Given the opportunity to watch the inner workings of his own brain, Steven Johnson jumps at the chance. He reveals the results in Mind Wide Open, an engaging and personal account of his foray into edgy brain science. In the 21st century, Johnson observes, we have become used to ideas such as "adrenaline rushes" and "serotonin levels," without really recognizing that complex neurobiology has become a commonplace thing to talk about. He sees recent laboratory revelations about the brain as crucial for understanding ourselves and our psyches in new, post-Freudian ways. Readers shy about slapping electrodes on their own temples can get a vicarious scientific thrill as Johnson tries out empathy tests, neurofeedback, and fMRI scans. The results paint a distinct picture of the author, and uncover general brain secrets at the same time. Memory, fear, love, alertness--all the multitude of states housed in our brains are shown to be the results of chemical and electrical interactions constantly fed and changed by input from our senses. Mind Wide Open both satisfies curiosity and provokes more questions, leaving readers wondering about their own gray matter. --Therese Littleton

From Publishers Weekly
It's the rare popular science book that not only gives the reader a gee-whiz glimpse at an emerging field, but also offers a guide for incorporating its new insights into one's own worldview. Johnson, the former editor of the Webzine Feed and author of the acclaimed Emergence (2001), does just that in his fascinating, engagingly written new survey. Applying what he calls "the `long-decay' test" to gauge the information's enduring relevance, he chooses a handful of current neuroscience concepts with the potential to transform our thinking about emotions, memories and consciousness. In a charming device, the writer subjects himself to the latest in neurological testing techniques, from biofeedback to the latest forms of MRI, and shares the insight he gains into the moment-by-moment workings of his own brain, from the adrenaline spike he gets from making jokes to his intense focus when composing sentences. The structure is fluid almost to a fault, as Johnson illustrates, elaborates on and returns to his view of the brain as a modular, associative network, "more like an orchestra than a soloist." He introduces the amygdala, for example, as a small region in the brain implicated in our ongoing, nearly automatic interpretation of the emotional states of others (called "mind reading"), a function impaired in autistic individuals. But the amygdala, the brain's source of "gut feelings," returns in the following chapter as important in encoding fearful memories, a connection that helps explain why fearful or traumatic memories are so much more tenacious and detailed than emotionally neutral ones. Always considerate of his audience, Johnson weaves disparate strands of brain research and theory smoothly into the narrative (only a concluding section on Freud's modern legacy feels like a tangent), which leaves readers' minds more open than they were. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Scientific American
"Over the past three decades, science has given us extraordinary glimpses of the brain's inner geography.... We now have the technology in place to picture that inner landscape, in itself as it really is. These are tools, in other words, for exploring our individual minds, with all their quirkiness and inimitability." Johnson, who was co-founder and editor of the Internet science magazine Feed, tested several of the tools and reports on what they and various experiments can reveal about such mental activities as mind reading, the fear response, neurofeedback, the roots of laughter and how one gets flashes of insight. "Knowing something about the brain's mechanics--and particularly your brain's mechanics--widens your own self-awareness as powerfully as any therapy or meditation or drug."

Editors of Scientific American (130)

From Bookmarks Magazine
What would you learn if you "could see what your brain looked like when it was remembering a long-forgotten childhood experience, or listening to a song, or conceiving a good idea?" The answer: a lot, but we still have much to discover about the complicated circuits run by experience, memory, emotion, and brain chemistry. This topic could have scared away non-scientists, but Johnson (a non-scientist) explains technical terms clearly and enthusiastically, using personal examples to illustrate key concepts. Some readers might question his claims; does a baby's crying result more from chemistry than emotion? Despite its uncertain conclusions and relevance to, say, PTSD, Mind Wide Open is an excellent introduction to the complex feedback system that defines our daily experiences. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
Journalist Johnson, whose Emergence (2001) explored collective behavior, here branches into another arena of emergent phenomena, our brains. Volunteering himself as a test subject, Johnson gallivants to a series of experimenters in neuroscience and wires his head up to their machines. Consciousness is explicitly not his topic; rather, Johnson hunts for neurochemical and physiological bases for feelings of conscious experience involving attention, emotion, and memory. Along the way, Johnson explains how the hormone oxytocin contributes to feelings of attachment; how new biofeedback technologies can help people rewire their brains; the science behind our ability to read other people's expressions; and how understanding brain chemistry may well lead to an understanding of dreams and phobias. Spreading a gospel to be curious about one's own mind, Johnson, aided by personal anecdotes about, for example, the length of his attention span, will snare even those unfamiliar with brain science. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
Steven Pinker Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of The Blank Slate and How the Mind Works Mind Wide Open is a lucid and engaging travelogue from the frontiers of human brain science. Steven Johnson has an eye for the most interesting new ideas in this exploding field, and he explains them with insight and gusto.

John Horgan author of The Undiscovered Mind and Rational Mysticism My brain was tickled, fascinated, moved, surprised, and above all entertained by Steven Johnson's delightful tour through modern neuroscience.

David Shenk author of The Forgetting: Alzheimer's: Portrait of an Epidemic What good is living in an age of discovery if only a handful of people understand what's being discovered? With this book, Steven Johnson builds an extraordinary bridge between today's trailblazing neuroscientists and the rest of us. His mind-opening and potentially life-changing insight is that virtually anyone can now learn enough about brain chemistry and circuitry to personally explore -- and perhaps even reshape -- the contours of his or her own mind.

Review
Howard Rheingold author of Smart Mobs Johnson's first-person account of the experiential and neuroscientific aspects of daily life is lucid, illuminating, entertaining, and thought-provoking. You'll find yourself thinking about thinking -- while you are thinking -- in a whole new way.

Howard Rheingold author of "Smart Mobs"
"Johnson's first-person account of the experiential and neuroscientific aspects of daily life is lucid, illuminating, entertaining, and thought-provoking. You'll find yourself thinking about thinking -- while you are thinking -- in a whole new way."

Book Description
BRILLIANTLY EXPLORING TODAY'S CUTTING-EDGE BRAIN RESEARCH, MIND WIDE OPEN IS AN UNPRECEDENTED JOURNEY INTO THE ESSENCE OF HUMAN PERSONALITY, ALLOWING READERS TO UNDERSTAND THEMSELVES AND THE PEOPLE IN THEIR LIVES AS NEVER BEFORE. 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.

Download Description
"BRILLIANTLY EXPLORING TODAY'S CUTTING-EDGE BRAIN RESEARCH, MIND WIDE OPEN IS AN UNPRECEDENTED JOURNEY INTO THE ESSENCE OF HUMAN PERSONALITY, ALLOWING READERS TO UNDERSTAND THEMSELVES AND THE PEOPLE IN THEIR LIVES AS NEVER BEFORE. 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?

About the Author
Steven Johnson is the author of Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, which was named as a finalist for the 2002 Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism and was a New York Times Notable Book of 2001, as well as a "best book of the year" in Discover, Esquire, The Washington Post, and The Village Voice. He writes the monthly "Emerging Technology" column for Discover and is a contributing editor at Wired. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, The New Yorker, Harper's, and The Guardian. He is also the author of Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate. Johnson holds a B.A. in semiotics from Brown University and an M.A. in English from Columbia. He lives in New York City with his wife and two sons.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Jonathan Weiner - The New York Times

This is an entertaining and instructive ride inward to a place that looks less familiar the better we get to know it. As Johnson says, ''It's a jungle in there.'' ''If a lion could talk we would not understand him,'' Wittgenstein said. Mind Wide Open takes the point closer to home. If every part of our brain could talk, we would not understand ourselves.

Publishers Weekly

It's the rare popular science book that not only gives the reader a gee-whiz glimpse at an emerging field, but also offers a guide for incorporating its new insights into one's own worldview. Johnson, the former editor of the Webzine Feed and author of the acclaimed Emergence (2001), does just that in his fascinating, engagingly written new survey. Applying what he calls "the `long-decay' test" to gauge the information's enduring relevance, he chooses a handful of current neuroscience concepts with the potential to transform our thinking about emotions, memories and consciousness. In a charming device, the writer subjects himself to the latest in neurological testing techniques, from biofeedback to the latest forms of MRI, and shares the insight he gains into the moment-by-moment workings of his own brain, from the adrenaline spike he gets from making jokes to his intense focus when composing sentences. The structure is fluid almost to a fault, as Johnson illustrates, elaborates on and returns to his view of the brain as a modular, associative network, "more like an orchestra than a soloist." He introduces the amygdala, for example, as a small region in the brain implicated in our ongoing, nearly automatic interpretation of the emotional states of others (called "mind reading"), a function impaired in autistic individuals. But the amygdala, the brain's source of "gut feelings," returns in the following chapter as important in encoding fearful memories, a connection that helps explain why fearful or traumatic memories are so much more tenacious and detailed than emotionally neutral ones. Always considerate of his audience, Johnson weaves disparate strands of brain research and theory smoothly into the narrative (only a concluding section on Freud's modern legacy feels like a tangent), which leaves readers' minds more open than they were. (Feb.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews