The Private Life of the Brain: Emotions, Consciousness, and the Secret of the Self

by Susan A. Greenfield

Book Overview

How does the human brain produce your private world? Critically acclaimed neuroscientist and author Susan Greenfield, who holds the prestigious position of Director of the Royal Institution in England, weaves together a thought-provoking examination of childhood experiences, primal emotions, such as fear and euphoria, and the effects drugs have on our personalities to probe the most intriguing mystery facing today's scientists: How does the human...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471183431
• ISBN13: 9780471183433
• Release Date: May 2000
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.31 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Complex but interesting.

The Private Life of the Brain by Susan Greenfield is a very complex work on consciousness and theory of self. Trained in the field of neuropharmacology and physiology with degrees from St. Hilda's College, Oxford, United Kingdom, the College de France, Paris, and NYU Medical Center, New York, the author has held lecture posts at several of the world's prestigious universities including Lincoln College, Oxford, the Institute of Neuroscience, La Jolla, California, and Queens University, Belfast. In 1998 she became the first female director of Britain's Royal Institution. Her current research is in the causes of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. With this vita she is eminently equipped to discuss the topic. Although the book seems to be a bit rambling, this is because it covers a lot of territory-but then there is a lot of territory to cover: brain anatomy-physiology, chemistry, neuro-connections, diseases, emotions, consciousness and the emergent self. Probably because she is a pharmacologist and physiologist and most especially a scientist, she approaches her subject by dividing it into aspects that illuminate these characteristics and give rise to testable hypotheses regarding the inner workings of the brain and mind. The chapter headings are therefore: 1) The Idea (the problem of consciousness), 2) The Story So Far (a history of the theories of mind), 3) The Child (early consciousness), 4) The Junkie (pain, euphoria, neuro-effective and neurophysiological chemicals), 5) The Nightmare (loss of consciousness), 6) The Depressive (highs and lows of consciousness), 7) The Human Condition (emotions and a theory of consciousness), 8) The Answer (the wrap up). Certainly much of the material, especially in the first two chapters, is a recap of the work of others. This is the usual approach to a topic about which one wishes to introduce new information; first you inform your reader of what has been done and by whom and how it fits with what you are yourself doing. Much of this may be new to those who have not studied anything about mind-brain research, but for those who have the names will be familiar: Edelman, Aleksander, Chalmers, Crick and Koch, Calvin, and Dennett, among others. In line with this style of authorship, most of the bibliography Greenfield cites is in the form of articles in prestigious professional journals from the 1980s to the 1990s (the book was published in 2000). One finds here periodicals like Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Neurology, Journal of Cell Science, etc. Most of these entries will probably not interest any but the professional in the field. Fortunately the author has done most of the work herself and puts the research into understandable perspective for the amateur. For myself, I found some of the information very interesting, even useful in my profession. I had heard of and even seen ecupuncture use to control some types of pain, but had felt that it was all a placebo effect.

Read if your brain does indeed have a private life

Not for those who, like some of the other reviewers, have an IQ of less than 85. This book attempts to make an American audience THINK...which is an audacious undertaking, given how most folks do not want to USE their brain... & they complain when someone else DOES! This is a masterful book.

The brain is a rather complex thing!

There is no "gene for", no "brain region for",and no "transmitter chemical for" a particular humanbehaviour or cognitive function. I.e. we willnot be able to express a sophisticated brain functionin terms of one feature alone, Susan Greenfield tells us. Rather, genes, chemicals and brain regions work together in a complex and highly intricate way to produce a behaviour. So, the book offers no swift catchphrases, as those so often seen on TV, e.g.: "The chemical dopamine is a molecule for pleasure, all human activity therefore evolves around obtaining higher dopamine levels in the brain". Instead, Susan Greenfield offers a thorough (and,must be said, sometimes complex bordering something almost selfcontradictory)neuroscientific explanation of mental states,the effect of drugs, how emotion will ebb and flow ininverse relation to selfconsciousness etc. I was particular pleased with the chapter on the effects of drugs in the brain. Here I really felt I learned somethingabout what is really going on inside a brain under the influence of drugs. Which also gives an inside into the workingsof a normal brain. However I wasn't completely swayed by her explanations concerning consciousness I.e.: Emotions are found to be "the most basic form of consciousness" Greenfield states,but how does that help us to know what consciousness IS?The book could have digged deeper here.Still, it is highly recommended.-Simon

There's more to the brain than the mind

This is a must for those wanting to add an up-to-date and readable book containing `mind' or `brain' in the title to their collection. Greenfield argues for consciousness to be more than mind, and proposes that we look to our emotional life for clues as to its emergence and continuity. In a crude nutshell, we are asked to believe that "the interaction between body and brain IS consciousness" and that whereas the mind needs the brain (alone ?), consciousness requires the neuronal brain plus its modulatory interaction with the hormonal system(s) of the body as a whole. (i.e., the brain is necessary, but not sufficient to produce consciousness).In a little more detail, although this volume provides the reader with an attempt to distinguish mind from consciousness, we are at the same time given a model continuum with `emotion' at one end and `mind' at the other; the goal of neuroscience (of whatever flavour its researcher) being to uncover the `Rosetta Stone' of the physical brain Vs emotion/consciousness. Starting with the thesis that emotions are suppressed by logic and reason, we are taken on a tour of metaphysical models of mind-brain coexistence and a useful series of historical analogies of self-hood persistence are drawn from the literature. What an agent does (behaviourally) is rightly in my view distinguished from what it might think or understand (concerning its situation), but Greenfield pushes for the further dependence upon consciousness to underly true understanding. What of consciousness itself, here as elswhere in the book, there is little new. The middle chapters concerning specific brain regions, their known behavioural correlates, and their modulation by the use of both clinical and street drugs are well written in a style accessible to the general reader, but perhaps cloud the formation of the `bigger picture'. However, such might be beyond the remit of this volume, requiring a different vocabulary and indeed a couple more chapters. The standard amine neurotransitter stories are appropriately given, but I am left wondering whether we have really come thereby to know how (as opposed to that) "feelings influence thoughts" before before turning to how "thoughts influence feelings" ? (concluding Ch.6). Discusing the ways in which thoughts and words might give rise to our emotional sensations is `difficult' because we are unclear as to `the physical stimuli and triggers [which] impinge upon the senses' - but this begs the question as if other behaviours such as sensorymotor transformations are already understood. Even if emotions are found to be "the most basic form of consciousness" as Greenfield contends, I'm not convinced that such a view helps me to know what consciousness IS (either for myself or another). Indeed, I'm rather afraid that this might result in the term dissappearing following the phenomenon being explained away [cf the illiminative materialism of Churchland]. It is only in the

Elegant theory, excellent writing, but a bit vague

This is excellent science writing. Many complex ideas are made understandable through clear analogies, while clearly pointing out the limitations of those analogies. The author tries to describe how brain states relate to states of experience; by finding common ground between many extreme experiences. Her elegant (if not original) thesis is that patterns of connectivity between massive numbers of neurons determine our overall state of consciousness. States vary, according to this theory, by how large the interconnected clusters of neurons are, and how rapidly they turnover from one cluster to another. Neuroses and depression reflect a kind of stuckness in wide scale static networks of associations. States of intense sensation all involve "losing our mind" in the sense of dismantling these widespread networks and replacing them with many small networks that rapidly switch from one to another, keeping us trapped in the here and now. We peer into the life of drug addicts, the fearful, the schizophrenic, and small children, to find some remarkable similarities in their experience. Then we see how the experience is so different for the depressed and those in pain. By comparing these extremes, and comparing the extremes to the way we normally feel, the authors' thesis begins to come to life.This is a fascinating attempt at a framework for relating brain states and states of consciousness that has a lot of potential, but is clearly still a skeleton. It does, however, make a number of testable predictions discussed in the final chapters, which distinguish this book still further from the usual speculations about how the brain produces conscious experience.On the other hand, in some ways, there is more missing than presented here. The theory of neural connectivity is very vague and makes no inroads to explaining just why a complex neural network should produce a mind. The implication is almost that arbitrary complexity should suffice, but this clearly isn't the case. Sensory networks seem to possess qualities of experience, while motor networks do not. There is something more in the networks that give rise to higher mental qualities than just complexity itself, and the author is very vague in this critical area.