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Title: Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are by Joseph Ledoux ISBN: 0-14-200178-3 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 28 January, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (12 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Interesting, Fascinating, but Hard Work
Comment: LeDoux is a fine neuroscientist who is attempting to explain an extremely difficult subject.
However, "The Synaptic Self" is a very hard book to read, compared to other "popular science" books. It doesn't always explain using easy-to-follow examples, and it is a very academic book.
On the other hand, I believe that academics in the same area who read the book will probably point and laugh. It's probably not academic enough.
The bottom line - this is a very interesting book - and I would recommend it for anyone who has enough free time to go through it. Whoever does so should find it a very rewarding, albeit difficult task.If you are looking for a lightweight introduction into the realms of cognition and neuroscience, look elsewhere - I would suggest reading "How The Mind Works" and "The Language Instinct" by Pinker, and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" by Oliver Sacks. Read them first, and LeDoux later on when you grasp the idea and want to go into further details.
Rating: 5
Summary: LeDoux's Synaptic Self is wonderful !
Comment: LeDoux starts his first chapter with a quote from Bart Simpson: "Dad, what is the mind? Is it just a system of impulses or something tangible?" My kind of humor.
LeDoux's Synaptic Self is a wonderful book loaded with clear understandable explanations and insights (his wife, a "fantastic writer," assisted) on how the brain works based on the most current neuroscience (e.g., how neurons/synapses/neurotransmitters/neuro modulators work/don't work, implicit/explicit learning/memory mechanism explanations, nature/nurture considerations, the "mental trilogy" of cognition/emotion/motivation, and much more). The book's bottom-line, he writes, is "you are your synapses." With this book, "know thyself," and even fix thyself, seem more attainable. It's a book I'll reread/study for a while.
The following are quotes from the last chapter:
Life requires many brain functions, functions require systems, and systems are made of synaptically connected neurons. We all have the same brain systems, and the number of neurons in each brain system is more or less the same in each of us as well. However, the particular way those neurons are connected is distinct, and that uniqueness, in short, is what makes us who we are.
What is remarkable is that synapses in all of these systems are capable of being modified by experience... Emotion systems [as an example]... are programmed by evolution to respond to some stimuli, so-called innate or unconditioned stimuli, like predators or pain. However, many of the things that elicit emotions in us or motivate us to act in certain ways are not preprogrammed into our brains as part of our species heritage but have to be learned by each of us. Emotion systems learn by association - when an emotionally arousing stimulus is present, other stimuli that are also present acquire emotion-arousing qualities (classical conditioning), and actions that bring you in contact with emotionally desirable stimuli or protect you from harmful or unpleasant ones are learned (instrumental conditioning.) As in all other types of learning, emotional associations are formed by synaptic changes in the brain system involved in processing the stimuli. Some of the brain's plastic emotional processors include systems involved in detecting and responding to danger, finding and consuming food, identifying potential mates and having sex.
Because synaptic plasticity occurs in most if not all brain systems, one might be tempted to conclude that the majority of brain systems are memory systems. But [as LeDoux argues in chapter 5], a better way of thinking about this is that the ability to be modified by experience is a characteristic of many brain systems, regardless of their specific function. Brain systems, in other words, were for the most part not designed as storage devices - plasticity is not their main job assignment. They were instead designed to perform particular tasks like processing sounds or sights, detecting food or danger or mates, controlling actions, and so on. Plasticity is simply a feature that helps them do their job better.
Functions depend on connections: break the connections and you lose the functions...
From LeDoux's Synaptic Self
Rating: 5
Summary: The Psychophysical Problem
Comment: The psychophysical problem is long standing and, probably, intractable. This book is an excellent introduction to the subject, bringing together strands from philosophy, neurology, psychology - and common sense based on observations.
We have a corporeal body. It is a physical entity, subject to all the laws of physics. Yet, we experience ourselves, our internal lives, external events in a manner which provokes us to postulate the existence of a corresponding, non-physical ontos, entity. This corresponding entity ostensibly incorporates a dimension of our being which, in principle, can never be tackled with the instruments and the formal logic of science.
A compromise was proposed long ago: the soul is nothing but our self awareness or the way that we experience ourselves. But this is a flawed solution. It is flawed because it assumes that the human experience is uniform, unequivocal and identical. It might well be so - but there is no methodologically rigorous way of proving it. We have no way to objectively ascertain that all of us experience pain in the same manner or that pain that we experience is the same in all of us. This is even when the causes of the sensation are carefully controlled and monitored.
A scientist might say that it is only a matter of time before we find the exact part of the brain which is responsible for the specific pain in our gedankenexperiment. Moreover, will add our gedankenscientist, in due course, science will even be able to demonstrate a monovalent relationship between a pattern of brain activity in situ and the aforementioned pain. In other words, the scientific claim is that the patterns of brain activity ARE the pain itself.
Such an argument is, prima facie, inadmissible. The fact that two events coincide (even if they do so forever) does not make them identical. The serial occurrence of two events does not make one of them the cause and the other the effect, as is well known. Similarly, the contemporaneous occurrence of two events only means that they are correlated. A correlate is not an alter ego. It is not an aspect of the same event. The brain activity is what appears WHEN pain happens - it by no means follows that it IS the pain itself.
A stronger argument would crystallize if it was convincingly and repeatedly demonstrated that playing back these patterns of brain activity induces the same pain. Even in such a case, we would be talking about cause and effect rather than identity of pain and its correlate in the brain.
This vade mecum is unlikely to end the debate but it provides a firm, fact based, evidence oriented foundation for its contnuance. Sam Vaknin, author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited".
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Title: The EMOTIONAL BRAIN: THE MYSTERIOUS UNDERPINNINGS OF EMOTIONAL LIFE by Joseph Ledoux ISBN: 0684836599 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 27 March, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness by Antonio R. Damasio ISBN: 0156010755 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 10 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Mapping the Mind by Rita Carter ISBN: 0520224612 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: February, 2000 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain by Antonio Damasio ISBN: 0156028719 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Descartes' Error : Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain by Antonio R. Damasio ISBN: 0380726475 Publisher: Avon Pub. Date: 01 November, 1995 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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