The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation - Hardcover

Horgan, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684850753 ISBN 13: 9780684850757

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1999

Synopsis

The mystery of human consciousness, of how and why we think, has stimulated heated scientific inquiries throughout the world. In The Undiscovered Mind, John Horgan interviews scientists engaged in every aspect of the search for answers -- including neuroscientists, Freudian analysts, behavioral geneticists, and artificial intelligence engineers -- and lays bare the weaknesses, fallacies, and, sometimes, the absurdities of their conclusions.As he investigates everything from the effectiveness of Prozac and other treatments for mental disorders to the robot designed at MIT to replicate human thinking, Horgan dismantles the myth that science can establish a final theory of the mind. Engaging, witty, and profound, The Undiscovered Mind presents a persuasive argument that understanding the essence of human nature transcends the most sophisticated methods of scientific inquiry.

About this title

Review

Since antiquity, philosophers have speculated upon the workings of the human mind, as much as they have puzzled over the nature of the night sky. Today, as books like Marcus Chown's The Magic Furnace so eloquently demonstrate, we know much about the size and substance of the universe. But how much do we really know about the human brain?

In his previous, controversial work, The End of Science John Horgan argued that science had explained almost everything that it could explain about the world and that, in a universe so complex and various, there were bound to be phenomena that defied scientific scrutiny. (No-one, for example, would seriously seek a scientific explanation for anything so complex as a human being's life story but would turn rather to, say, biography).

The Undiscovered Mind applies the lessons of the earlier book to the sciences of the mind. There are many models of how we think, remember, perceive and emote. Many of them are mutually exclusive; none of them disprove any of the others. Horgan likens this state of affairs to science's precursor alchemy and claims that, with a phenomenon as complex andv arious as human thought, alchemical explanations are the best we'll ever get.

Horgan is good at fleshing out the social and political contexts of brain science and offers real ammunition to cynics. Alas, he enjoys himself too much, finding weakness and failure in the very debates, controversies and animosities that to many would suggest healthy progress in the field. This is a clever and provocative book; it is not altogether good-natured.--Simon Ings

About the Author

John Horgan is a freelance writer and author of The End of Science, a U.S. best-seller that has been translated into ten languages. His awards include the Science Journalism Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1992 and 1994) and the National Association of Science Writers Science-in-Society Award 1993). He has written for the New York Times, London Times, Washington Post, New Republic, Slate, Discover, The Sciences, and other publications in the United States and Europe. He was a staff writer at Scientific American from 1986 to 1997 and at IEEE Spectrum from 1983 to 1986. He graduated from Columbia University's School of Journalism in 1983. He lives in Garrison, New York, with his wife, Suzie Gilbert, a childrens' book author, and their two children.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0684850753
• ISBN 13: 9780684850757
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 325