Biology 202 Book Commentary

In her book, The Female Brain, Louanne Brizendine describes the stages that the female brain goes through during life, citing brain structure and chemistry as the departure for differences between the male and female brains. Most of the misunderstanding of female psychology, Brizendine notes, stems from the misconception held by scientists during most of the 19th and 20th centuries - “that women are essentially small men in psychology and physiology”. She says that it is important to make the distinction between male and female psychologies because physiological sources for these differences do exist, contrary to the reality that they are usually just brushed off as mere deviations during studies.

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"Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? If you were unable to awake from that dream, how would you know the difference between that dream world and the real world?" -Morpheus 0:31:45

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Controversial news has broken loose in the mental health community: antidepressants are hardly better than placebos!

   Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink is an exploration of rapid cognition, of the thinking that happens in the blink of an eye, and is an attempt to “understand this magical and mysterious thing called judgment” (Gladwell 260). He refrains from using “intuition” to describe this kind of thinking, as he believes we use that word to describe irrational thought. Gladwell argues that those first two seconds of rapid cognition are completely rational and just involve thinking that moves a little faster and operates a little more mysteriously than deliberate, conscious thought and decision-making.

 “The Eyes sees what it sees, even when we know what we know”(P17).

              Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard-trained neuro-anatomist who wrote a book called “My Stroke of Insight”, which is an account of her experience of a stroke that took place in the left hemisphere of her brain, when she was thirty-seven years old. She suffered from a major hemorrhage that was a result of a congenital malformation of blood vessels that erupted in her brain. As a result she experienced her brain function deteriorate within a period of four hours to such an extent that she was unable to read, write, walk, talk or remember any of her life.

Eve Gleichman

Neurobiology 202

May 12, 2010

Paul Grobstein

Book Review: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, by Anne Fadiman