Using a mix of experiential reportage, personal storytelling, and fresh scientific discovery, Steven Johnson
describes how the brain works -- its chemicals, structures, and subroutines -- and how these systems connect to
the day-to-day realities of individual lives. For a hundred years, he says, many of us have assumed that the most
powerful route to self-knowledge took the form of lying on a couch, talking about our childhoods. The possibility
entertained in this book is that you can follow another path, in which learning about the brain's mechanics can
widen one's self-awareness as powerfully as any therapy or meditation or drug.
In Mind Wide Open, Johnson embarks on this path as his own test subject, participating in a battery of attention
tests, learning to control video games by altering his brain waves, scanning his own brain with a $2 million fMRI
machine, all in search of a modern answer to the oldest of questions: who am I?
Along the way, Johnson explores how we "read" other people, how the brain processes frightening events
(and how we might rid ourselves of the scars those memories leave), what the neurochemistry is behind love and
sex, what it means that our brains are teeming with powerful chemicals closely related to recreational drugs, why
music moves us to tears, and where our breakthrough ideas come from.
Johnson's clear, engaging explanation of the physical functions of the brain reveals not only the broad strokes
of our aptitudes and fears, our skills and weaknesses and desires, but also the momentary brain phenomena that
a whole human life comprises. Why, when hearing a tale of woe, do we sometimes smile inappropriately, even if we
don't want to? Why are some of us so bad at remembering phone numbers but brilliant at recognizing faces? Why does
depression make us feel stupid?
To read Mind Wide Open is to rethink family histories, individual fates, and the very nature of the self, and to
see that brain science is now personally transformative -- a valuable tool for better relationships and better
living.