The Right Mind: Making Sense of the Hemispheres

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Summary: A lucid and entertaining paradigm shift
Review: One of Robert Ornstein's great gifts is his ability to presentcomplicated historical and scientific material in a concise, lucid andentertaining fashion that lay readers like myself can understand and enjoy. THE RIGHT MIND embodies a daring shift in his paradigm for brain function from the 1970's, regarding the two hemispheres as complementary rather than dichotomous,the right providing the scaffolding and the left the building blocks. I was as startled and amazed when I read this book as I was when I read Ornstein's THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

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Summary: Fascinating account of latest research on brain hemispheres
Review: Partly as a result of Ornstein's earlier book on the divided brain 25 years ago, the terms left and right brain have become part of of daily vocabularly. Even adverts talk about developing the right brain. Not surprisingly there are a lot of confusions on the topic as well. That's why Ornstein's return to the topic should be welcomed by anyone with an interest in the brain and how the mind works. He shows how the simple idea that people are either left or right brained is simply wrong but that the two work together in fascinating ways that we are only just beginning to understand. For a fine example of entertaining yet easy to understand science writing, turn to his section describing what is involved in understanding a joke and the different way patients who have lost the use of parts of their left or right brain respond to jokes. Other topics like dreams and schizophrenia also can be seen in a new light when seen from this interaction between the hemispheres. This is a lot shorter than Steve Pinker's latest work on the Mind and a lot more entertaininly written and contains many more fresh insights Jerome Burne, (London-based journalist specializing in psychology)

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Summary: Brain for beginners
Review: Readers with previous experience with Ornstein's books may find The Right Mind the most interesting he's written. The view of brain through psychology offers a different approach about brain functions. For Beginners, this book may be quite useful. Though I read other book from Ornestein, I was expecting to find deep research on brain assymetry, which this book is poor, there's nothing you can't find over Internet on related sites. For intermeddiate readers on brain issue, this book may offer some interesting approaches, but too hard to get them between 200 pages. Instead, I would reccomend Carl Sagan's "Broca's Brain", a marvelous and interesting book about brain development. Advanced readers won't like Ornstein for explaing brain lateralization, and a more appropriate book would be "Left brain, Right Brain", the only serious book written on this subject. Conclusion: Ornstein book is not that bad at all. If you like Oliver Sacks and psychological views of brain, this is indeed a good choice. Wrong Title though, coz it doesn't have much about brain lateralization itself (by the way, the book enphasizes the importance of both hemispheres working together - which is quite obvious when you want a scientific approach - but many people forget on daily life).

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Summary: Decent book.
Review: This book has lots of interesting information. The author has done his homework. However, it gets boring at times and also the entire first 1/3 of the book just assumes that you believe in the theory of evolution.

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Summary: the right mind is the right book to read on the subject
Review: This book is not simply a sterile collection of ideas about the right and left hemispheres of the brain. It is a superbly-paced, well thought out text, one that leads the reader not only to an understanding of how the halves of the brain may work, but to an idea of how the skills possessed within these parts of the brain might work together to produce the 'right' mind for a given situation. I loved the last sentence of this book-it puts it all together in a way that is just right. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the subject.