Category Archives: Book Reviews

One of the most complex unsolved mysteries in science is how the brain produces consciousness.  The study of brain disorders not only helps us understand and treat those conditions; it also renders insights into questions about human consciousness, sense of self, and creativity.  It can help us appreciate both our individuality and our shared humanity. Eric R. Kandel, Columbia University professor, Howard Hughes Medical Institute senior investigator and Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine, advances these beliefs in his book The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves. Kandel, who also authored The Age of Insight, reviews the latest research on autism, depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, addiction, Parkinson’s disease, and Alzheimer’s disease to illuminate the factors that contribute to these diseases, how the diseases are experienced, possible points of intervention, and what these diseases reveal about our social, emotional, decision-making, memory, kinesthetic, and creative abilities more generally.

Kandel commences with a brief overview of the history of psychiatry and neurology and modern tools for studying the brain and disordered behavior. He emphasizes that genes and environment interact to disrupt neural circuitry, resulting in disordered minds.  Brain disorders can be caused by over or under active brain circuits or ineffective communication within the brain because of injury, altered synaptic connections, or developmentally inappropriate patterns of brain connection.

Kandel contends that we are inherently social; typical development cannot proceed in isolation. Yet, autism is a disorder related to difficulty connecting with people and understanding others’ minds. The so called “social brain,” which includes the inferior temporal cortex, amygdala, temporoparietal junction, and other regions, may be disrupted in autism. Autism spectrum disorders, like several other brain disorders, have a strong genetic basis and may come about in part because of age-related mutations in fathers’ sperm.

We are not only social beings but also emotional. Indeed, emotions, or states of readiness in our brain in response to our surroundings, play a critical role in our everyday lives and in our constructions of our sense of self.  One in every three Americans will experience anxiety at least once in their life, and about 8% will experience post-traumatic stress disorder. Depression is a mood disorder that affects about 5% of people and is characterized by feelings of extreme sadness, hopelessness and worthlessness and by a lack of energy.  Although it can be cruelly stereotyped as such, depression is not a personal or moral weakness. Kandel explains how the use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, ketamine, cognitive behavioral theory, and brain stimulation can all be used, under different conditions and in different combinations, to treat depression. These disorders are teaching us about where emotions arise in the brain (i.e., in areas including the hypothalamus, amygdala, striatum, and prefrontal cortex), how the brain and body engage in bidirectional communication, and how emotions impact behavior, decision-making, and morality.

Several brain disorders are caused by dopamine imbalances. Schizophrenia is a neurodevelopmental disorder related to excessive dopamine. It affects 1% of the population by disrupting thinking, behavior, memory, and sense of self starting in late adolescence.  Whereas depression results primarily from functional abnormalities in the brain, schizophrenia results primarily from anatomical abnormalities. Unfortunately, most currently available treatments for schizophrenia address only the symptoms related to disordered thoughts and not the symptoms like lack of motivation. Fortunately, preemptive therapy for people at risk for developing schizophrenia is promising.  Parkinson’s disease, a motor disorder associated with tremors at rest and slow movement, is caused by defective protein folding that causes dopamine producing neurons in the brain’s substantia nigra to die. Addiction is another chronic disease in which dopamine is involved. Medications that help people forget the pleasure of an addictive substance can help treat addiction. Unfortunately, even though drug overdose is a leading cause of death for people under 50, there has been minimal investment in drugs to treat addiction, Kandel laments.

Although memory abilities can be disrupted in several of the disorders Kandel reviews, in dementia memory loss is the primary symptom. Alzheimer’s disease is fundamentally different from age-related memory decline. It is causes by protein misfolding, causing toxic clumps that create neurofibrillary tangles. Our understanding of Alzheimer’s disease, including genetic and health risk factors for developing it, has increased rapidly.

Synthesizing his review of these disorders, Kandel offers insights into our understanding of creativity and consciousness. Creativity has a biological basis in the brain and the capacity for creativity is universal (i.e., not dependent on mental disorders). By reviewing the art of people with various brain disorders Kandel suggests that some of the elements that are important for creativity are perseverance, collaboration, mind-wandering, and combining unrelated elements. As Sigmund Freud argued, unconscious mental work impacts conscious thinking. Disordered minds are revealing that our decisions emerge from our unconscious thoughts, more than from our conscious thoughts.

Kandel concludes with a powerful prediction—that neurology and psychiatry will merge soon into one discipline that examines how genes and environment lead to individual differences in brains and behavior. This field could move us to personalizing medical treatment such that we may be able to prevent the diseases of the brain and mind.

Kandel, E.R. (2018). The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves.New York, NY: Farrar, Strous, and Giroux.

More than any other life stage adolescence is derided and characterized as an unpredictable, turbulent storm. In Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain, University College London cognitive neuroscience professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore argues that we need to stop disparaging adolescence and instead recognize it as a critical time for building identity. Further, we need to support young people in this process. Blakemore explains how adolescents develop socially and neurologically, how that development shapes behavior, and how it impacts who young people will become. Inventing Ourselves will be useful for educators wishing to understand better people who are between puberty and adulthood (roughly ages 12-25) and for developmental psychologists wishing to explore how brain and behavior develop after childhood.

Adolescence is a distinct period of life observable across all human cultures and across numerous animal species. During adolescence most people develop a stable sense of who they are and how they would like to be viewed by others. Identity development is shaped by environment and by some of the social changes that occur during adolescence. For example, adolescents are more likely to engage in social comparison, value others’ opinions, attend to cultural norms, spend less time with parents and more time alone or with friends, experience embarrassment, and wrongly assume others care or notice their own behavior.

Interestingly, the pattern of brain activity that supports the ability to think about oneself changes during adolescence, which may correspond to these behavioral changes. Conversely, social experiences during adolescence can change the brain. For example, social exclusion results in more mood disturbance and anxiety for adolescents than for adults, and isolation during this period can have long lasting impacts on brain structure, hormone levels, and long-term behavior. For adults the effects of isolation on the brain are not as dramatic.

More generally, the brain undergoes substantial change during adolescence. Gray matter volume decreases and white matter volume increases. The prefrontal cortex, an area associated with decision-making, self-control, and self-awareness undergoes substantial, protracted development during adolescence. A network of regions that supports the ability to understand others’ minds undergoes anatomical maturation through early adulthood.

Blakemore also discusses the “mismatch hypothesis” of adolescent brain development. That is, the limbic system, which is involved in reward sensitivity, matures on average earlier than the prefrontal cortex. This mismatch may explain adolescents’ risk-taking because rewards may be especially alluring and self-control may be limited. Importantly, Blakemore notes that there is individual variability in the extent to which a mismatch exists. Although major changes in the brain level off by adulthood, brains can always continue to change with experience.

Adolescence can be a dangerous time. Adolescents’ penchant for risk-taking can lead them to have deadly accidents. Extensive consumption of cannabis and alcohol can reduce cognitive ability later in life and can cause more damage to the brain than an equal amount of consumption in adulthood would cause. Additionally, three-fourths of mental illnesses emerge by the end of adolescence. Fascinating brain research suggests that we may be able to detect differences in young peoples’ brains that would be predictive of whether they will go on to develop mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.

Informed by a body of research about the messages to which adolescents are responsive, Blakemore advises, “if we want to curb certain kinds of risk-taking in young people, it would be a good idea to focus on the immediate, social consequences of actions and decisions rather than, or as well as, delivering earnest warnings about long-term repercussions.” She argues also that mindfulness training might be a way to improve self-control and well-being and reduce mental health issues in adolescents.

Blakemore describes the value of understanding adolescents’ brains and behavior for supporting education. She suggests that adolescents’ proclivity for risk-taking should be harnessed in schools to push adolescents to take intellectual risks. She suggests that high schools should start later so that students are not deprived of sleep. Brain research shows that adolescents’ circadian rhythms are shifted later than adults, and behavioral evidence suggests that adolescents are not sleeping enough. A final suggestion is that in determining punishments for adolescents’ transgressions, we should remember that adolescents have tremendous potential for change, they are biologically disposed to riskiness, and they may be more likely to learn from rewards than from punishments.

Adolescents, more than people at other stages, are creative, passionate, and eager to learn from new people and experiences. All around us there are examples of inspiring young people making an impact in society, overcoming obstacles, and building better lives for themselves and others. We need to honor adolescence for what it is—a time of identity development—and support adolescents because of what they are—our hope and our future.

Blakemore, S.J. (2018). Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain. New York, NY: Public Affairs.

Abigail Marsh’s 2017 book , reviews research by her and others showing that extraordinary altruists and psychopaths may be two extremes of a bell-curve of human caring with altruists and psychopaths distinguished by how sensitive they are to feelings of fear. She employs an evolutionary perspective to argue that having evolved to care for vulnerable young has equipped us with the neural architecture to care for other people more generally. She concludes by arguing that we both can and should strive to be more altruistic.

Marsh, associate professor of psychology at Georgetown University, has herself been both the beneficiary of extraordinary altruism and the victim of assault. At age 19 she was in a serious car accident that might have left her dead had an anonymous stranger not intervened, at great risk to himself, to rescue her. A few years later a man she did not know grabbed her in a sexually inappropriate manner. When she reacted with outrage, he proceeded to punch her in the face, knocking her to the ground. Marsh has devoted her career to understanding the roots of and individual variability in these extremes of behavior, how we can help people with psychopathic tendencies, and how we can behave more like altruists.

Early in her career, Marsh uncovered a peculiar relationship; the ability to recognize fear in faces predicted altruism. This effect held across different types of altruistic actions and was more robust than many factors that had traditionally been expected to be closely related to altruism. Intrigued by this, she went on to study responses to fearful faces in children and adolescents known for their lack of altruism and lack of remorse for causing other people pain—youth with callous-unemotional traits (or psychopathic tendencies). Marsh conducted functional MRI scans of the brains of these youth as they were exposed to faces displaying different emotions. Previous research had suggested that the amygdala—a brain structure located deep in the middle of the brain—responds strongly when an individual is exposed to fearful expressions. In children with psychopathic traits, however, this brain pattern was not observed—a fact consistent with these children stating that they rarely experienced fear. It may be that psychopathic individuals’ impaired ability to feel fear impairs their ability to empathize with others’ fear, and this makes it difficult for them to understand why it can be wrong to make people feel afraid.

Given that many human traits can be modelled with a bell-curve shape and that the distribution of psychopathy in the population looks like a bell-curve cut in half, Marsh hypothesized that perhaps a normal curve could be constructed to represent the full distribution of caring in the population with extraordinary altruism balancing out psychopathy. Although many people engage in altruistic actions frequently, extraordinary altruists do so for people they do not know at great cost to themselves, even when there is no expectation to do so.

Humans can function normally with one kidney but are born with two. Anonymous kidney donors—people who voluntarily undergo kidney surgery, incurring financial costs and medical risks, in order to give one of their kidneys to person they do not know—served as an ideal case study of extraordinary altruists. Marsh recruited these extraordinary altruists to undergo similar functional MRI scans to the ones she had had youth with callous-unemotional tendencies undergo. Interestingly, she identified complementary findings. Extreme altruists’ amygdalae were especially responsive to fearful faces and their right amygdalae were about 8% larger than those of people in the general population. Marsh concludes that, although there is a common trope that extraordinary altruists are fearless to be able to help others in the way they do, on the contrary these individuals are actually hypersensitive to the fear of other people and motivated to act because of it.
That hypersensitivity to fear may stem from a co-opting of our parental instincts. We have evolved to love our small, underdeveloped babies, enjoy physical contact with them, and produce nutritious mother’s milk to feed them. We are built to parent, and are drawn to provide care for other beings, even those who are not our children.

Marsh argues that people are more compassionate than we typically recognize. Better quality of life is associated with greater caring. Thus, as quality of life continues to improve, more people may become increasingly compassionate. To bring about greater altruism we should cultivate a humble understanding that strangers’ welfare is worth as much as our own. Most simply, Marsh argues that there is a virtuous cycle of giving, so, “if you want to be more altruistic, just start!” (P. 50).

Marsh, A. (2017). The Fear Factor: How One Emotion Connects Altruists, Psychopaths, and Everyone In-between. New York: Basic Books.

Sir Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica previously argued in their 2015 book Creative Schools (reviewed here) that we should pursue individualized and holistic learning.  The duo have now written a sequel of sorts, for parents of school age children. In You, Your Child, and School: Navigating Your Way to the Best Education Robinson and Aronica: 1) review the ways society is changing and the implications for education; 2) note several challenges related to ensuring students receive a quality education; and 3) help parents analyze how to overcome these challenges so that their children get the education they need to live fulfilled lives.

Great parents create the conditions that support their children’s growth.  They work to ensure that the needs in Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs– physiological, safety, love/belonging, esteem, self-actualization—are fulfilled for their children.  They recognize that there are, as Howard Gardner has argued, multiple types of intelligence, and they help their children identify their talents. Great parents recognize that different aspects of development (e.g., cognitive, emotional, physical) co-occur and impact one another.  They encourage a lot of play, especially outside.  Finally, great parents encourage healthy sleep and exercise habits to help mitigate the substantial stress that students experience. Great teachers help students stay excited about learning, build students’ confidence, demonstrate passion, focus on relationships, and are experts in knowing how people learn.

Quality education supports students in becoming fulfilled and engaged adults by supporting the development of the eight competencies Robinson and Aronica detailed in Creative Schools: curiosity, creativity, criticism, communication, collaboration, compassion, composure, and citizenship. These competencies help students develop socially, emotionally, and culturally. Quality education is practical, showing connections between theory and practice to help engage students.

Quality education also prepares students for the future. Today’s typical education may not be the best way to prepare kids for the future because it is difficult to know what jobs today’s students will hold. Robinson and Aronica argue that a college degree, which has become increasingly expensive, is no longer a guarantee of a good job. The emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and math fields not only leads to some students being less engaged in school, but it may also be ignoring ways in which the arts and humanities help students develop important workforce skills. They argue that we are doing a disservice both to students and to society by not offering more vocational education courses in high school and not endowing vocational tracks with more respect. One out of every three jobs requires non-college professional training, and yet only 12% of people have that training. These jobs can be fulfilling and even pay commensurate with jobs that require a college degree. Parents, children, and schools should work together to find the best educational and career path for each child.

Robinson and Aronica suggest several factors for parents to consider when determining whether a school will fit their child’s needs. They suggest parents look for schools with a broad, balanced, and dynamic curriculum that teaches not only the academic disciplines but also physical education, arts, and social and life skills. Parents should consider whether teachers flexibly modify their practice to students’ needs. Parents should seek schools that use assessments that are open, informative, and ongoing. School schedules ideally are flexible and varied. The environment should be safe and stimulating.  Schools should capitalize on and contribute to the wider community.

When the local public school does not have these elements, Robinson and Aronica argue that parents can change the schools from within them or from outside of them. They can also take their children out of the school system. They draw on the work of Jerry Mintz to list indicators for homeschooling or “unschooling” a child. They suggest that parents can try to connect more with their child’s teachers, get involved with the school (e.g., volunteering in the library), participate in school governance (e.g., parent teacher associations), or advocate for changes to education policy. They offer advice about how parents should behave when raising a complaint and what parents should expect from their child’s school in addressing their concern. Robinson and Aronica offer advice also about common problems that kids face in school, e.g., homework, stress, bullying, and attentional issues.

Consistent with a message these authors have shared previously, the main theme in You, Your Child, and School,is one that is not new to parents and yet is reassuring to have affirmed: every child is unique, one type of education is not appropriate for all students, and life is not linear. Parents and educators alike can better serve children when bearing this in mind.

Robinson, K., & Aronica, L. (2018). You, Your Child, and School: Navigating Your Way to the Best Education. New York, NY: Viking Penguin.