I found this book very interesting. It discuses, neuroplasticity, most specifically the use of directed thinking to change the chemical structure of the brain. Dr. Schwartz goes into detail his Four Steps method for treatment of OCD, which pulls heavily from Buddhist meditation.

This book was very informational, with a strong emphasis on the specific science involved, but was not jargon-heavy, and could be followed by an interested reader. It gives great background on the history and development of Neuroscience. It is also quite broad, touching on topics from Buddhism, Philosophy, Quantum Physics, learning disorders, the beginnings of PETA and the first scientist ever charged with animal cruelty. As I said, the scope of the book is vast.

Dr. Schwartz comes down quite hard on the scientific community and materlism, as pertains to science in particular, as the a fundamental problem in modern society.

Neuroplasticity itself is a relatively new idea in the science community, and one that isn't always embraced, but Schwartz does well to explain the details and background of this fascinating development. The ramifications of neuroplasticity are vast, and will not be fully understood for quite some time.

3,5

On the whole I have to say this book sucked. I am willing to give credit where credit is due in that it offers a really good overview of the history surrounding the idea of neuroplasticity. It recounts the studies and experiments performed by the major players in what was by the end of the last century representative of a massive paradigm shift within the neuroscience and neurobiological communities - namely that adult brains are not immutable and cortical remapping in response to physiological insults (strokes, hemispherectomies, etc) is a fact rather than wishful thinking and covered the additional fact that the adult human brain does indeed form new neurons based on research by Fred Gage at the Salk Institute. But that's where my praise stops. In the mid-2000's I attended a lecture by Pasko Rakic, MD, PhD. Dorys McConnell Duberg Professor of Neuroscience and Professor of Neurology at Yale University. He was responsible for describing the proliferation of neural stem cells from the subventicular area of the human brain. It would be difficult to find a man with a more distinguished career in 20th century neuroscience - he is perhaps the biggest skeptics of adult neurogenesis meanfully contributing to repair etc. The "Mind and the Brain" ended up being in support of psuedoscience and a half cocked idea of reviving some form of cartesian dualism, thinly masked by scientific jargon that, not surprisingly involved the language of quantum mechanics. I found the mechanisms discussed for making the case for "self-directed change" and "free-will" unconvincing at the very best. It wasn't science, it was philosophy, a respectable discipline in its own right but conjecture shouldn't be passed off as legitimate science and here we are well over a decade following the publication of this book, and the ideas put forth in the last three chapters have not born much fruit. Everything was going fine until about chapter 8 when Schwartz decides to go off the rails on a crazy train, hard.

If you would like to know more about the human brain, I highly recommend this book. I read it a number of years ago after hearing the author interviewed and I have remembered it ever since. Jeffrey M. Schwartz, MD, is a research psychiatrist at UCLA. His descriptions of how the brain is formed will astound you! The stories of how nerves are reclaimed and reused (in the event of a limb amputation, for example) are amazing. Did you know that violinists have a much larger portion of their brain devoted to their fingers? Much of the book is based upon experiments using PET (positron emission tomography) which allows the researchers to see what is occurring chemically in the brain at the same time that the patient is describing it. Ironically, Schwartz himself believes that there is much more to the conscious mind than simply the physical wiring. He uses the Buddhist notion of "mindfulness" in explaining what seems to be there and his interpretation I found pretty convincing. He also demonstrates that the idea that our brain is largely complete in youth and rigid after that is untrue and the adaptability of the brain (neuroplasticity) is available throughout our lives. Very hopeful and optimistic though some of the animal experiments may make some people squirm.

Truthfully, I didn't have intention of writing a review of this book but considering there's something that might safely be called a debate between the book's apologists on the one side and its adversaries on the other side, I thought I might as well write the review. What follows, however, is just a simple advantages/disadvantages recapitulation of the book's claims and its internal structure.

Disadvantages

(1) With all due respect to Schwartz's treating of OCD patients and to the patients themselves, it's a rather mild mental condition (in terms of its dangerousness to the patient and his environment, and the social impact on the patient) (Seligman et al., 2002), as compared to other mental conditions, such as psychopathy with its instrumental and reactive aggression (Blair, 2006), Autism Spectrum Disorder with its non-understanding of emphatical emotions and severe social apprehension (Baron-Cohen, 1995, 2004, 2013), or schizophrenia with its (plausible) delusions and mental disintegration (Liberman, 2008). The author extrapolates his treatment of the OCD patients and their improvement, and proclaims that the power of attention, and thus the power of mind, reshapes neural circuitry and cortical maps. There are two things fundamentally wrong with his claim. First, it doesn't take the said reshaping (how would it even look like?) to mitigate the OCD symptoms. Through repetitive exercises, the brain can start functioning more adequately (but it doesn't change its internal structure) (Churchland P.S., 1986; Damásio, 1995). Second, extrapolating data (and drawing conclusions from it) is something any scientist should be cautious about due to each mental condition's different causes, epidemiology and management, not to mention healthy population's yet another, individual case.

(2a) Mind/body (mind-brain) dualism is a concept that deserves a very careful scrutiny. If true, that is, if the mind and body were distinct and separable entities, any damage to the brain wouldn't affect the mind (which, needless to say, is non-physical). The reality is quite the opposite. Take these two cases as points of reference and further interest. Famously described (Damásio, 2005; Blair, 2006; Stanovich, 2009; Baron-Cohen, 2011) Phineas Gage, who suffered an accident in which an iron rod punctured through his head and damaged much of his brain's left frontal lobe, exhibited mental changes in his behavior after the accident. Another example is of a man, who, due to growing tumors in his brain, exhibited paedophilic tendencies, which vanished after the surgical removal of the tumors (Eagleman, 2015). If the mind-body dualism was true, such physical conditions wouldn't transcend the non-physical nature of the mind.

(2b) Another case against the proposed dualism derives from a biological instance of human development. Considering that we begin our existence as purely physical entities and since nothing outside of the physical domain is added later on in the course of our development, then, all in all, we must end up being fully developed physical beings.

(2c) Logic (and Occam's razor) dictates that if a phenomenon can be explained by existing referential categories, then adding other categories can be considered superfluous.

(3) Repetitive mentions of quantum physics doesn't make a book more scientific. It's been shown that making references to physics or mathematics (in reality, superficially or needlessly) gives a semblance of scholarship (Sokal and Bricmont, 1999) but the same quantum physics produces arguments against Schwartz's claims: any manifestation of a non-physical mind on the brain would entail the violation of physical laws, such as the conservation of energy, since some external source of energy would be responsible for the interaction between the non-physical and the physical.

(4) The Mind and the Brain doesn't observe established methodological standards for writing a book/an article. That a scientist considers himself a maverick and tries to unravel some mysteries and semi-revelatory truths before our eyes, doesn't mean he doesn't have to follow certain creeds of scientific research, especially taking into account that he draws from and writes about multiple fields of human knowledge, such as psychology, sensu largo neuroscience, philosophy, ethics and so forth. There are, to be perfectly fair to Schwartz, endnotes at the end of the book, but the phrases there only vaguely refer to certain articles/books he draws his assertions from. If I were to be mean, I'd say Schwartz's blunt references are exactly meant to cause confusion and create ambiguity. Insofar as proper references, which are nowhere to be found in the book, psychology books, for instance, follow methodological standards of putting their sources in brackets right behind a sentence they refer to, e.g. (Schwartz, 2002). Other books (legal, for example, which I'm most familiar with) contain footnotes that make a reference to a particular page of a particular book/article. In this regard, Schwartz's standards are unique, to say the least. There's also an oddity of writing in singular form, which, normally, isn't necessarily desirable, but I'll just blame it on Bagley's apparent minute input; that's also why I refer to the book as Schwartz's only (in this, I just follow his steps).

Advantages

(1) There are other books out there.

This is a book about plasticity in the brain. Schwartz treated OCD patients in a way that was entirely novel at the time and now has become the standard. Although most of his examples are about OCD, the neuroscience base that he writes about is applicable across many disorders or poorly organized orders. For instance, in one section he talks about getting something stuck in your mind; the example is of someone needing to wash her hands until they bled, but his solutions were equally useful if you have an earworm song that won't quit resonating.

Like a lot of popsci, your mileage will vary. You may need to skip chapters, or read up on terms that aren't fully explained, based on your neuroscience background. I found the tale of how some patients demonstrated neural plasticity through behavioral changes that led to increased happiness quite compelling.

Sterren gingen op en neer tussen 3 en 5, vandaar 4. Uiteindelijk is de gedachtentrein vrije wil, quantum realiteit een erg interessante!

At first, I was like:



And then I got to the second half of the book and I was like:



Because QUANTUM PHYSICS IS WEIRD, Y'ALL.

And then I ended up with a little bit of this:



So, yes. Super interesting read if you'd like to understand why and how attention or the "mental force" of your mind can actually change the brain's structure.

This is an excellent book. I learned how people with severe conditions can sometimes overcome the debilitating effects of stroke, OCD, and so on.

Toward the end of the book, the author describes how quantum mechanics may be a key component to volition and free will. But, I am not completely convinced of the connection with quantum mechanics. I understand how the act of observation of an atom can resolve its (previously probabilistic) state. And the analogy between "observation" and "attention" is striking. But doesn't this just beg the question, what is the mechanism for the mind/brain to show attention to something?

I read this book back in Junior year in college and it made me pursue neuroscience in graduate school. As a scientist, I highly recommend this book for anyone who is interested in the brain (the the mind), because it is full with neuroscience and neuroplasticity historical evidence and scientific studies. This book is very informative and full of knowledge - a great source to feed my hunger :) The story was written with great transition and the author made neuroscience and science more interesting by putting real, dramatic stories to the book, for example the story of Silver Spring, monkeys, Dr. Taub, his fake student from PETA, and other interesting evidence how neuroscientists in the past went through difficult times before they established valuable knowledge and set the path for us current scientists to do more research and study for the greater good of human mind. LOVE this book! :)

Easily one of the best books on neuro plasticity as a concept. The book passionately avers that free will is very much in practice. The mind has free will. And the mind can control the brain. And that for treating mental disorders like OCD this concept can be of great practical utility.

Understood about William James who was the original proponent of this thought over 130 years ago. The relationship of consciousness with quantum mechanics is another fascinatingly told story.

Finally all of this comes back to the original philosophy of Gautama Buddha who had explained that volition is the key and restraint is excellent.

Exceptional research. Go for it.

Chapter 8 on the Quantum Brain... blew my mind. Worth the read just for those few pages. Cheers to adult neuroplasticity