Mapping The Mind

'One of the clearest and best-illustrated attempts to explain the virtually inaccessible, the brain' SUNDAY TIMES

Brain scans reveal our thoughts, memories - even our moods - as clearly as an X-ray reveals our bones. We can watch a person's brain literally light up as it registers a joke, or glow dully when it recalls an unhappy memory.

MAPPING THE MIND shows how these cans can be used to help explain aspects of our behaviour and how behavioural eccentricities can be traced to abnormalities in an individual brain. Dyslexia, for example, may be caused by a short-circuit in the messages converting sound to visual cues; addiction, eating disorders and alcoholism stem from dysfunction in the brain's reward system. In this acclaimed book Rita Carter draws on the latest in brain imaging to give extraordinary insights into how the brain works.

In the last decades of the 20th century, scientists have come to believe that the human brain is almost completely modular. Every bit of the brain does something in particular, and surprisingly specific abilities, memories, and responses are in localized areas. Journalist Rita Carter has drawn a map of what is known (and speculated) about the mind in a heavily illustrated field guide to the human brain.

Carter and her scientific editor, neuropsychologist Christopher Frith, cover the state of the mind in a reasonably accurate, accessible way. They emphasize topics that are likely to be of some practical interest--such as Alzheimer's or attention deficit disorder--but not so much as to give a distorted picture of the field.

Perhaps the most interesting parts of the book are the sidebars written by a variety of leading names in mind-brain science. Roger Penrose writes on computer minds, Francis Crick on consciousness, Steven Rose on memory, John Maynard Smith on social evolution, William Calvin on mosaic minds, Kay Redfield Jamison on creativity and bipolar disorders, and more. It's a stellar assortment, more than worth the price of admission--and there's a map of the mind on the cover, in case you misplace yours. --Mary Ellen Curtin