Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Oakdale Library | 150 BLA | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | 150 BLA | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
In this compelling, cutting-edge book, two generations of science writers explore the exciting science of "body maps" in the brain--and how startling new discoveries about the mind-body connection can change and improve our lives. Why do you still feel fat after losing weight? What makes video games so addictive? How can "practicing" your favorite sport in your imagination improve your game? The answers can be found in body maps.
Just as road maps represent interconnections across the landscape, your many body maps represent all aspects of your bodily self, inside and out. In concert, they create your physical and emotional awareness and your sense of being a whole, feeling self in a larger social world.
Moreover, your body maps are profoundly elastic. Your self doesn't begin and end with your physical body but extends into the space around you. This space morphs every time you put on or take off clothes, ride a bike, or wield a tool. When you drive a car, your personal body space grows to envelop it. When you play a video game, your body maps automatically track and emulate the actions of your character onscreen. When you watch a scary movie, your body maps put dread in your stomach and send chills down your spine. If your body maps fall out of sync, you may have an out-of-body experience or see auras around other people.
The Body Has a Mind of Its Own explains how you can tap into the power of body maps to do almost anything better--whether it is playing tennis, strumming a guitar, riding a horse, dancing a waltz, empathizing with a friend, raising children, or coping with stress.
The story of body maps goes even further, providing a fresh look at the causes of anorexia, bulimia, obsessive plastic surgery, and the notorious golfer's curse "the yips." It lends insights into culture, language, music, parenting, emotions, chronic pain, and more.
Filled with illustrations, wonderful anecdotes, and even parlor tricks that you can use to reconfigure your body sense, The Body Has a Mind of Its Own will change the way you think--about the way you think.
"The Blakeslees have taken the latest and most exciting finds from brain research and have made them accessible. This is how science writing should always be."
--Michael S. Gazzaniga, Ph.D., author of The Ethical Brain
"Through a stream of fascinating and entertaining examples, Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee illustrate how our perception of ourselves, and indeed the world, is not fixed but is surprisingly fluid and easily modified. They have created the best book ever written about how our sense of 'self' emerges from the motley collection of neurons we call the brain."
--Jeff Hawkins, co-author of On Intelligence
"The Blakeslees have taken the latest and most exciting finds from brain research and have made them accessible. This is how science writing should always be."
--Michael S. Gazzaniga, Ph.D., author of The Ethical Brain
"A marvelous book. In the last ten years there has been a paradigm shift in understanding the brain and how its various specialized regions respond to environmental challenges. In addition to providing a brilliant overview of recent revolutionary discoveries on body image and brain plasticity, the book is sprinkled with numerous insights."
--V. S. Ramachandran, M.D., director, Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego
Author Notes
Sandra Blakeslee is a regular contributor to The New York Times who specializes in the brain sciences. She has co-written many books, including Phantoms in the Brain with V. S. Ramachandran, On Intelligence with Jeff Hawkins , and S econd Chances: Men, Women and Children a Decade After Divorce with Judith S. Wallerstein. She is the third generation in a family of science writers.
Matthew Blakeslee is a freelance science writer in Los Angeles. He represents the fourth generation of Blakeslee science writers. This is his first book.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
What do "golfer's yips," the ability to see auras and the hypnotic appeal of video games all have in common? Each arises from the brain's body map. New York Times science contributor Sandra Blakeslee and her son, science writer Matthew Blakeslee, begin with a quick overview of the sense of touch. According to the Blakeslees, body maps are created by the brain, using touch, to spell out the brain's experience of the body and the space around it. These maps expand and contract to include objects such as clothing, tools or even your car. Some of the more interesting subjects the Blakeslees cover include muscle tone disorders, phantom limb sensations in amputees and the inaccurate body images associated with anorexia. Sketches and sidebars explore topics in more detail, while a glossary explains technical terms. With its breezy "this is so cool" style, this entertaining book will appeal to readers who prefer their science lighthearted and low-key. (Sept. 11) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
This popular synthesis of a technical field in neuroscience explores how the brain constructs its models of the body. Entangled with the perception of self, these maps are multitudinous and dynamic, as experimenters have discovered. The Blakeslees ground the idea of mental maps in the work of Wilder Penfield, a 1940s researcher whose probes on the brains of living people localized which areas of the brain represent which parts of the body. Subsequently, scientists have refined the concept of body maps, a history that binds the Blakeslees' informative explanations of specific maps, case studies, and psychic disorders. Expressed in an amiable, we're-all-in-this-together manner, their tour describes one's personal space and its extension to one's clothes, tools, instruments, and sports gear. The body in motion generates its own set of changing mental maps, distinguishing the graceful from the clumsy. Maps are plastic, report the Blakeslees, yet they also have permanence: successful dieters may still feel overweight, and amputees retain a map of the missing limb. Varied and revealing, this will intrigue readers interested in the clinical perspective on self-perception.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2007 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Two seasoned science writers enthuse about some new wrinkles in neuroscience, and ways you can benefit from the findings. The wrinkles are literally those folds of neuron-rich cortex that cover the brain. Back in the 1930s, neurosurgeons charted the primary somatosensory and motor cortices, strips of brain tissue that map points on your body to points on the strip in an orderly way--brain cells receiving signals from your hand lie next to cells receiving signals from your wrist, and so on. The sensory cortex tells you where you have been touched; the motor cortex indicates which body parts you move. Each is part of larger integrated circuits that feed forward and back to create perceptions, actions and emotions, to build memories, etc. The key to these multiple anatomical layouts in the brain is plasticity: The brain maps can change, and you can help the process. One way is practice. Those maps in your finger areas can grow larger as you practice arpeggios or free throws. Evidence suggests that mental practice works too. The Blakeslees, a mother and son team, see potential reversals for stroke paralysis, but they also describe a host of weird body distortions that result from disease or brain injury. "Amputee wannabes," for example, seek to have body parts removed. Dieters who relapse may be stuck with a mismatch between their new, thin body map and their long-standing, fat body image. Curiously, the authors do not consider the role of hormones and neurochemicals. They are also cavalier in their discussion of pain, surely one of the most complex phenomena, and all too readily assume that belief explains why any and all forms of alternative medicine may work. Despite some flaws, a text with much to be savored--not least the upbeat message that you can take control. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The authors, who bill themselves as "the world's first mother-son neuroscience writing team," here explore the "body mandala"-the sets of cells scattered throughout the brain that register touch perception and allow us to construct a sense of our body and its movement through space. This sounds pretty straightforward, but in fact malfunctions of this body-mapping system have been implicated in such esoteric conditions as "golfer's yips," out-of-body experiences, and autism. It also appears that body maps can expand, as when people act as if their hat is part of their head and duck in low doorways or when we flinch when a loved one is hurt. Engaging without being simplistic, this is the only title devoted to body mapping for a nonspecialist audience (other books touch on the topic in their discussions of broader subjects). An excellent choice for most public and undergraduate libraries.-Mary Ann Hughes, Neill P.L., Pullman, WA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
From the Introduction: Stand up and reach out your arms, fingers extended. Wave them up, down, and sideways. Make great big circles from over your head down past your thighs. Swing each leg out as far as you can, and with the tips of your toes trace arcs on the ground around you. Swivel and tilt your head as if you were craning out your neck to butt something with your forehead or touch it with your lips and tongue. This invisible volume of space around your body out to arm's length--what neuroscientists call peripersonal space- is part of you. This is not a metaphor, but a recently discovered physiological fact. Through a special mapping procedure, your brain annexes this space to your limbs and body, clothing you in it like an extended, ghostly skin. The maps that encode your physical body are connected directly, immediately, personally to a map of every point in that space and also map out your potential to perform actions in that space. Your self does not end where your flesh ends, but suffuses and blends with the world, including other beings. Thus when you ride a horse with confidence and skill, your body maps and the horse's body maps are blended in shared space. When you make love, your body maps and your lover's body maps commingle in mutual passion. Your brain also faithfully maps the space beyond your body when you enter it using tools. Take hold of a long stick and tap it on the ground. As far as your brain is concerned, your hand now extends to the tip of that stick. Its length has been annexed to your personal space. If you were blind, you could feel your way down the street using that stick. From Chapter 1: The idea that your brain maps chart not only your body but the space around your body, that these maps expand and contract to include every-day objects, and even that these maps can be shaped by the culture you grow up in, is very new to science. Research now shows that your brain is teeming with body maps--maps of your body's surface, its musculature, its intentions, its potential for action, even a map that automatically tracks and emulates the actions and intentions of other people around you. These body-centered maps are profoundly plastic--capable of significant reorganization in response to damage, experience, or practice. Formed early in life, they mature with experience and then continue to change, albeit less rapidly, for the rest of your life. Yet despite how central these body maps are to your being, you are only glancingly aware of your own embodiment most of the time, let alone the fact that its parameters are constantly changing and adapting, minute by minute and year after year. You may not truly appreciate the immense amount of work that goes on behind the scenes of your conscious mind that makes the experience of embodiment seem so natural. The constant activity of your body maps is so seamless, so automatic, so fluid and ingrained, that you don't even recognize it is happening, much less that it poses an absorbing scientific puzzle that is spawning fascinating insights into human nature, health, learning, our evolutionary past and our cybernetically enhanced future. From Chapter 6: "Carter" was a master chef at a well-known New York restaurant when, in late 1994, a blood clot in his brain almost cost him his livelihood. Rushed to the hospital in time to receive state-of-the-art clot dissolving care, Carter was left with a potentially devastating problem: He could no longer recognize fruits and vegetables. He couldn't tell a banana from a leek, though he could still tell a bread knife from a butcher knife and a hawk from a handsaw. He could use English fluently, and his senses were all intact. He had no discernible problems naming or thinking about any other categories of object-just fruits and veggies. It sounds like a career killer for a chef, but Carter managed to get by. You see, his brain's network body maps still knew what to do with each item. There was nothing wrong with the body maps containing his visual-motor templates for how to manipulate objects. And there was nothing wrong with the body maps that storehoused his library of well-practiced motor sequences involved in food prep. He could still peel a carrot, slice a tomato, or dice an onion--but first he had to be told what each thing was. He would simply query the kitchen staff: "Hey, Jane, is this a cucumber? "Yeah? Thanks." Chop chop chop. Excerpted from The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better by Sandra Blakeslee, Matthew Blakeslee All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Introduction: The Embodied Brain | p. 3 |
| Chapter 1 The Body Mandala: or, Maps, Maps, Everywhere | p. 7 |
| Chapter 2 The Little Man in the Brain: or, Why Your Genitals Are Even Smaller Than You Think | p. 15 |
| Chapter 3 Dueling Body Maps: or, Why You Still Feel Fat After Losing Weight | p. 28 |
| Chapter 4 The Homunculus in the Game: or, When Thinking Is as Good as Doing | p. 54 |
| Chapter 5 Plasticity Gone Awry: or, When Body Maps Go Blurry | p. 71 |
| Chapter 6 Broken Body Maps: or, Why Dr. Strangelove Couldn't Keep His Hand Down | p. 98 |
| Chapter 7 The Bubble Around the Body: or, Why You Seek Elbow Room | p. 109 |
| Chapter 8 Sticks and Stones and Cyberbones: or, The End of the Body as We Know It? | p. 138 |
| Chapter 9 Mirror, Mirror: or, Why Yawning Is Contagious | p. 163 |
| Chapter 10 Heart of the Mandala: or, My Insula Made Me Do It | p. 180 |
| Afterword: The You-ness of You | p. 203 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 209 |
| Glossary | p. 211 |
| Index | p. 217 |
