Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

I recently read Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life by Steven Johnson, whose book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software I also found fascinating. In Mind Wide Open, Johnson starts with everyday experiences – detecting other people’s emotions, phobias, paying attention, being a family, having moods and emotions, being good at different things – and looks at the leading edge of neuroscience in these areas and how it helps us to understand ourselves.

He writes personally and tells it as a personal journey; he undergoes various experimental demonstrations himself and describes what that was like and what he learned about himself by doing so. He’s setting out to give ordinary, intelligent people a vocabulary to talk about our own mental processes in terms of current neuroscience, so that we can discuss things and think about things that are important to how we live our lives. And he does this very well (and concludes with an extended discussion of Freud, whose psychological vocabulary is influential to this day, talking about what he got right as well as what he got wrong).

One thing that he makes clear is that emotion is inextricably entangled with our thoughts and colours them continuously. Not only when we are experiencing something, either; also when we remember it. When we take memories out and run them through our brains, we put them back again changed – altered by our current situation and what has gone on for us in the intervening period since the time we are remembering.

For anyone who is interested in how we think and interact, this is a good, accessible, thoughtful and well-written introduction to what scientists are now discovering about our minds.

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