The Developing Mind: Toward a Neurobiology of Interpersonal Experience - Hardcover

Siegel, Daniel J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1572304537 ISBN 13: 9781572304536

Publisher: The Guilford Press, 1999

Synopsis

This book goes beyond the nature and nurture divisions that traditionally have constrained much of our thinking about development, exploring the role of interpersonal relationships in forging key connections in the brain. Daniel J. Siegel presents a groundbreaking new way of thinking about the emergence of the human mind and the process by which each of us becomes a feeling, thinking, remembering individual. Illuminating how and why neurobiology matters, this book is essential reading for clinicians, educators, researchers, and students interested in human experience and development across the life span

About this title

About the Author

Daniel J. Siegel, MD, is an internationally acclaimed author, award-winning educator, and child psychiatrist. He is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine, where he serves as Co-Investigator at the Center for Culture, Brain, and Development and Co-Director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center. He is also the Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute, an educational center devoted to promoting insight, compassion, and empathy in individuals, families, institutions, and communities. Dr. Siegel's books include Mindsight, The Mindful Brain, The Mindful Therapist, Parenting from the Inside Out, and The Whole-Brain Child.

Reviews

We know that what other people do and say to usAespecially when we're youngAhelps shape our later ideas and emotions. We also know more than ever about how neurons, neurotransmitters and the structures in our brains create and affect our minds and personalities. Siegel, who directs the Infant and Preschool Service at UCLA, connects our life among others to the life in our brains: his hefty, ambitious work tries to show how both create our selvesAhow "human connections shape the neural connections through which the mind emerges." A chapter on memory explains how "neural networks," "engrams" and "retrieval cues" help us form stories about our pasts; a chapter on our attachments to parents and others links current neuroscience to some of the most exciting and useful work in recent clinical psychology. Why can't we remember what we did at age three? Why are some children unusually shy? What is the biochemistry of humiliation, and how can it be "toxic to the developing child's brain"? New and plausible answers to these questions emerge from Siegel's synthesis of neurobiology, research psychology and cognitive science. Siegel explains all the technical terms he uses, and assumes no prior knowledge. And despite his frequently dry and quite detailed prose, his subjectAhow we become the people we areAdeserves to hold many readers spellbound.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The mind is a fascinating but not a simple subject. Siegel's current, thorough, closely argued text will reward those who stick with it. A psychiatrist specializing in children and families, Siegel is intrigued by the processes of human development and the relationships between individuals. The broad field of neurobiology has many theories, much data, and a variety of viewpoints to offer the lifelong student, and accordingly, Siegel presents a vast amount of material, carefully ordered in sequence of presentation to point up the lessons it has to teach. Genetics and experience help produce the mind, he shows, but also combine and react with each other. One of Siegel's major gifts is for presenting anatomical, neurological, research, and clinical information while still pointing out what remains unknown. He explores infant-parent relationships, emotions, states of mind, and how knowing about them can help one improve one's relationships and capabilities for developing successfully. William Beatty

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface
I. Introduction: Mind, Brain and Experience
II. Memory
III. Attachment
IV. Emotion
V. Representations: Modes of Processing and the Construction of Reality
VI. States of Mind: Cohesion, Subjective Experience and Complex Systems
VII. Self-Regulation
VIII. Interpersonal Connection
IX. Integration

Edition details

• Publisher: The Guilford Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1572304537
• ISBN 13: 9781572304536
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 394