Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are

Rating:
Summary: Worth the effort
Review: A great overview of Modern Neuroscience. The author highlights the recent discoveries on the molecular and cognitive levels in relation to the "Mental Trilogy"; Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation. It is extremely enlightening, and is a great source of ideas for any young researcher who wishes to understand how the brain carries out higher order mental functions.
I highly recommend this book

Rating:
Summary: A few comments on self & consciousness
Review: As other people have written very complete reviews already, I just had a few miscellaneous comments I hadn't seen elsewhere, so I thought I would make them here.

First, a caveat. Although I'm not a professional neuroscientist, I have a strong background in both psychology and the neurosciences, so I didn't find the book difficult to read. But most people would be advised to try a more popular book on the brain before tackling this one. A couple of other reviewers here also mentioned that.

But on to my main comments. This book attempts to explain the self in neurobiological terms. Influenced perhaps by 2400 years of philosophical and psychological speculation on the subject, neuroscience has recently taken on the task of trying to explain it too. Without getting too far into all the technical details, what has become clear from recent research is that consciousness isn't a unitary phenomenon in the classical sense--it results from the coordination and integration of distinct and separate brain areas and mechanisms. Hence, the classical idea--and our normal perception of consciousness as a discrete and unitary entity--is an illusion. And the same goes, as Ledoux shows, for the phenomenon of the self.

So far so good. My only problem with this is that consciousness and the sense of self, although they impress us as the most important and immanent aspects of our mental life, may be ultimately unimportant. Although interesting, it is quite possible that they are simply an "epiphenomemon" or side-effect of a brain that is complex and highly evolved enough to contain an internal representation of itself, as if one had programmed a big computer to act like it was self-aware. In other words, although consciousness is nice, it may not be important or necessary to our survival. (And considering all the suffering that consciousnesses and selves are subjected to in this life, perhaps we'd all be better off without them). :-)

Although not the main focus of the book, I'd like to say a few things on the subject of biophysical reductionism before I conclude this review. Many people seem loathe to consider themselves just a collection of atoms, molecules, synapses, and nerve cells--perhaps because it doesn't seem to leave much room for the soul. Ask yourself, since the brain consists of over 14,000 major and minor brain areas and nerve pathways, where exactly would the soul be located? In the frontal cortex, with its relation to personality and long-term motivations? In the thalamus, with its function as a sensory relay and termination station (some sensations are processed in the thalamus--such as orgasms)? Or how about the limbic system, with its important functions in more primitive motivations and drives? The main point is that all brain areas have specialized functions. Being "the soul" doesn't seem to be part of the picture.

But getting back to the reductionism question, the fact that we can't totally reduce behavior to biology doesn't mean this isn't the case. It just means we don't know enough yet. However, even if we never learn enough to rigorously reduce behavior to biology (and I suspect that will be the case, given that the brain has 60 trillion neurons with between 3,000 and 100,000 connections each, so we'll probably never get the entire brain mapped), it seems pretty obvious that consciousness still depends on the brain. This is clear from the many degenerative brain diseases that progressively damage critical areas needed for memory, personality, and ultimately the self, to the point where the person is no longer conscious and eventually becomes completely brain dead, with the amount impairment being proportional to the amount of nerve damage.

Well, I didn't mean to dwell on such a morbid subject, but I can't think of a better demonstration that we are all basically our "brains."

Overall, this is a well written, interesting, and enjoyable account on a fascinating subject for those with some background already in the neurosciences.

Rating:
Summary: LeDoux has a winner again
Review: I agree with editorial reviewers, it's good, plain reading, that even I understand. Moreover one can be easily oriented in logic of the book and to find again anything already read is no problem - that counts.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, Fascinating, but Hard Work
Review: LeDoux is a fine neuroscientist who is attempting to explain an extremely difficult subject.

However, "The Synaptic Self" is a very hard book to read, compared to other "popular science" books. It doesn't always explain using easy-to-follow examples, and it is a very academic book.

On the other hand, I believe that academics in the same area who read the book will probably point and laugh. It's probably not academic enough.

The bottom line - this is a very interesting book - and I would recommend it for anyone who has enough free time to go through it. Whoever does so should find it a very rewarding, albeit difficult task.If you are looking for a lightweight introduction into the realms of cognition and neuroscience, look elsewhere - I would suggest reading "How The Mind Works" and "The Language Instinct" by Pinker, and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" by Oliver Sacks. Read them first, and LeDoux later on when you grasp the idea and want to go into further details.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, Fascinating, but Hard Work
Review: LeDoux is a fine neuroscientist who is attempting to explain an extremely difficult subject.

However, "The Synaptic Self" is a very hard book to read, compared to other "popular science" books. It doesn't always explain using easy-to-follow examples, and it is a very academic book.

On the other hand, I believe that academics in the same area who read the book will probably point and laugh. It's probably not academic enough.

The bottom line - this is a very interesting book - and I would recommend it for anyone who has enough free time to go through it. Whoever does so should find it a very rewarding, albeit difficult task.If you are looking for a lightweight introduction into the realms of cognition and neuroscience, look elsewhere - I would suggest reading "How The Mind Works" and "The Language Instinct" by Pinker, and "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" by Oliver Sacks. Read them first, and LeDoux later on when you grasp the idea and want to go into further details.

Rating:
Summary: LeDoux's Synaptic Self is wonderful !
Review: LeDoux starts his first chapter with a quote from Bart Simpson: "Dad, what is the mind? Is it just a system of impulses or something tangible?" My kind of humor.

LeDoux's Synaptic Self is a wonderful book loaded with clear understandable explanations and insights (his wife, a "fantastic writer," assisted) on how the brain works based on the most current neuroscience (e.g., how neurons/synapses/neurotransmitters/neuro modulators work/don't work, implicit/explicit learning/memory mechanism explanations, nature/nurture considerations, the "mental trilogy" of cognition/emotion/motivation, and much more). The book's bottom-line, he writes, is "you are your synapses." With this book, "know thyself," and even fix thyself, seem more attainable. It's a book I'll reread/study for a while.

The following are quotes from the last chapter:

Life requires many brain functions, functions require systems, and systems are made of synaptically connected neurons. We all have the same brain systems, and the number of neurons in each brain system is more or less the same in each of us as well. However, the particular way those neurons are connected is distinct, and that uniqueness, in short, is what makes us who we are.

What is remarkable is that synapses in all of these systems are capable of being modified by experience... Emotion systems [as an example]... are programmed by evolution to respond to some stimuli, so-called innate or unconditioned stimuli, like predators or pain. However, many of the things that elicit emotions in us or motivate us to act in certain ways are not preprogrammed into our brains as part of our species heritage but have to be learned by each of us. Emotion systems learn by association - when an emotionally arousing stimulus is present, other stimuli that are also present acquire emotion-arousing qualities (classical conditioning), and actions that bring you in contact with emotionally desirable stimuli or protect you from harmful or unpleasant ones are learned (instrumental conditioning.) As in all other types of learning, emotional associations are formed by synaptic changes in the brain system involved in processing the stimuli. Some of the brain's plastic emotional processors include systems involved in detecting and responding to danger, finding and consuming food, identifying potential mates and having sex.

Because synaptic plasticity occurs in most if not all brain systems, one might be tempted to conclude that the majority of brain systems are memory systems. But [as LeDoux argues in chapter 5], a better way of thinking about this is that the ability to be modified by experience is a characteristic of many brain systems, regardless of their specific function. Brain systems, in other words, were for the most part not designed as storage devices - plasticity is not their main job assignment. They were instead designed to perform particular tasks like processing sounds or sights, detecting food or danger or mates, controlling actions, and so on. Plasticity is simply a feature that helps them do their job better.

Functions depend on connections: break the connections and you lose the functions...

From LeDoux's Synaptic Self

Rating:
Summary: painless intro to synaptic structure and biochemistry
Review: The book is an introduction to neurology from the particular viewpoint of the synapse and associated biochemistry. The author's specific interest in the field is experimental research into fear circuits in the brain, and the book shows this interest well and it forms the bulk of the examples. It is not the first book in the field that i would recommend to someone just getting interested, it is an "advanced intro" if that is possible, just a little hard going if you have no idea of the terminology or general structures. But it is written to the educated laymen, doesn't require a college degree to understand it, and is a welcome addition to my expanding library on the philosophy of the mind.

The book is well written, flows nicely until the near end,(drags a little just after chapter 6 however, that is why a 4 not a 5 rating) i'd recommend "synaptic sickness" be moved to an appendix if it couldn't be integrated into the body of the book better. The scholarly apparatus is kept to a minimum yet the push to ratify/justify the new knowledge via experimental data and reference to other scientists work is clearly evident and makes the book a good intro to the field, as further study is facilitated. I found the use of concrete experimental examples and the prolific use of diagrams (especially figures 6.4 - 6.6) particularly good(very superior), the book was always engrossing and a stimulating read, not common in books written by scientists who are not teachers as well.

As to particularly important ideas: i would point to chapter 6= "small change" and the systematic analysis of Hebbian plasticity and how long-term potentiation supplies the synaptic justification for memory and learning the key chapter in the whole book. The chapters before are introductory prologue to this idea, and the chapters subsequent are particular examples of how Hebbian plasticity and synaptic change unlie the circuits of the brain and hence become who we are.

And unusual emphasis(compared to the field as a whole) is on the emotional side of the triad: cognition, emotion, motivation, this is due to the author's interest and last book as a result of his professional research into fear circuitry. I appreciate the emphasis as a long overdue correction to neurology being somewhat, like philosophy of the mind, concentrated on the cognition part of the equation. With this emphasis and direction much of the book dedicated to showing fear circuits and like analysis means this ends up with teaching you a wider view of the brain than most introductory books. A good thing.

So i wholehearted recommend the book to anyone who had the patience and interest to finish reading this review. thanks.

Rating:
Summary: The Psychophysical Problem
Review: The psychophysical problem is long standing and, probably, intractable. This book is an excellent introduction to the subject, bringing together strands from philosophy, neurology, psychology - and common sense based on observations.

We have a corporeal body. It is a physical entity, subject to all the laws of physics. Yet, we experience ourselves, our internal lives, external events in a manner which provokes us to postulate the existence of a corresponding, non-physical ontos, entity. This corresponding entity ostensibly incorporates a dimension of our being which, in principle, can never be tackled with the instruments and the formal logic of science.

A compromise was proposed long ago: the soul is nothing but our self awareness or the way that we experience ourselves. But this is a flawed solution. It is flawed because it assumes that the human experience is uniform, unequivocal and identical. It might well be so - but there is no methodologically rigorous way of proving it. We have no way to objectively ascertain that all of us experience pain in the same manner or that pain that we experience is the same in all of us. This is even when the causes of the sensation are carefully controlled and monitored.

A scientist might say that it is only a matter of time before we find the exact part of the brain which is responsible for the specific pain in our gedankenexperiment. Moreover, will add our gedankenscientist, in due course, science will even be able to demonstrate a monovalent relationship between a pattern of brain activity in situ and the aforementioned pain. In other words, the scientific claim is that the patterns of brain activity ARE the pain itself.

Such an argument is, prima facie, inadmissible. The fact that two events coincide (even if they do so forever) does not make them identical. The serial occurrence of two events does not make one of them the cause and the other the effect, as is well known. Similarly, the contemporaneous occurrence of two events only means that they are correlated. A correlate is not an alter ego. It is not an aspect of the same event. The brain activity is what appears WHEN pain happens - it by no means follows that it IS the pain itself.

A stronger argument would crystallize if it was convincingly and repeatedly demonstrated that playing back these patterns of brain activity induces the same pain. Even in such a case, we would be talking about cause and effect rather than identity of pain and its correlate in the brain.

This vade mecum is unlikely to end the debate but it provides a firm, fact based, evidence oriented foundation for its contnuance. Sam Vaknin, author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited".

Rating:
Summary: Good pop neuroscience
Review: This book is as good as a popular science book can be, and explains in easy terms some of the most important concepts in neuroscience. For this it should be widely read. However, Ledoux wants to explain the self, and not only to write a popular book on cognitive neuroscience. Now, given that it is very difficult not to accept that the self at some level is nothing but synapses, Ledoux does seem to base the self on neurobiological mechanisms. But this is no more enlightening than sayying that vision, attention, language, or even qualia are nothing but synapses, claims that at some level must also be correct. So one would expect the bulk of the book to develop principles that tie or at least correlate the self with brain mechanisms. Do we get this in Synaptic Self? well, yes and no.

Ledoux concentrates on memory, having in his last book focused on emotion. He explains memory systems from molecules to circuits, with the classical and most recent findings, including some from his own lab. He also gives a quick overview of the emotional systems of the brain, the working memory complex of the prefrontal cortex, and motivational systems of neuromodulator and brainstem and thalamocortical systems. He calls that the mental trilogy, namely cognition, emotion and motivation. Ledoux also wrote a nice chapter on some brain diseases that seem to alter these functions selectively. And thats it. Ledoux has explained the self. Or has he? Well, memory, emotion, cognition and motivation surely contribute to the making of the self, especially memory. How much of a self is left in a retrograde and anterograde severe amnesic? But this is not saying that putting them together is all the self is about. Its like saying vision, attention and waking are what consicousness is. Vision provides content, attention access, and waking a necesary condition for consicousness, but together they are not the phenomenon in question. I bring out consicousness because Ledoux says the really hard and important question in neuroscience is the self, and not consciousness. To me it seems almost silly to try to understand the former without the latter.

Ledoux then forgets about the feeling of the self itself, the possible bases of it on body schemas and body signals, the primacy of movement. He does touch on volition and free will, and is as naturalistic about these issues as one can be, which I think is a good thing. The final chapter presents 7 principles he can extract from his discussions, and meybe here we can find his theory of the self. Unfortunately, he seems just to add another thing, binding, to the picture. So binding, convergence zones, emotion and motivation, memory, placticity, hebbbian mechanisms of memory, together are the self. Again, I would say they are an important part of the self, but not the self itself. I may be wrong or maybe dogmatic about what would count as an explanation for the self. Maybe there is nothing more to the self than those mechanisms Ledoux lists. But work in theorethical neuroscience like by Damasio, or Patricia Churchland and philosophers like Bermudez show that the self is more complex than Ledoux seems to think.

At the end this book is of value, and I never said it did not make progress on the problem of the neurobiology of the self. However, it does not by any means solve it. It presents a nice theory of the integration of cognitive and affective mechanisms, and manages to cover a great deal of issues in simple terms, and that is always an achievement.

Rating:
Summary: Strong start /Falters at end
Review: Took a college course entitled survey of physiology of psychology last fall. The textbook we used was physiology of behavior by Neil R. Carlson. A few weeks into the class I purchased synaptic self and began reading it. Stopped reading after about half way through because I lacked the necessary mental framework to understand the gist. After finishing the physiology course I picked up synaptic self and started over from page one.

From my point of view the average person with no prior knowledge of brain physiology would be in need of some sort of primer before attempting this book. There are 11 chapters. Chapters 1-10 read like a college textbook in order to set up the author's final conclusion in chapter 11. The last chapter is my only complaint about the book, because I thought his main point wasn't elaborated enough.