Steven Johnson: Mind Wide Open: Your Brain And The Neuroscience Of Everyday Life

A studious inquiry into the brain that doubles as a heady sort of self-help book, Mind Wide Open follows recent trails of neuroscience research to plumb personal ends. Noting the cultural ubiquity of phenomena like right- and left-brain division, adrenaline surges, and serotonin levels, author Steven Johnson tries to expand the pop-science language of the brain to increase awareness of how, what, and why we think. It's an ambitious undertaking, but Johnson's tight-leash approach always circles around a premise pitched to transform readers into better "users" of their brains. That language is pure Johnson (he made his name writing about technology), but so is the way it zooms in and pans out to account for science's logical additions to more ephemeral notions of self-awareness. To that end, Mind Wide Open surveys what is known about the brain's compartmentalized processes and how they react to the world around them. The book starts with an explication of "mindreading," the practice through which brains deduce what other brains are thinking by processing information communicated through gestures. In one of many participatory experiments, Johnson takes a test to measure the wealth of information translated by eye signals. The brain's analytical components grow frantic when trying to divine specific nuances of emotion, but more purely reactive parts recognize a startling amount of truth in the smallest details. Johnson digs into the small stuff—how real and fake smiles utilize different muscles, how post-spinning dizziness stems from the brain trying to reconcile conflicting information—and then sets it against an evolutionary backdrop. An engaging survey of humor starts with the tickle response and presents the desire to laugh as a social agent derived from infancy, when a baby's smile serves as a salve to parents who might otherwise be put out by the care that babies require. An illuminating sketch of the fear response shows how and why bad memories linger, while considerations of different types of thinking show how the brain prioritizes past and present stimuli in its myriad operations. The book's approachable tone veers toward patness on occasion, but Johnson's ritual of not taking anything for granted leaves scientific findings at the ready for everyday use. Mind Wide Open is a book about the brain, but it's more concerned with the brain's role in the mind, as well as the mind's role in the whole of the world.