashioned way, such as by practicing a skill. The negative aspects of recent work are invoked in more polemical than scientific prose, such as the specter of social control through "medicalization" of everything, and how the overstimulation of our brains by modern society is giving us all ADD. Hackles will rise the farthest over the author's proclamation that it is proven that TV violence affects our brains in ways that lead to violent behavior without even mentioning the word "censorship." A compact if sometimes oversimplified introduction to its subject, Restak's latest is best when it stays close to the data. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Scientific AmericanPity the poor neurologists of yesteryear, saddled as they were with their conviction that our brains are hardwired after childhood. Then celebrate today’s scientists, who are exploiting brain-imaging technologies to show that our brains are capable of profound and permanent alterations throughout our lives. Neurologist Richard Restak does just that in The New How the Modern Age Is Rewiring Your Mind, even as he argues that we are being negatively altered by the sound-bite, techno environment in which we live. Technology such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, Restak begins, can now demonstrate that as a musician practices for many hours, certain neural pathways are strengthened. He then moves to a profound implication, namely that all kinds of technological stimuli are forging brain circuits that may hurt us instead of helping us. For instance, he cites correlations between positron emission tomography scans of violent people and normal experimental subjects who are simply thinking about fighting, then asserts that repeated viewing of violence on television and in video games can set up brain circuits that make us more likely to initiate realworld fisticuffs. Unfortunately, such brain imaging may leave more questions than answers. As Restak himself points out, the technology does not provide "neurological explanations," just "important correlations." Yet he is whipped up enough to diagnose all of modern society with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, the probable result of brain changes we are initiating in our media-saturated world. He reminds us of the antidote, we are still in control of what we allow ourselves to see and hear. In the end, Restak fails to create a sense that scientists have revealed a new way of understanding the brain. And the images that inspire speculation in the book still await research that may finally reveal the mechanisms of such phenomena as memory and aggression.--Now Available in Paperback!The era of the New Brain is upon us! Already our brains are working differently than they did just one hundred years ago. Drugs are already available that work in the brain to prevent us from feeling drowsy, depressed, anxious, or fearful, or that enhance concentration and memory. Dramatic treatments to repair damage in the brain are becoming common. In The New Brain, neurologist, neuropsychiatrist, and bestselling author Dr. Richard Restak tells how technology and biology are converging to influence the evolution of the human brain. Dr. Restak describes the dramatic advances that now are possible, as well as the potential for misuse and abuse, examining such questions Is Attention Deficit Disorder a "normal" response to the modern world's demand that we attend to several things at once? What happens in our brains when images replace language as the primary means of communication? How does exposure to violent imagery affect our brains? Are we all capable of training our brains to perform at a superior level?

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Psychology, Technology, Brain, Health, Education

237 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Richard M. Restak M.D. is an award-winning neuroscientist, neuropsychiatrist and writer. The best-selling author of nineteen acclaimed books about the brain, he has also penned dozens of articles for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today. A fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Neurology, and the American Neuropsychiatric Association, he lives and practices in Washington, D.C.

Reviews

[أميــــرة · Rating 4 out of 5]

كتاب علمي دسم للغاية ، يتناول - في تسعة فصول - التطور الذي طرأ على طريقة معالجة أمخاخنا للمدخلات المختلفة في ظل التطور التكنولوجي الرهيب الذي فرض وجوده وتدخله في أبسط أنشطة حياتنا اليومية ، وتندرج دراسة وظائف المخ وطريقة عمله تحت علم يُدعى :
Cognitive Neurotherapy

إن عصرنا الحالي يطالبنا بتأدية أكثر من مهمة في وقت واحد نظرًا لحالة اللهاث التي نعيشها كأن يطالبنا بمشاهدة فيلمًا بينما يتشتت انتباهنا بشريط سخيف يجري بأسفل الشاشة ..

كما يعرض الكتاب أحدث الإختراعات التي تشمل تطوير شرائح دقيقة يمكن غرسها بالمخ للتحكم في الإنفعالات والاستجابات الصادرة عنه.
وأخيرا لم يغفل الكاتب أن يمس الوتر الحساس : أخلاقية تلك التجارب وكيف ستُستغل إذا ظهر نجاحها ، وهذا من خلال ما يسمى بـ
Neuroethics

الترجمة جيدة جدا ، ولكنها أغفلت بعض الصور الموجودة بالنسخة الأصلية مع الإبقاء على الفقرات التي تشير لتلك الصور !!
يعيب الكتاب زخمه بالمصطلحات الطبية الدقيقة ، مما يصعّب فهمه على غير المتخصصين .

[Tareq Mansour · Rating 4 out of 5]

طريقة الكاتب فى تناول دراسات المخ شيقة ومبسطة لدرجة كبيرة ممزجة بالأمثال الإفتراضية والواقعية للتوضيح
,علاوة على ذلك يفسر الكتاب الكثير من تصرفات وسلوك أمخاخنا فى الحياة من فرح وغضب وكذب وعنف والتصرفات المتعارضة مع التفكير العقلى الصرف والكثير من سلوك الإنسان فى التفكير.

[Dawayr]

الكتاب يقع فى تسعة فصول ويتناول أسئلة مختلفة كنا ولا زلنا نسألها، أسئله حول العبقرية وطبيعتها وعن عن الموهبة وهل هى وراثة أم من الممكن اكتسابها عبر التدريب...
عن طبيعية الحياة العصرية وسرعتها ومدى تطور العقل البشرى لمواجهتها والتكيف معها فيما عبر عنه بمصطلح (مطاعة المخ)...
عن الأدويه النفسية واستخداماتها وهل ستكون بديلًا عن أهمية التعبير عن مشاعرنا حتى السلبي منها...
عن معالجه المخ للمشاعر الإيجابية والسلبية وتقنيات تصوير الدماغ ومستقبلها...
عن توازن المخ...
عن خداع العقل أحيانا وطبيعية عمل المخ...
قد يرى البعض أحيانا عند بدء القراءة أن الكتاب يبدو ثقيلًا من حيث المحتوى ولكنه شيق من حيث تقديم الأمثلة المختلفة ف إطار شيق وخاصة لغير المتخصصين.
سوف تدرك أكثر لماذا تقوم بتصرف دون غيره وسوف يزيد وعيك بعقلك وطبيعته.

ريتشارد ريستاك Richars Restak أستاذ النيورلوجى بالمركز الطبى بجامعة جورج واشنطن وله عده مؤلفات لغير المتخصصين فى مجال المخ والأعصاب منها المخ الحدود الأخيرة.

[Amina Fathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

من الكتب الممتعه ... بجد
اسلوب سهل للاشخاص اللى مش فى المجال ..

[Mohamed Al-Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

brilliant

[Durrah]

دراسة شيقة في المخ وتفعيله وفق المعطيات الحديثة، دسم جدًا وحجمه لا يعكس محتواه.

[Georgia · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is outdated (2003), and short on complete information. I say this specifically for the chapter on ADD/ADHD. After genetics, it states in the book, if the parents don't have ADHD, then it 's probably culturally driven....too much TV, multi-tasking etc. But it's now known that ADHD is a disorder of the stress system, so people can develop ADHD like symptoms when their stress system is hyper-activated. And there are different types of ADHD, with different phenotypes involved; I hate when ADHD is discussed as one phenotype, all lumped together.

[Gail · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciated his point on the evils of a pharmacological society. There are real human emotions that were meant to be experienced, sadness included.
Some would have us protect ourselves from struggles that shape us. God speaks of the refining process like the one which gold endures to come out shiny and precious. Emotions, of all kinds, are to be part of the human experience. We should not medicate ourselves out of reality.

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was easy to read, and very informational. I really couldn't put it down.

[Raza Mustafa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Key takeaways from the book:

1. Brain Plasticity refers to the brain’s capacity to change or re-organize itself
2. When repeated attempts are made to learn a skill, the brain changes
3. IQ tests fail to gauge important aspects of functions: motivation, social skills, persistence in the time of adversity, and the ability to set and realize achievable goals
4. Multi-tasking is inefficient: results in a time loss of up to seven-tenth of a second as the attention of brain shifts from one activity to another
5. Multi-tasking can result in inefficiency when two tasks are being performed simultaneously that activate the same area of brain
6. Our brains are being forced to manage time-compressed information, i.e. too much information in too little time. This is called Sensory Overload. This can result is us having no “Time to Listen” and no time for ourselves
7. We have started to resemble machines in their pace, rigidity, and performance expectations
8. Media violence contributes to aggressive attitudes and violent behavior
9. Images have overtaken words. Words up us up to the ideas whereas images do not
10. Excessive reliance on anti-depressants, tranquilizers, and life-style drugs, especially when we can do without them, can detach us from the “real” us

[Elvis · Rating 3 out of 5]

First few chapters actually deal with technology and how it influences our behavior, but rest of the book is just dry report of brain research that has no connection to anything. The only thing that connects all this research is that they all talk about the "brain".

The book "The Brain That Changes Itself" by Norman Doidge is 100 times better in this regard even if it is most of the times anecdotal at least we have something to think about. The "The New Brain" book however provides nothing. The discussion around the research that the author tries to create is only few lines long and is an obvious one with 0 depth.

[Rossdavidh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Subtitle: "How the Modern Age is Rewiring Your Mind". Are you scared yet? This book has a subtext of, "if you're not nervous about what technology is doing to the human brain, you haven't been paying attention". But then again, you're probably not reading books in that case, either.

Time was, anything to do with your brain was more or less assumed to be set in stone, except in so far as it could get worse with age or injury. I was taught in grade school that nerve cells didn't recover from damage, which we now know to not exactly be true. I seem to recall being taught that we have the maximum number of synapses as a youth, and that it would only decline from there, the implication being that the number of synapses is a proxy measure of brain power.

We now know much of this to be bunk. Some synapses get stronger, others weaken or disappear entirely, and this process is called "learning". If you put all the synapses back at their full strength, you would have neatly erased all that you had learned. Nerve cells do, in some cases, recover from damage, and the brain certainly does generate new cells after we reach adulthood. But...

We only generate cells where they're needed, which (in muscle or brain tissue alike) tends to be whatever we've been using a lot lately, especially if we used it and it was found wanting (or nearly so). So, our brain is "plastic", and over time it changes in response to how we use it. Restak shows us a number of examples of this (the blind, professional musicians, etc.), where whole sections of the brain enlarge or get repurposed in response to what we do all day. So, what do we do all day, nowadays?

To be perfectly blunt, we watch TV. Chapter 4 is entitled "More Images Than Ever: Is It Destabilizing Our Brains?" (Hint: the answer isn't 'no') Study after study is trotted out, to demonstrate that more TV (WHETHER VIOLENT OR NOT) increases the chance of violent behaviour. Restak finds this result so odd he rejects it out of hand, and assumes that violence on TV is so widespread that a correlation of violence to TV-watching is just a proxy for a correlation of violent behavior to watching violence on TV. I'm not so sure.

"The correlation between violent media and aggression is larger than the correlation between exposure to lead and decreased IQ level in kids. It's larger than the effects of exposure to asbestos. It's larger than the effect of second-hand smoke on cancer". Maybe Austin should have banned TV in bars, instead of smoking.

Not all of the book is so grim. There are chapters on how music affects the brain, and how new imaging techniques (MRI's and so on) are helping us to understand how the brain works, either when it's functioning properly or when it's been damaged. There's a chapter titled "Cosmetic Psychopharmacology", a fancy title for taking meds to make yourself feel better. Restak's prediction: in our lifetime, instead of trying a different med every few months until you find one that works, our doctors will be able to tailor one to our own particular needs, based on our genetic profile. Like getting a tailored suit, but it will be a tailored anti-depressant. Never having wished for such a thing myself, this leaves me unenthused. Many people I like have had to try to rebalance their chemistry somehow, though, and the current process seems to be quite scattershot, so some improvement does seem called for. There's a chapter on prospects for healing brain damage, on which he is cautiously optimistic.

The final chapter is called "The New Brain", and here the otherwise well-written book just sort of peters out. There's a lot of technology that is newly available to neuroscience (and neuromedicine), and a lot more that's coming soon. It felt like Restak, a neuropsychiatrist himself, felt that he should be able to sum up all that we are about to embark on, as a species. We are, after all, distinct from other species primarily in what happens in our brains, and the fact that we are about to start acquiring real knowledge on how it works and how to modify it, ought to both thrill and horrify.

In fact, though, Restak simply cannot sum it all up, and the book doesn't end with a finale so much as it simply stops. This shouldn't obscure the fact that is a well-written and easily readable survey of a range of fascinating topics. Perhaps it is too early to write the Great Book of neuroscience, one that will rank with Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker and Carl Sagan. It is intriguing enough, that he has translated the mostly impenetrable language of neuroscientists into a series of essays on a topic of undeniable interest (for anyone with a brain of their own, that is).

[عبدالله · Rating 4 out of 5]

الكتاب الثاني الذي أقرؤه ويحمل على الغلاف الخلفي صورة جميلة للسيدة سوزان مبارك :)

بعيداً عن السياسة لقد كان مشروع مكتبة الأسرة واختيارات المكتبة موفقه جداً جداً

بعد (سيرة عيسى بن هشام) هذا الكتاب وربما كانت مطبوعات مكتبة الأسرة هي من القليل من الكتب التي أقرأها في غير مجال الرواية

كتاب جميل جداً تقرأه فلا تعود نظرتك للامور كما كانت لنه يكشف لك الكثير من الأسباب التي بسببها يعمل عقلك بالطريقة الفلانية ، بالإضافة إلى الجزء الأهم في الكتاب وهو كيف تغير التكنولوجيا طريقة عمل المخ

مرعب ومشوق في آن معا

ويحسب للمؤلف نجاحه الكبير في كسر أكاديمية وعلمية الموضوع بالعديد من القصص الحقيقية والمشوقة والحالات ربما يؤخذ عليه في مواقع قليلة من الكتاب استدلاله بقصص اسطورية لاثبات حالة علمية أو قصص استثنائية لا يمكن القياس عليها

السيء في النسخة الالكترونية التي وصلتني هي إضافة مقحمة بشكل فيه تعدي على الحقوق بإضافة عبارة (مكتبة الملحدين العرب) إلى غلاف الكتاب ! وإذا كان هذا سيشعرهم بالراحة فقراءة الكتاب العلمي جداً لا تصب في مصلحتهم بل العكس .. فسبحان من علم الإنسان ما لم يعلم

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Richard Restak is one of the old hands at translating brain science discoveries into popular books. This one looked at the emerging field of brain imaging and how it is taking us away from the era of looking at the brain in terms of its diseases and dysfunctions and helping us to examine the "normal" brain. It also explored whether changes in technology and lifestyle are actually changing the way our brains function -- e.g., is attention deficit disorder growing because it is a natural response of the brain to the ever-increasing speed of new stimuli?

[Ashley · Rating 3 out of 5]

For EDP 540, my Educational Psychology class. Nothing mind-blowing (no pun intended), but still pretty interesting. Restak does a great job of staying pretty readable for a general public, as long as you're not intimidated by the names of different parts of the brain. This book is around 10 years old, so this is hardly cutting-edge technology and research. I probably would have found it more interesting if I hadn't already learned a lot of these ideas in my EDP class... This is great if you're interested in Psychology (even casually) and the effects of our modern society on the brain.

[Esraa Muhammed · Rating 4 out of 5]

الكتاب ممكن يكون احيانا غلس.بس مواضيعه شيقه وبالدخول اكتر فيه هتحسه بيحاول التبسيط لغير المتخصيين بضرب الامثله وده شئ رائع..الاهم مواضيعه اللى بتتناول مواضيع مهمه زى العبقريه وهل هى وراثيه..الادويه النفسيه اللى اعتبرها ف احد فصول الكتاب ادويه نفسيه تجميليه..تطبيقات تصوير المخ ونشاطه اللى ممكن تعرفنا انت بتفكر فيه حتى لو حاولت الخداع...كيفيه معاجله المخ للمشاعر السلبيه وفصل اخر يتكلم عن معالجته للموسيقى والضحك والمشاعر الايجابيه ..كل ده باسلوب سلس وبسيط وشيق

[Derrick Till · Rating 5 out of 5]

They use current research to help us understand that we are actually using all of our brain and how it plays out in every day life, science perspective. Dry but factual and moves quickly, not over assertive on the details, but not half baked either. Easy read for those unfamiliar with typical brain functions.

[Mark Valentine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Restak's prose is fluid but it is his ideas that hold the greatest power. Reading this, I felt that there was a time-lapse camera set up to record the adaptable brain in its fluidity [there's that word again!]. Restak writes with authoritative support, chronicling the changes that are already here. This is a beneficial book.

[Shelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting! especially the implants that control motor function of bionic limbs... and the idea of writing (and PDAs and the like) as external memory storage for our species. We'll all be androids in no time!

[sarad · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting read... not captivating for the casual reader... some experiments they have done was pretty interesting... using a sensor in the mouth that activates the vision areas in the brain.. Had to come back to it twice to finish it.. so... :)

[Sarah Milne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a bad read, but less captivating than I expected. Restak breaks things down for the lay audience. I guess for me, it's just a little too broken down. There's a whole lotta value there, but I would have enjoyed more depth. Good for a quick read or as an introduction.

[Joe Ross · Rating 3 out of 5]

The guy tends to blabber at the beginning and the end, but right in the middle there is some compelling data, anecdotes and observations.

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cutting edge information on neuropsychology/physiology.

[Martha · Rating 2 out of 5]

disappointing:nothing new

[Mashail Faqeeh · Rating 3 out of 5]

loved it. it really helps with knowing how all people are very smart, the problem is with the lack of focus and discipline.

[Stacy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not as compelling as I had hoped. It caught my attention at first, but I struggled to keep reading through the second half. It still provided some interesting insights however.

[Mohamedridha Alaskari محمد رضا العسكري · Rating 4 out of 5]

كتاب جيد لتفسير الكثير من الظواهر الخفية حول معرفة الية عمل مخ الانسان و الامراض التي تصيبة وكيفية معالجتها

[David Buhler · Rating 1 out of 5]

One chapter was enough.

[Mindy · Rating 3 out of 5]

written by a scientist who is not a christian, yet his research confirms scripture! very cool.

[Arushi]

recommended by http://www.testingreflections.com/nod... for usability testing