Download Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life AudioBook Free
BRILLIANTLY EXPLORING TODAY'S CUTTING-EDGE BRAIN RESEARCH, MIND WIDELY OPEN CAN BE AN UNPRECEDENTED JOURNEY IN TO THE ESSENCE OF HUMAN PERSONALITY, ALLOWING READERS TO UNDERSTAND THEMSELVES ALONG WITH THE PEOPLE WITHIN THEIR LIVES AS NOTHING YOU'VE SEEN PRIOR. Using a mix of experiential reportage, personal storytelling, and fresh scientific discovery, Steven Johnson describes the way the brain works - its chemicals, structures, and subroutines - and how these systems hook up to the day-to-day realities of individual lives. For 100 years, he says, most of us have assumed that the most powerful route to self-knowledge took the proper execution of lying on the couch, discussing our childhoods. The probability entertained in this book is the fact you can follow another path, in which learning about the brain's mechanics can widen one's self-awareness as powerfully as any therapy or meditation or drug. AT HEART Wide Open, Johnson embarks upon this path as his own test subject, taking part in a battery of attention tests, learning to control video games by altering his brain waves, scanning his own brain with a $2 million fMRI machine, all searching for a modern response to the oldest of questions: who am I? Along the way, Johnson explores how exactly we "read" other folks, the way the brain processes frightening events (and how exactly we might rid ourselves of the scars those memories leave), the particular neurochemistry is behind love and sex, what this means that our brains are teeming with powerful chemicals closely related to recreational drugs, why music moves us to tears, and where our breakthrough ideas result from. Johnson's clear, engaging explanation of the physical functions of the mind reveals not only the broad strokes in our aptitudes and fears, our skills and weaknesses and desires, but also the momentary brain phenomena that a whole human life comprises. Why, when hearing an account of woe, do we sometimes smile inappropriately, even if we don't want to? Why are some of us so bad at remembering telephone numbers but brilliant at recognizing faces? Why does depression make you feel stupid? To learn Mind Wide Open is to rethink family histories, individual fates, and the very nature of the self, and see that brain science is now personally transformative - a very important tool for better relationships and better living.n the country...
