Description
Book SynopsisMinding the Social Brain Virtual Foundation StoneFor the initiative to fund a decade-long BRAIN ACTIVITY MAP BAM as in OBAMAA generation of social neuroscientists uses acronyms to identify the structural neural networks revealed in the NIH Human Connectome Project. They know that a medial brain hub of nodal networks, the Default Mode (DM), uses most of the brain's activation energy. Responding to the unexpected, it adapts the brain's predictive capacity by learningmodifying its own synaptic structure. During syndrome formation in brain damage, depression, traumatic anxiety, or psychosis, the DM maintains familiar mental fantasy and reverieeven when its core networks should be processing new data for adaptive problem-solving. Alzheimer's disease decimates all the nodes of this hub. Just as industry alongside government generated our genome code, researchers worldwide in the private sector and government are already exploring how a brain's emergent property unifies its mind. Alert to
Trade ReviewBoth Freud and Kohut were strongly convinced that psychoanalysis had a great deal to offer for an understanding of the social structures we live in and the political forces that move our world. In undertaking a first attempt to understand social tendencies in a brain-mind format compatible with psychoanalysis, Dr. Harris has done groundbreaking work for a future psychoanalytic understanding of social syndromes. This is a book to be read and pondered by all those interested in neuropsychology, psychoanalysis and social justice. -- Sheldon Bach, PhD, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis
In this sophisticated and erudite volume, Jay Harris beautifully demonstrates the connections between neural structures and functions, on the one hand, and politics, history, religion and other social phenomena, on the other. He also shows how psychoanalytic or psychological concepts such as guilt, anxiety and conflict can emanate from and be mapped onto the workings and environment of the brain. Anyone looking for a serious high-end book in the rapidly evolving field of social neuroscience and its clinical applications will want to read this fascinating volume. -- Stanley B. Messer, PhD, Rutgers University
Every page is a treasure trove of novel and integrative ideas. Dr. Harris artfully draws from cutting edge neuroscience to contemporary culture; from classical psychoanalysis to social and political movements and back through the anatomy and chemistry of the brain. Looking for the neural substrates which link such things as mythology and history to developmental and quotidian human behaviors, this innovative thinker blazes new trails in our journey toward understanding where mind meets brain, creatively locating that junction within. -- Virginia L. Susman, MD, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College
Dr. Jay Harris has created a ‘Babette’s Feast’ for those of us interested in a more three-dimensional, integrative, non-reductionistic view of human beings and their psychiatric and socio-emotional predicaments. A masterful integration of brain, mind, and culture. Minding the Social Brain is a tour de force revealing our human-ness and a generous virtuosity in mapping neuron to neighborhood. -- Brian Koehler, PhD, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis; President, ISPS-US.
