Rating: 
Summary: Great writing and Great insights to us
Review: I am a social worker and not a research scientist or from academia. However, I am fascinated by our new understanding of how our relationship to ourselves and attachment to others is affected by how our brain has been wired. The author's information here seems to support similar theories I have read in such as books as "Symphony in the Brain" and "Change your Brain Change your Life." Recent discoveries indicate the brain is more plastic than rigidly set. This opens up so many fascinating therapies, beyond just insight therapy and shotgun drug intervention, using very specific chemical and electrical interactions of our brain to restructure it. I do not always agree with some of their more cynical conclusions on human change. I do believe they do offer a clear and lyrically written concept that will help you to understand yourself and others better. The writing and quotations are spectacular. Be prepared to read words that you may never have used, so keep a dictionary near. If you are a psychotherapist or worked with a good one then the chapter, Between Stone and Sky, will reveal that lyrical dance between patient and practitioner exquistely.
Rating:
Summary: Eloquent, Important, Brave
Review: I am not a scholar, doctor, or 'evolutionary biologist' like some of these other reviewers but I am a person dealing with anxiety and depression for over 15 years. I thought this book was extremely well written, even poetic, but certainly not 'precious'. The reviewers who have a problem with this book don't seem to get it -- they are once again trying to intellectualize something that they should be trying instead to open their hearts to. If you think that's precious, that's seriously your problem. God forbid people, especially 'doctors' talk about love...which again, is the point -- not many talk (or teach) about it. This book is trying to tell you something -- just listen!! Gloria Steinem said "the only long term solution to humanity's problems is to change the way we raise our children." Yes! That's it. That's all you have to get...you don't have to be pretentious, argue, or resist. Simply realize that our children need authentic love to realize their potential. It's not blaming single, working mothers and to think so is being short-sighted. And as far as feeling hopeless about having anxiety, depression, or whatever -- you know what? ...it is difficult. Medication can help. Therapy can help. But it's a disorder that one has to cope with it and understanding the reality of it is important....and if you don't have it (lucky you) or don't work as a therapist, or are not capable of empathizing than you can't possibly understand. It sucks, I don't want it, but I deal. And I know how very important it is to love your children, really love them and let them know it everyday. Thank you for writing this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Good introduction to a general theory of attachment
Review: I found this book a mostly quite well written review of evidence that we are fundamentally social beings, that early traumatic social experiences are not simply generative of a "software" problem for the brain but alter the 'hardware' in fundamental and maladaptive ways, and that we need to re-examine both some very old wisdom on these issues, and evidence from newer neuroscience about our basic social nature. The general argument advanced in the volume is certainly an old one, but marshals much depth of evidence, that in the end all we have are our connections to loved and valued people, places, and endeavors, that very little else matters, and that events in our lives in general matter to the extent that they tap into this primary source of value. What I find most puzzling and frankly somewhat disturbing is the level of antipathy to these basic and very old ideas among the reviews of this book on this web site. People seem very disturbed by the notion that both very painful and very comforting childhood experience stays with us for the rest of our lives, that we are not and cannot be particularly happy if we are profoundly isolated, and that cognitive development takes place within a social matrix. Although questions were raised in some of the reviews about evidentiary issues, the tone of many of the negative reviews suggests to me that some of the reviewers did not believe that early attachment experience colors our development in profound and oftentimes invisible ways, simply because it is so hard to get outside our own heads when it comes to primary emotions. Anyone with a modicum of emotional commonsense, I hope anyway, would find such assertions consistent with some very basic human limitations, and the book in general certainly presents evidence for a bedrock of basic human needs that people within mental health fields, neuroscience, as well as other disciplines would do well to review and absorb. Some reviewers appear to disagree with these basic assertions. I do not. It is troubling that such an effort to outline those needs, however imperfectly sketched, might create such an antipathy for any reader.
Rating:
Summary: Must read for coaches, therapists, doctors!
Review: I loved this book! It is extremely well written and understandable for the layperson. I think that the title is a little misleading; as a businessperson I normally would not be interested in the subject of 'love'. The book is about emotions, and that, as introduced by Daniel Goleman, is a critical factor in the workplace. The book explained many phenomena that I intuitively believed but never had a scientific explanation for why I thought it was true. The authors blow away many of Freud's theories that never made sense to me and replace them with theories about "who we are as mammals" that make sense. I disagree with the reviewer that was frightened by the last chapter. I think that the authors are "right on" regarding their concerns about the influence of "Western Cartesian" thinking on medicine, parenting, and learning. This is why I think every coach, therapist, doctor, and businessman should read this book. Even if you don't agree 100% with the theory, it will challenge the way you have been.
Rating: 
Summary: Good up to a point
Review: If you're unemployed and didn't grow up in an ideal environment stay far, far away from this book. On the other hand, if you're looking for hard data to support an arguement to stay home with your baby, this is it. There's so much good information in this book that it's a shame that it leads to a conclusion where serious and permenant damage to children and society in general seems blamed on the working mom. Read thouroughly, it's hard documentation about how environment affects neural development. However this could easily be quoted dangerously and could turn the tide on what little progress women have made since the 50's. I'd like to believe that the brain develops throughout a lifetime. With this book, it's as if there's a brain 'ideal' that if not achieved through effective bonding, leaves a person socialy handicapped for life. I'd recomend this to professionals who can apply the findings from the extensive studies to counsel their patients. For the average person trying to gain a better understanding of what makes them tick, consider "A User's Guide to the Brain" instead. It focuses more on understanding neurology in a positive manner that offers hope.
Rating: 
Summary: numerous fallacies
Review: Somehow the authors manage to supply numerous factual inaccuracies from a number of fields. Badly misrepresents ethology (mammals are loving, family-oriented -- does not indicate that the paradigmatic mammal relationship is only mother-juvenile, ending abruptly at amturity, w/ no father in sight, & sociality in herds, etc.; psychology and attachment theory (distorts Winnicott's complex relationship with Bowlby, by misused, out-of-context quote; Freud's neutrality theory (which the authors describe as advocating "coldness"), and on and on. Finally, the authors conclude that Americans are too materialistic. Shocking. On the whole, a shallow, inaccurate, and surprisingly mean-spirited treatment of the topic.
Rating:
Summary: phenomenal and thought provoking
Review: The author's theory of limbic resonance correlates very accurately with reality. As any good theory on human emotion should, it accurately explains why we love who we love and why we are who we are. For years and years I argued with countless intellectuals who said there was no such thing as "Spark". This book not only provided me with a realistic explanation of my own emotional makeup and attraction certain woman (through spark), but gives me a way to examine spark and change it if I so desire. It's not a book for everyone, since the first four or five chapters are a bit slow and technical, but if you get bogged down, skip to Hebbian learning (the fundamentals behind artificial intelligence in computers) in chapter six and you'll be suddenly and completely enthralled. The way it ties our mind together as a logical group of thinking units and then ties this back to the way we love is fantastic. Get the book, read it, you'll learn a lot. I guarantee it.
Rating:
Summary: Good presentation of neuroscience but falters later on
Review: The first third of this book is an accurate, well-planned presentation of results from neuroscience. This section is very exciting and illuminating. But in the second third, the authors attempt to explain the memory mechanism and in doing so just don't maintain the standard of presentation that they did in the first third. The presentation gets bogged down in an effort to simplify the information, using drawings that don't completely convey the research data and that become confusing. The presentation is based more on a cognitive science viewpoint (e.g., computation) than on the human/rational/emotive picture. The last third of the book is taken up with too much discussion of Freud, whose work is easily refuted by our scientific findings (as he should have been just through common sense), and a poetic fugue on psychotherapy that sounds more like a spiritual travel essay than a presentation of methods (medical or psychological) and fails to convince. The best advice I received on mental health was from a nutritional psychiatrist, who told me as he does his patients: if you get the proper nutrition, your brain and body will function correctly, and you will be able to handle the emotional stresses. The authors don't present this perspective, which is a growing view in our field, but do make claims for pharmacological solutions that literature is now showing are not that effective. After reading a substantial portion of this book, I also became annoyed with the author's fixation on the mother-child bond (very Freudian). Granted this is an important relationship, but they are generally blaming mental problems on poor mothering, which is a big step backwards. There is no exploration of father-child relationships, sibling or peer relationships, the effect of disease or environmental poisoning, and the authors even admit they simplified by not looking at the formative results from experience and trauma. The book really presents only a partial view of research and results, and though some of the conclusions drawn by the authors are scientific, others are based on Freudian or pharmacologic bias. This is a small book, thus the whole picture is not presented, and for that reason it is inadequate. Some sections hold sufficient information to bring personal illumination to the reader or the benefit of some level of understanding of new research/implications, but it isn't as helpful as reading the actual research. I'd still recommend this book as an interesting read. It is well written and constructed, especially in the first several chapters, and the authors have dared to be politically incorrect, delivering tidbits of information that are often suppressed by our current environment of social remodeling. The book is a beginning for in depth understanding of human beings, although I wonder if, after all our effort and research, we end up agreeing with the pre-Socratic philosophers.
Rating:
Summary: Love as Influenced and Sustained by the Brain
Review: These three authors use creative literary style and scientific research to argue for the great importance and influence of the brain upon the nature and expression of love. The book is written for a general but scholarly audience. Our brains link us with those people to whom we love and as a consequence who we are, and who we become depends in great part on whom we love. It is the body's physiology that ensures our relationships and identities.
The authors lament that from the beginning of the 20th century to its end, the most influential accounts of love rarely, if ever, mentioned biology. Although the authors point to important links between physiology and love, they do not claim to have solved all of the mysteries of love. This book's thesis or agenda is described well when the authors asked this question: "What can the structure and design of the brain tell us about the nature of love?" (18)
One of the main theses of the book is that understanding love begins with understanding feelings rather than the reason. "Emotion is the messenger of love; it is the vehicle that carries every signal from one brimming heart to another" (37).
The authors document well the profound effects that various regions of the mind have upon human behavior. For instance, the authors note that patients who have lost the hippocampi bear witness to the memory aspect of this region of the brain, because no explicit memories can be created without a hippocampus.
The authors note the profound importance of relationships. "The astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love, as our attractors activate certain limbic pathways, and the brain's inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them" (144). However, the neurostructures responsible for emotional lives are not infinitely adaptable in relationship.
The book concludes with these words: "The adventure of seeking a theory of love is far from over. While science can afford a closer glimpse of this tower or that soaring wall, the heart's castle still hangs high in the heavens, shrouded in scudding clouds and obscured by mist. Will science ever announce the complete revelation of all love's secrets? Will empiricism ever trace an unbroken path from the highest stone to the heart's castle down to the bedrock of certitude? Of course not! We demand too much if we expect single-handed empiricism to define and lay bare the human soul" (230).
Thomas Jay Oord
Rating:
Summary: They put the bop in the bopshebopshebop
Review: They wrote the book of love. The scope of the task undertaken by these authors is vast: explaining love. To unlock the secrets of the (metaphorical) human heart, they begin by educating us in biological fundamentals, explaining the three layers of the brain (reptilian=basic function, limbic=emotion, neocortical=facility to reason) and postulating on why our evolutionary path did not involve a cleaner convergence of our emotions and our rational mind. They go on to pour over several studies demonstrating our emotional dependence on others. All of the science is delivered masterfully, and this section of the book is one of the more literate non-fiction pieces I've read recently. Building on the underlying scientific knowledge collected, the authors then go on to explain their theories of limbic resonance (how we interact emotionally with others), limbic regulation, etc. While these theories may not seem absolutely convincing, they do make intuitive sense, though one is justified in remaining skeptical. Regardless, their theories are well presented and are certainly filling food for thought. Finally, we are left knowing much more about the biology behind our emotions, and should be more secure knowing that our emotions are a valid part of us, and not something that must be conquered by the rational mind. This is a different point of view then I've held, and it is a welcome outlook. Highly recommended
|
