Rating: 
Summary: Don't Stop There!
Review: A delight and a disappointment. Steven Johnson opens the door (briefly) to many of the brain's multi-level functions and then closes it before the reader can fully grasp the significance and inter-relation of the areas and functions. True, the end-papers do help but I'm still left than more questions than an answers. Maybe it's really a "teaser" for the sequel.
Still, I would recommend it for anyone like myself who is interested in the how the brain functions but doesn't have a Phd in the neurosciences.
Rating: 
Summary: Great insight
Review: A great book for the lay reader. Real insight into autism and post traumatic stress disorder.
And unintentionally he debunks psychiatry and the whole concept that a mind - as contrasted with a brain - can be diseased.
Rating:
Summary: View of the brain is mind-opening
Review: A highly readable introduction to the brain and how it works. The author, using himself as the guinea pig, has ventured into the various avenues of research and knowledge about the brain and its workings. This is a wonderful book for the layman, interested in understanding the brain.
From his explorations into the most primitive parts of the brain to the higher areas of creativity and thought, Johnson brings clarity to the functioning of this most fascinating organ. He examines the component parts of the brain; some parts which dictate the core survival tasks, such as heartbeat regulation and the flight-or-fight instinct and other parts, such as face recognition and interpretation. Your personality, science and research is discovering, is the aggregate of the differing strengths of each of these modules, depending how they have been shaped by nature and nurture, by your genes and by your life experiences. You and your personality are indeed, the sum of the various parts of your brain.
Refreshingly free of dogma, the book is a romp through the working of this most marvelous organ. He examines and talks to Freudian theory, male-female differences, right brain-left brain and most interestingly, drugs and their influence on the brain.
Turns out many of the drugs that influence our brains are manufactured by our bodies. This interesting information gives a bit of humor and wonderment to the "Just say no" and "This is your brain on drugs" campaigns by the moralists of all persuasions.
This book should stimulate a diverse examination of our behaviour and the theories and methods around modifying those behaviours.
Rating: 
Summary: What a disappointment.
Review: I really expected to like this work, but I was sadly disappointed to find a book about the brain that's neither well-written nor informative. It offers no new information, which is okay, but also no insights, which isn't. Instead, it's an account of the author's not always interesting escapades, plodding along in boring prose.
Rating:
Summary: Open wide the mind's black box.
Review: In MIND WIDE OPEN, Steven Johnson gives new meaning to the phrase, "you ought to have your head examined." Through his guided journey into the depths of the human brain, he not only reveals how cutting-edge neuroscience presents us with a new set of tools for understanding our minds (p. 184), but he also reveals how a more informed understanding of the "brain's internal architecture" can change the ways we think about ourselves (p. 8) in post-Freudian ways (pp. 185-214). Along the way, Johnson submits himself to the latest in neurological testing techniques and gadgetry--empathy tests, neurofeedback, and an fMRI scan, for instance--sharing his resulting insights about emotions, memories and consciousness. He demonstrates how the brain works more like "an orchestra than a soloist" through the chemical and electrical interactions resulting in memory, fear, love, and alertness.On the subject of chemicals, in Chapter 5, "The Hormones Talking," Johnson reveals that the pleasure drugs otherwise found "in a dime bag or a coke spoon"--heroin, morphine, codeine--occur naturally in the brain (p. 136). "Your brain is nothing but drugs," Johnson writes; "right now, as you read these words, you are under the influence of chemicals, molecularly speaking, almost indistinguishable from drugs that could get you arrested if you consumed them openly in a public place." Reading MIND WIDE OPEN will not only stimulate and delight your gray matter, it will cause you to rethink your very thinking process. G. Merritt
Rating:
Summary: Open wide the mind's black box.
Review: In MIND WIDE OPEN, Steven Johnson gives new meaning to the phrase, "you ought to have your head examined." Through his guided journey into the depths of the human brain, he not only reveals how cutting-edge neuroscience presents us with a new set of tools for understanding our minds (p. 184), but he also reveals how a more informed understanding of the "brain's internal architecture" can change the ways we think about ourselves (p. 8) in post-Freudian ways (pp. 185-214). Along the way, Johnson submits himself to the latest in neurological testing techniques and gadgetry--empathy tests, neurofeedback, and an fMRI scan, for instance--sharing his resulting insights about emotions, memories and consciousness. He demonstrates how the brain works more like "an orchestra than a soloist" through the chemical and electrical interactions resulting in memory, fear, love, and alertness. On the subject of chemicals, in Chapter 5, "The Hormones Talking," Johnson reveals that the pleasure drugs otherwise found "in a dime bag or a coke spoon"--heroin, morphine, codeine--occur naturally in the brain (p. 136). "Your brain is nothing but drugs," Johnson writes; "right now, as you read these words, you are under the influence of chemicals, molecularly speaking, almost indistinguishable from drugs that could get you arrested if you consumed them openly in a public place." Reading MIND WIDE OPEN will not only stimulate and delight your gray matter, it will cause you to rethink your very thinking process. G. Merritt
Rating:
Summary: Dr. Michael L. Johnson
Review: In one word.......Brilliant! If you're interested in why we do the things we do, author Steven Johnson covers it. He does an excellent job researching his findings, even putting himself through a scan of his own brain. I recant my one word review to TWO: Brilliant and Superb!!! Thank you Steven! --Dr. Michael L. Johnson, author of "What Do You Do When the Medications Don't Work--A Non-Drug Treatment of Dizziness, Migraine Headaches, Fibromyalgia, and Other Chronic Conditions"
Rating:
Summary: Ask The Man Who Owns One
Review: It is the most complicated object in the solar system, and each of us gets to carry one around at all times. The complications of the human brain, however, have ensured that among all the organs of the body or other objects of investigation, it is the slowest to yield its secrets. Especially over the past two decades there have been intense inquiry and surprising new tools for studying the brain, and in _Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life_ (Scribner), Steven Johnson has made himself a test subject for various means of looking at the brain. He is a technology writer for Discover magazine, so he gets to try out gadgets for which most of us will never be guinea pigs. His is a personal view of a universally fascinating subject, and a fine introduction to current brain science for those not familiar with the field. The tests Johnson puts himself through and describes so openly are good subjects for his amused reflection. For instance, a few years ago he was hooked up to a biofeedback machine, sensors attached to hands and forehead. The machine was set to monitor adrenaline levels. He felt nervous, and as is his habit, he deflected the nervousness by making jokes, to the audience of the biofeedback guy. (His writing is loaded with good humor, too.) And every joke he made showed up on the monitor as an adrenaline spike; suddenly the jokes "... seemed less like casual attempts at humor and more like a drug addict's hungering for a new fix." Here was a little chemical subroutine his brain had been putting itself through every day for almost all his life, and he had not known a thing about it. He still could not explain why the adrenaline rush felt the way it did, but that's not important. He wondered how many such little chemical subroutines his brain ran every day, or at any given moment, and what would he learn about himself if he could see them like his adrenaline spikes. Each chapter here is a sampling of how he got to see another subroutine at work. He looks at his capacity to mind-read, based on judging the emotions shown in pictures of eyes. He tries on a neurofeedback helmet that has the potential for increasing attention, and thus decreasing the large amount of medicines children are taking to increase their attention spans these days. He spends a session in a $2 million MRI machine, takes sojourns into different brain chemicals, recounts traumatic fears triggered when a window of his house was blown in almost catastrophically by a storm, experiences natural highs, and examines the biological and social importance of laughter. Johnson winds up with a tribute to Freud, who realized that beneath the surface of our consciousness, there are all sorts of processes going on of which we are unaware. The trouble with this, of course, is that while this insight was correct, the sorts of unconscious processes that can be looked at by the gadgets which Johnson describes are very far from the ones Freud thought were active. The brain is full of busy neurons and designated centers for specific sorts of thought, but it "is not seething with incest fantasies suppressed by the restrictions of civilized societies." (In fact, the incest taboo seems more likely to be in our DNA, not in our cultures.) But still, we all have so many "...voices in our heads, all of them competing for attention, that it's a miracle we ever get anything done." Just so. Johnson has produced an entertaining, idiosyncratic introduction into brain function, highlighting the ways that brains are now open to us in ways they never could have been before. Anyone with a brain will find that _Mind Wide Open_ makes aspects of that miraculous brain a little clearer.
Rating:
Summary: Ask The Man Who Owns One
Review: It is the most complicated object in the solar system, and each of us gets to carry one around at all times. The complications of the human brain, however, have ensured that among all the organs of the body or other objects of investigation, it is the slowest to yield its secrets. Especially over the past two decades there have been intense inquiry and surprising new tools for studying the brain, and in _Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life_ (Scribner), Steven Johnson has made himself a test subject for various means of looking at the brain. He is a technology writer for Discover magazine, so he gets to try out gadgets for which most of us will never be guinea pigs. His is a personal view of a universally fascinating subject, and a fine introduction to current brain science for those not familiar with the field. The tests Johnson puts himself through and describes so openly are good subjects for his amused reflection. For instance, a few years ago he was hooked up to a biofeedback machine, sensors attached to hands and forehead. The machine was set to monitor adrenaline levels. He felt nervous, and as is his habit, he deflected the nervousness by making jokes, to the audience of the biofeedback guy. (His writing is loaded with good humor, too.) And every joke he made showed up on the monitor as an adrenaline spike; suddenly the jokes "... seemed less like casual attempts at humor and more like a drug addict's hungering for a new fix." Here was a little chemical subroutine his brain had been putting itself through every day for almost all his life, and he had not known a thing about it. He still could not explain why the adrenaline rush felt the way it did, but that's not important. He wondered how many such little chemical subroutines his brain ran every day, or at any given moment, and what would he learn about himself if he could see them like his adrenaline spikes. Each chapter here is a sampling of how he got to see another subroutine at work. He looks at his capacity to mind-read, based on judging the emotions shown in pictures of eyes. He tries on a neurofeedback helmet that has the potential for increasing attention, and thus decreasing the large amount of medicines children are taking to increase their attention spans these days. He spends a session in a $2 million MRI machine, takes sojourns into different brain chemicals, recounts traumatic fears triggered when a window of his house was blown in almost catastrophically by a storm, experiences natural highs, and examines the biological and social importance of laughter. Johnson winds up with a tribute to Freud, who realized that beneath the surface of our consciousness, there are all sorts of processes going on of which we are unaware. The trouble with this, of course, is that while this insight was correct, the sorts of unconscious processes that can be looked at by the gadgets which Johnson describes are very far from the ones Freud thought were active. The brain is full of busy neurons and designated centers for specific sorts of thought, but it "is not seething with incest fantasies suppressed by the restrictions of civilized societies." (In fact, the incest taboo seems more likely to be in our DNA, not in our cultures.) But still, we all have so many "...voices in our heads, all of them competing for attention, that it's a miracle we ever get anything done." Just so. Johnson has produced an entertaining, idiosyncratic introduction into brain function, highlighting the ways that brains are now open to us in ways they never could have been before. Anyone with a brain will find that _Mind Wide Open_ makes aspects of that miraculous brain a little clearer.
Rating:
Summary: A great start and a refreshing perspective
Review: Johnson does a good job of taking concepts that could potentially be very confusing, and lays them out in an easy to read format. He does a great job of relating chemical and electrical activities in the brain with events in everyone's everyday life. Mind Wide Open is a great book if you're new to the field of psychology or simply aren't too familiar with the actual chemical workings of the brain. The detail in the main text isn't all that deep but the end notes make up for much of the "overlooked" information. I give this book 4 out of 5 stars because while it was informative and quite revealing I think that Johnson slightly oversimplified the issues at hand. If you come into this book with anything much above a beginners understanding of brain biochemistry you won't walk away with any new ideas. I recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a beginners guide to theories of how the brain functions.
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