Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology

by Paul Broks

Book Overview

A finalist for The Guardian First Book Award, Into the Silent Land is a stunning look into how the human brain constructs a "self," or the essence of who we are as individuals. A neuropsychologist with twenty-five years' experience and a runner-up for the prestigious Wellcome Trust Science Prize, Paul Broks writes with a doctor's precision and clarity in a series of narratives about the fascinating world of the neurologically impaired, delving not...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802141285
• ISBN13: 9780802141286
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Length: 246 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Wherever you go, there you aren't

"Into the Silent Land" was both entertaining and informative. Something you don't get very often with books on such daunting topics such as neuropsychology. Broks years of clinical research have been brought to life with a richness and provocation that impels me to search deeper, even within myself, if I have one after reading this book. I typically don't like clinical analysis, especially about brain damage, but this book was so well written, in both narrative and first person dialogue, that I was able to connect with the patients and still maintain the critique of the theories on brain, mind and consciousness. I especially enjoyed his thoughts on the "all-seeing eye" and the four-sided pyramid on the dollar bill, and how he used it to study the four side of the identity issue: brain, mind, self, and society. My only issue was that his sense of humor and what I perceived to be sarcasm sometimes were difficult to interpret. Maybe it's the English way? Some of these I got, but some got in the way of my really understanding what side he was really on between the dualists, materialists, and mysterians. Perhaps he did that on purpose. Truly, for what I got out the text, it doesn't matter what his opinion is, that in itself would have only gotten in the way of making my own assumptions. I first borrowed this book from the library to read, but intend to buy a copy for my future reference. I would like to read it again in a couple months.

Difficult to Pin Down

This book, like its topic (the human mind), is difficult to pin down. British neuropsychologist Paul Broks tries a number of different styles and approaches -- approaches to the "silent land" of the human mind. The basic formula here is a series of short chapters describing one or two of Broks' patients, along with the clinical reason why he is seeing them. Most of these patients suffer from serious brain traumas or pathologies, conditions which severely alter (but do not entirely destroy) their experiences, their feelings, their beliefs and their self-identities. Broks leads you on a tour of his daily routine at the hospital clinic and classroom, along with a summary of what is known to be happening or not happening within the brains of his patients. But this is not an introductory textbook. Broks also tells you what's going on in his own mind, both in terms of professional analysis and in terms of personal responses to those he treats. If Dr. Broks is judgmental, it is not so much about the patient, but about himself. He administers steadily increasing doses of "quiet desperation" regarding his own circumstance and that of his profession. He admits his own frailties, limitations and self-doubts, ultimately confessing his mixed feelings regarding the "Articles of Faith" of scientific psychology. His ultimate despair regards the notion that neuroscience will soon understand the conscious mind and the notion of "self", in the way that science now understands nuclear fusion, continental drift and DNA. Broks has become a man without a country; he cannot entertain dualistic thinking or theologicially-twinged notions, and yet, on the eve of his (dreamed of) execution, he cannot imagine himself comforted by "falsity of self" ideals asserted by Buddhist philosophy nor by Hume's "bundle theory". I've read a variety of books on the subject of conscious awareness and the problem of "self", but this has to be one of the best, just because it's woven around real lives and not sheer abstractions. Brok admits that he's of two minds on the subject; there's the scientist side of him, who "knows" that consciousness is entirely dependent upon the physical activities of a complicated machine, a mix of computer and chemical factory. I.e., the brain. Even though we can't fully describe its workings yet with math and equations and other scientific verbiage, the brain ultimately mediates a physical process not unlike digestion. The "self" that would experience such consciousness is seen as will of the wisp, wholly dependent upon a constantly changing body and environment. Brok visits his old school and meditates upon the many changes that time has brought to both him and the school; both now so different and yet imagining to maintain an unchanged essence. And then there are his patients, who quickly become very different people because of a tumor or blunt force trauma. BUT. Brok also admits an intuitive suspicion that there's something more to

a breath of frash air

I am half way through this book and am really enjoying it. I picked up this book because I want to explore the career path of becoming a neuropsychologist, and found some of the things I was looking for, but am mostly surprised by Broke's exceptional talent as both a scientist and writer. Broke shares much personal insight and his day to day encounter in his job as a neuropsychologist. he doesn't just tell you the dry science of the brain but offers unique philosophical perspective on soul and our sense of self through his eyes as someone who knows the "back end". From time to time Broke pokes me with his some what crude humor. It's an interesting read for someone who's curious about aspects of a neuropsychologist's career, but this is not a textbook on a science subject, plus he is British so I believe he's practicing under a different health care system than what we have here in the US. Over all i find him very insightful and honest; what he offers in this book is very refreshing!

Great Reading For Anyone, Especially For Psychology Buffs

This is an extraordinarily interesting book. I say this as an average reader and not as someone with training in neuropsychology or neurosurgery.This will be of interest to anyone who is curious about life in general, but it will be greatly appealing to psychology and philosophy buffs. The book will be of special interest to anyone interested in the so-called mind-body problem. What is the nature of our identity as individuals? Do we have a soul? What is the difference between a soul and a mind? Are we nothing more than the grey matter encaged inside our skulls? The author, Paul Broks, does not provide new or even concrete answers to these questions. But he explores them in hugely entertaining ways. This is not a dreary, poorly written book on psychology, philosophy or personally identity theory. It is an exceptionally entertaining look at the brain and how its defects can affect our personality and sense of identity.Broks is a British neuropsychologist. He makes the book enjoyable by telling incredibly interesting tales about his patients and their problems. I would recommend this book to just about anyone, not only those people who have a background in this field. It is a pleasure to read. Moreover, at only 242 pages, most readers will be able to finish the whole book in just a couple of days. But they may be sorry when it is finished.

More Puzzles Than Your Brain Can Handle

Everything we know or think or feel is somehow processed within the contents of our craniums. Thoughts happen without our thinking about making them occur or about the incalculably complex neuronal interactions that would make them happen. How can it possibly happen that intracranial meat makes mentation? Check with an expert, like Paul Broks, who is a British lecturer and consultant in neuropsychology, the study of brain processes that produce thought and behavior. In _Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology_ (Atlantic Monthly Press), he will bring you up short: "My area of supposed expertise, neuropsychology, is the subject about which I feel the most profound ignorance." He cannot satisfactorily account for how the brain generates conscious awareness. He reflects that this is something like finding out that your airplane pilot knows nothing of lift, drag, and so on. And yet, the patients he describes in his book, and his own introspection, and his fictional thought experiments are so strange that readers will be amazed that they could have ever taken themselves (or their _selves_) for granted.The people Broks sees in his clinic are those with damaged brains of some sort, "thought experiments made flesh." This is the territory previously explored for us by Oliver Sacks, whom Broks names as an influence on his own thinking and writing. Especially illustrative are the split brain patients, those who have had the cables cut from right brain to left, usually to try to short circuit seizures. It is possible to get a sedative to one side of such brains and then to the other, so that clinicians can interview only one half-brain at a time. In such a patient, Naomi, Broks finds, "Ms Left-brain was talkative and cheerful. Ms Right-brain was unsettled, mute, morose." But Ms Left-brain afterwards was responsible for describing the entire session, and had no memory of Ms Right-brain's difficulties. This is the usual sort of sharing, and not just in patients with split brains. The left hemisphere not only is the spokesman for both, but also is "the brain's spin doctor," making odd events (such as the transient communicative ability of the right brain) comprehensible and acceptable. The left brain, quite simply, lies to make a palatable reality. We are all split up like this. Different wrinkles in the brain handle language, thoughts, memories, feelings. Broks worries: "There is no special point of convergence. No cockpit of the soul." Unity is an illusion. The brain is pretty well mapped, via MRI slices, and we have good ideas about what large parts of it do, but even if you look around a living brain, you will fine no self there; "... there is no ghost in the machine. It is time to grow up and accept this fact." But take heart; even if we exist in some mysterious emptiness between neurological components, this is itself a "... beautiful, liberating thought and nothing to be afraid of. The notion of a tethered soul is crude by