A User's Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain - Hardcover

Ratey M.D., John J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679453091 ISBN 13: 9780679453093

Publisher: Pantheon, 2001

Synopsis

For the first time ever, discoveries in our under-
standing of the brain are changing anthropology, linguistics,
philosophy, and psychology--indeed, the brain itself may become a catalyst for transforming the very nature of these inquiries.
In A User's Guide to the Brain, Dr. John Ratey, best-selling co-author of Driven to Distraction, explains in lucid detail and with perfect clarity the basic structure and chemistry of the brain: how
its systems shape our perceptions, emotions, actions, and reactions; how possession of this knowledge can enable us to more fully understand and improve our lives; and how the brain
responds to the guidance of its user. He draws on examples from his own practice, from research, and from everyday life to
illuminate aspects of the brain's functioning, among them
prenatal and early childhood development; the perceptual
systems; the processes of consciousness, memory, emotion, and language; and the social brain.
As the best means for explaining the dynamic interactions of the brain, Ratey offers as a metaphor the four "theaters" of exploration: 1) the act of perception; 2) the filters of attention, consciousness, and cognition; 3) the array of options employed by the brain--memory, emotion, language, movement--to transform information into function; and 4) behavior and identity. Ratey
succeeds not only in giving us a compelling portrait of the brain's infinite flexibility and unpredictability but also in demonstrating how our very understanding of the brain affects who we are.

About this title

About the Author

John J. Ratey, M.D., is associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is the co-author of Driven to Distraction, Answers to Distraction, and Shadow Syndromes. He lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

From the Back Cover

"The brain is subject to the same kinds of influences and dysfunctions as other organs. Like a set of muscles, it responds to use and disuse by either growing and remaining vital or decaying, and thus, for the first time, we are learning to see mental weaknesses as physical systems in need of training and practice. The brain is a dynamic, highly sensitive yet robust system that may adapt, for better or worse, to almost any element of its environment. If we are going to set about training our brains to succeed in the world, we certainly need to learn about the various factors that can influence brain functions."

--From A User's Guide to the Brain

From the Inside Flap

t time ever, discoveries in our under-
standing of the brain are changing anthropology, linguistics,
philosophy, and psychology--indeed, the brain itself may become a catalyst for transforming the very nature of these inquiries.
In A User's Guide to the Brain, Dr. John Ratey, best-selling co-author of Driven to Distraction, explains in lucid detail and with perfect clarity the basic structure and chemistry of the brain: how
its systems shape our perceptions, emotions, actions, and reactions; how possession of this knowledge can enable us to more fully understand and improve our lives; and how the brain
responds to the guidance of its user. He draws on examples from his own practice, from research, and from everyday life to
illuminate aspects of the brain's functioning, among them
prenatal and early childhood development; the perceptual
systems; the processes of consciousness, memory, emotion, and language; and the social brain.
As the best

Reviews

The recent feats of neuroscientists in penetrating the secrets of the brain have unfortunately been shrouded in an opaque technical vocabulary. Harvard psychiatrist Ratey translates those discoveries into the common idiom, thus allowing nonspecialists to peer into the brain's complex inner workings. The metaphor of four mental theaters clears away much of the complexity and renders comprehensible the process by which raw perception passes into consciousness, then into language and memory, and ultimately into personality and introspection. But to understand fully how the brain works, we need to see how it breaks down: in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), for instance, the malfunction of pleasure neurotransmitters indirectly reveals their role in normal brain activity. Ratey offers hope that psychological disorders resistant to traditional therapies may yield to new approaches premised on a deeper understanding of brain dynamics. Far more than a map of the brain's exotic jungles, this study can serve as a life-enriching guide for keeping the richest mental fields in cultivation. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

New developments in brain research seem to be constantly announced these days, so a competent description of the latest results for the lay reader is always welcome. Ratey, a specialist in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, organizes his material by functional categoryDdevelopment, perception, attention, memory, emotion, language, and socialization. The "Four Theaters" of the subtitle don't appear until the penultimate chapter, where the metaphor is confusingly mixed with that of the brain as a river. The final chapter, "Care and Feeding," makes the expected suggestions for keeping the brain sharp: physical and mental exercise, good nutrition, and the positive impact of spirituality on mental health. Pierce J. Howard's The Owner's Manual for the Brain: Everyday Applications from Mind-Brain Research (Bard Pr., 2000. 2d ed.) is a better choice, although A User's Guide would be an acceptable addition for larger public libraries.DMary Ann Hughes, Neill P.L., Pullman, WA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1
DEVELOPMENT

She was doing it again. That young woman who periodically showed up dressed in a Western shirt and kerchief was standing in front of the automatic sliding doors at the Safeway supermarket. She'd look intently straight ahead, take five abrupt steps toward the doors, and try to restrain herself from walking through until they had fully opened. Sometimes she couldn't stop herself and nearly slammed right into the glass. Other times she'd wait long enough and then lunge through. Regardless, she'd back out and do it again. And again. Regular shoppers at the Phoenix, Arizona, store would hesitate beside her, then scurry past, eyeing her while trying not to stare. Once inside they'd shake their heads and make the usual comments: "Must be insane." They didn't know that Temple Grandin would go on to earn a doctorate in animal sciences and become an internationally recognized expert in animal handling. Or that she was autistic.

Temple had a normal birth, but by the time she was six months old she'd stiffen at her mother's touch and claw to free herself from her mother's hug. Soon she could not stand the feeling of other skin touching hers. A ringing telephone and a car driving by her house while a conversation was going on inside caused such severe confusion and hurt in the toddler's ears that she would tantrum, hitting whoever was within reach.

When she was three the doctors said that Temple had "brain damage." Her parents hired a stern governess, who structured the child's day around physical exercise and repetitive play such as "marching band." Occasionally the routine allowed Temple to focus on what she was doing, even speak. She taught herself to escape the stimuli around her, which caused pain in her overly sensitive nervous system, by daydreaming in pictures of places far away. By the time she reached high school she had made great progress. She could handle some of the academic subjects, and sometimes she could control her hypersensitive reactions to the chaos around her, primarily by shutting down to reduce the constant anxiety and fear. This made the other kids regard her as cold and aloof. She grew agonizingly lonely and would often tantrum or engage in pranks to combat her feelings of rejection. The school expelled her.

When she was sixteen Temple's parents sent her to an aunt's cattle ranch in Arizona. The rigid daily schedule of physical work helped her focus. She became fixated on the cattle chute, a large machine with two big metal plates that would squeeze a cow's sides. The high pressure apparently relaxed the animals, calming them enough for a vet to examine them. She visualized a squeeze machine for herself to give her the tactile stimulation she craved but couldn't get from human contact because the stimulation from physical closeness to another person was too intense, like a tidal wave engulfing her.
By this time Temple and her doctors had realized that she had a photographic memory. She was an autistic savant. When she returned to a special school for gifted children with emotional difficulties--the only school option left--her advisors allowed her to build a human squeeze machine. The project got her hooked on learning mechanical engineering and mathematics and on problem-solving, and she excelled at them all. She built a prototype, and would climb into it and use a lever to control the degree and duration of the pressure on her body. Afterward, she would feel relieved, more empathic, and more in touch with feelings of love and caring, even more tolerant of human touch. She started controlled experiments with the device and became skilled in research and lab techniques--which provided the impetus to apply to college.

Temple's state of hyperarousal and her inability to manage environmental stimuli impaired her ability to cope with the normal surroundings of her family or peers. The repetitive exercises as a child, the squeeze machine, and her academic successes gradually gave her the ability to control her offending behavior. Yet by her late twenties she still had had no success in creating social relationships. She was in a constant state of stage fright. She would get so anxious about approaching someone that she would literally race up and knock the person over, unable to restrain her muscles as she got emotionally energized. If she did manage to stop in time she would stand collar to collar, talking three inches from the person's face, an instant turnoff.
Then Temple put it all together. Walking up to someone in a socially acceptable way was the same as approaching the automatic doors at the supermarket. Both had to be done at the same relaxed pace. So she started showing up at the Safeway. She practiced approaching the doors for hours on end, until the process became automatic. The exercise helped. She found that she could approach people properly if she visualized herself approaching the doors. The doors were like a physical map; they provided a concrete visual picture of an abstract idea about approaching social interactions carefully.

Temple used another rehearsal technique to learn how to negotiate with people, a stressful interaction that usually sent her reeling. She read the New York Times's accounts of the Camp David peace talks conducted by President Jimmy Carter with Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Israel's Menachem Begin. She read every word and memorized them at once; being a savant came in handy. She played the conversations over and over again in her brain, like watching an internal videotape, and used them to guide her own conduct when negotiating with real people.

Today Temple Grandin, at fifty-one, leads a fulfilling professional and social life. It is twenty-five years since her training in front of the Safeway doors, and she has learned to pay attention to certain stimuli while ignoring others so that she does not become overly aroused. She also takes low doses of an antidepressant drug that alleviates her pent-up discomfort even better than the squeeze machine.

Temple resorted to a host of unusual practices to rewire her faulty brain circuits in order to control her conduct. She developed the circuits that enabled her to approach the supermarket doors, and then used these newly trained circuits to help position herself with relation to other people. She mastered each technique with practice, made it automatic, and then applied the newly imprinted pattern to other cognitive skills. Temple developed in adulthood the brain circuits her physical childhood development did not provide.

The brain is not a computer that simply executes genetically predetermined programs. Nor is it a passive gray cabbage, victim to the environmental influences that bear upon it. Genes and environment interact to continually change the brain, from the time we are conceived until the moment we die. And we, the owners--to the extent that our genes allow it--can actively shape the way our brains develop throughout the course of our lives. There is a great ongoing debate between different schools of neuroscientists as to whether the brain is merely a "ready-to-respond-to-environment" machine, an idea championed by a group who identify themselves as "connectionists," and those who would say that the brain is genetically made up of "ready-to-access" modules that the environment merely stimulates. However, the majority of neuroscientists see a hybrid, where the broad outlines of the brain's development are under genetic control, while the fine-tuning is up to the interaction of brain and environment.

Certainly, much of the course of our brains' development is determined while we are fetuses and young children. But as we will see, there are many other factors that can alter the process--in pregnancy, childhood, adulthood, and old age. A father's smile, exercise before the workday, a game of chess in the retirement home--everything affects development, and development is a lifelong process.

We are not prisoners of our genes or our environment. Poverty, alienation, drugs, hormonal imbalances, and depression don't dictate failure. Wealth, acceptance, vegetables, and exercise don't guarantee success. Our own free will may be the strongest force directing the development of our brains, and therefore our lives. As Temple's experience shows, the adult brain is both plastic and resilient, and always eager to learn. Experiences, thoughts, actions, and emotions actually change the structure of our brains. By viewing the brain as a muscle that can be weakened or strengthened, we can exercise our ability to determine who we become. Indeed, once we understand how the brain develops, we can train our brains for health, vibrancy, and longevity. Barring a physical illness, there's no reason that we can't stay actively engaged into our nineties.

Research on the brain's development has been fast and furious in this decade. The subject has become so popular that in the last few years it has rated a cover story in Time (three times), Newsweek (twice), and Life, as well as in other major magazines. New imaging technologies and scores of studies are providing enormous insight into ways to help the brain develop in babies, children, and adults, even in fetuses in the womb. Of course, there is also the chance here for misdirection.

The research has even prompted political action at the highest levels of government. In April 1997, Hillary Clinton hosted an all-day White House scientific conference, an unusual event, on new findings indicating that a child's acquiring language, thinking, and emotional skills is an active process that may be largely finished before age three. This premise is in stark contrast to the common wisdom of only a few years ago: that infants are largely passive beings who are somewhat unaware of their surroundings or who simply record everything in the environment without editing it. If infants are in fact editing and processing environmental stimuli, it behooves us to make these stimuli such good ones that they can move through them quickly and on to ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679453091
• ISBN 13: 9780679453093
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416