Book of the Month

What is “wisdom”? In Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience, Stephen S. Hall travels from ancient Confucianism to modern-day understandings of the biological brain to explore this very topic. Hall doesn’t stop at helping the reader understand wisdom—he also gives clues to how we might nurture wisdom in ourselves and our children.

In this engaging and hopeful book, Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg explains not just how many aspects of the brain decline with age, but how life experience can assist in pattern recognition (that may lead to wisdom). As some areas of the brain decline, others improve. In discussing the plasticity of the brain, Dr. Goldberg challenges readers to maintain a lifestyle that keeps their brains active and challenged.

Author Steven Johnson skillfully explores how our attributes and emotions—love, fear, memory, and more—derive from the brain’s electrical and chemical responses to what we sense in the world around us. He uses his own brain as a case study by undergoing a series of neurological tests (from fMRI to neurofeedback) and sharing the results with the reader.

Bruce Wexler, a Professor of Psychiatry at Yale Medical School (and member of the Posit Science Scientific Advisory Board), explores the interplay between culture and the brain’s physical and functional organization from childhood to adulthood. Immigrants provide an example of how this interplay changes with age: the brains of immigrant children are better able to make the structural changes needed to succeed in a new culture than the brains of their parents.

Carl Zimmer makes the history of neurology a gripping tale by juxtaposing massive social change in Cromwell’s England with the struggle against the Church to bring scientific method to biology. It’s surprising that the dominant view in the Age of Enlightenment was that “thought” and “soul” resided in the heart and that the brain’s gray matter was primarily for venting the body’s heat.

UCLA psychiatrist Jeffry Schwartz and former Wall Street Journal columnist Sharon Begley team up to explore how using the mind to change habits and activities can physically alter the brain for better function. They especially focus on obsessive compulsive disorder and stroke, citing an array of experiments that demonstrate how people can relearn to control actions thought lost to them.

This groundbreaking sociological analysis is based on three research projects that followed over 800 people from their adolescence through old age. Subjects were drawn from the Harvard Grant study of white males, the Inner City study of non-delinquent males and the Terman Women study of gifted females, begun respectively in 1921, 1930 and 1911.

In 1999, Rita Carter published her acclaimed book Mapping the Mind, a field guide for the layperson about what scientists knew about brain structure and function. In 2004, she followed it up with Exploring Consciousness, a book that goes beyond structure and function to explore the origin and purpose of consciousness. Together, the books provide a wonderful introduction to the brain and its relationship to selfhood.

In The Naked Brain, Richard Restak argues that we are gradually becoming a “neurosociety” in which brain science affects everyday life. Restak details the potential and the peril inherent in a neurosociety. Some change will be for the good, as scientists and doctors learn more about how the brain works. But Restak believes there’s a risk, too. He points out that advertisers, politicians, and others are already looking to brain scanning technology to influence our choices.

A rock musician turned cognitive neuroscientist, Daniel Levitin is especially well-qualified to write about the brain’s responses to music. In This Is Your Brain on Music he does just that. Levitin considers the intricacies of music as well as those of the brain’s auditory processing to shed light on how and why music affects people so deeply. In so doing, he helps readers gain insight into one of the qualities that makes us all human.