Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life by Steven Johnson (2004). It's amazing how far neuroscience jargon has engulfed the media in seven years, nevertheless it doesn't fascinate everybody. I suppose, people with an innate curiosity about the world around them are the only ones who are curious about how stuff inside our skull work's as well. No surprise there and we shouldn't surprised either if dystopians flood the cable news with the coming of Orwellian age or the dawn of the brave new world. Steven Johnson is a gifted science writer; his book is a great place to peak into the fascinating world of neuroscience. Educating ourselves is probably the best bet to subside that inevitable snake oil boom.
Johnson suggests updating Freud's taxonomy of id, ego, and superego (roughly parallel to the unconscious, conscious, and preconscious) with a neuroanatomical equivalent--Paul Maclean's model of the "triune brain." This model consists of: a) the brainstem--controlling metabolic functions like heart rate and breathing; b) the limbic system--the seat of emotion and memory, comprising chiefly the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the hypothalamus; and c) the neocortex--the most distinctly human component of the brain's architecture that allows us to engage in abstract thought and communicate in complex sentences. Johnson asserts that mankind's evolutionary march from "brain stem, to limbic system, to neocortex--as E.O. Wilson put it, from heartbeat, to heartstrings, to heartless--is certainly a more accurate assessment of the psyche's inner divisions than the old mythos of id, ego, and superego." (To understand the brain's inner life, Johnson maintains we should also examine the molecules of emotion and affect: ocytocin, cortisol, serotonin, etc.--these chemicals constitute the raw material of the brain's value system.)
Johnson suggests updating Freud's taxonomy of id, ego, and superego (roughly parallel to the unconscious, conscious, and preconscious) with a neuroanatomical equivalent--Paul Maclean's model of the "triune brain." This model consists of: a) the brainstem--controlling metabolic functions like heart rate and breathing; b) the limbic system--the seat of emotion and memory, comprising chiefly the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the hypothalamus; and c) the neocortex--the most distinctly human component of the brain's architecture that allows us to engage in abstract thought and communicate in complex sentences. Johnson asserts that mankind's evolutionary march from "brain stem, to limbic system, to neocortex--as E.O. Wilson put it, from heartbeat, to heartstrings, to heartless--is certainly a more accurate assessment of the psyche's inner divisions than the old mythos of id, ego, and superego." (To understand the brain's inner life, Johnson maintains we should also examine the molecules of emotion and affect: ocytocin, cortisol, serotonin, etc.--these chemicals constitute the raw material of the brain's value system.)
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