| Description |
325 pages ; 25 cm |
| Contents |
Introduction: I-Witnessing -- 1. Neuroscience's Explanatory Gap -- 2. Why Freud Isn't Dead -- 3. Psychotherapy and the Dodo Hypothesis -- 4. Prozac and Other Placebos -- 5. Gene-Whiz Science -- 6. Darwin to the Rescue! -- 7. Artificial Common Sense -- 8. The Consciousness Conundrum -- Epilogue: The Future of Mind-Science |
| Summary |
"John Horgan focuses on the single most important scientific enterprise of all - the effort to understand the human mind - and exposes a world of minor and doubtful achievement."--BOOK JACKET |
|
"Horgan takes us inside laboratories, hospitals, and universities to meet neuroscientists. Freudian analysts, electroshock therapists, behavioral geneticists, evolutionary psychologists, artificial intelligence engineers, and philosophers of consciousness. He looks into the persistent explanatory gap between mind and body that Socrates pondered and shows that it has not been bridged. He investigates what he calls the Humpty Dumpty dilemma, the fact that neuroscientists can break the brain and mind into pieces but cannot put the pieces back together again. He presents evidence that the placebo effect is the primary ingredient of psychotherapy, Prozac, and other treatments for mental disorders. As Horgan shows, the mystery of human consciousness, of why and how we think, remains so impregnable that to expect the attempts of scientific method and technology to penetrate it anytime soon is absurd."--BOOK JACKET |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Subject |
Neurosciences -- Popular works.
|
| LC no. |
99031051 |
| ISBN |
0684850753 |
|
