These days books about the gray matter are anything but gray. Every move we make – not to mention mood disorders and addiction problems – has a connection to the brain, and of particular interest to neuroscience these days is the chemical bath we receive from Mother Nature or our own pill-popping selves and how they alter how we behave.
I like the premise of David Eagleman's "Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain." Here we're not talking about the subconscious wounds from childhood, but the fact that your nervous system takes in so dang much material that you can't handle it all. So your conscious awareness amounts to a fraction of the intake. A good layman's intro to the lay of the land inside our heads.
Also a great read: “An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted and the Miracle Drug Cocaine,” by Howard Markel. The author, a doctor himself, creates a highly readable tale about drug use before there was such a thing as “controlled substances.” With opiates as available as aspirin, addiction problems were abundant, and Freud’s research with cocaine was inspired by the effort to use it as an antidote to get a friend off morphine. In the process, both Freud and Halsted, a renowned American surgeon, got hooked themselves.
And speaking of drug addiction: If you want to get freaked out about the extent of the problem now, read Robert Whitaker's “Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.” Whitaker, long a critic of the medical establishment, takes on the mental health profession in a book that sees a collaboration between psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical companies who offer a pill for every problem mentioned in the ever-expanding diagnostic manual of mental illness. He notes that a half century ago mental problems were almost exclusively the preserve of small group of middle-aged adults or the elderly. Now they're calculated to affect one out of ten Americans, including vast numbers of children, every year. How did the goalposts change, and whose interests were served by changing them? he asks.
Finally, I appreciate the premise of “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,” by the prolific Steven Pinker. A psychology professor at Harvard, in his latest book he argues that society has become less violent over time and tries to determine why our dualistic natures have turned to the light. The printing press, more rights for women, diplomatic options for settling conflict: These are among the reasons, he says. Yes, but: In a book that acknowledges the Muslim world (a mere 2 billion souls) has not participated in this advance... and in a book that says one-to-one homicides actually declined in Nazi Germany (the genocide part doesn't count?)... I was, sadly, left less than convinced that the better angels are winning the fight.
--Ellen
