Biology 202 Book Commentary

 “Without rebirth and resurrections, humanity loses its heroes and loses its capacity for transformation. In order to gain life, the monomythic lesson goes, we must first lose it” (146). ~Michael Paul Mason 

In almost every piece of literatureon the brain that I have encountered during my short time as a neurobiologystudent has described the design of the brain in a rather organized manner,implying that the brain is a perfectly systematic entity. For the bookcommentary assignment, I decided to read The Accidental Mind: How BrainEvolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams and God by David Linden, a scientific novel that contests the idea of thebrain as a perfectly organized entity and how its evolving design overthousands of years lead to certain phenomenon of the brain that cease to amazeeven to this day.

The Melding of Senses:

A Review of The Man Who Tasted Shapes

Michelle Crepeau

Prof. Grobstein

Biology 202-Neurobiology and Behavior

16, May 2008

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and the Oceans of the Mind: A Book Commentary of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly-A Memoir of Life in Death

Can we know something without knowing how we know it? This is precisely the question that Malcolm Gladwell sets out to ponder in his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Looking at scientific experiments from laboratories nation-wide, Gladwell explores the fascinating phenomenon of “thin-slicing”, or making snap-judgments without consciously engaging in the decision making process. These “thin-slices”, Gladwell asserts, are surprisingly accurate—sometimes even more so than the decisions we make after long hours of careful consideration and reflection. One particularly interesting question raised by this study is

The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self by Alice Miller examines how one loses their self during childhood and how as an adult struggle to discover or accept ones true identity that Miller focuses on children who undergo the process of overcoming an "abusive" childhood. Abuse does not necessarily have to be physical or sexual, but in many of the cases outlined in this book they refer to a child growing up in an environment where the child loses their identity and becomes passive to emotional abuse that their parents may indirectly put them through. This results in a child ignoring his or her own needs, which results in the disappearance of the "real" self.

The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently... and Why

Richard E. Nisbett (2003)