| View Larger Image | The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better | Paperbackby Sandra Blakeslee (Author), Matthew Blakeslee (Author)
| List Price: | $15.00 | | Price: | $10.20 | | You Save: | $4.80 (32%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Random House Trade Paperbacks | | Edition: | Reprintth Edition | | Page Count: | 240 Pages | | Publication Date: | September 09, 2008 | | Sales Rank: | 29,766th |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780812975277
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Your body has a mind of its own. You know it’s true. You can sense it, even though it may be hard to articulate. You know that your body is more than a vehicle for your brain to cruise around in, but how deeply are mind and body truly interwoven?Answers can be found in the emerging science of body maps. Just as road maps represent interconnections across the landscape, your many body maps represent all aspects of your bodily self. Your self doesn’t begin and end with your physical body but extends into the space around you. 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. 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: play tennis, strum a guitar, ride a horse, dance a waltz, empathize with a friend, raise children, cope with stress. 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 what it takes to have a conscious mind inside a feeling body.Praise for The Body Has a Mind of Its OwnNAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD“You’ll never think about your body–or your mind–in the same way again.”–Daniel Goleman, author of Social Intelligence“A fascinating exploration of senses we didn’t even know we had.”–Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of Coming to Our Senses “A delightfully original, understandable, and mind-stretching work.”–William Safire, columnist, The New York Times Magazine“A marvelous book.”–V. S. Ramachandran, M.D., director, Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego“[An] accessible, practical overview of an important scientific story.”–Antonio Damasio, author of Descartes’ Error |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 17 reviews)
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Amusing light review by D.E. Wray (Tokyo)  3 Stars
November 15, 2009
This is a good book for passing some spare time: say, three hours or so. The authors have nothing new to say, and literate readers will already know most of the things presented here, but "The Body has a Mind of its Own" serves well as a digest.
One annoying point is the excessively casual style of the prose. There is a superabundance of pronouns (especially "you" and "we") in what seems to be an attempt to make the information appealing to the masses. Alas, the approach comes off as appealing to the selfish. A less "intimate" style would have suited the material better. Still, the book ain't bad.
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Dazzling sketch of the embodied mind by Elliott Bignell (Sargans, Switzerland)  4 Stars
July 02, 2009
The Blakeslees have produced a wonderful piece of popular science writing. Fascinating, clearly written and up-to-date, it eschews the more impenetrable specialist details of the neurologists' trade without speaking down to the reader or oversimplifying. I found it a dazzling follow-up read to Damasio's "Descartes Error", since whose publication so much new science has emerged.
What that science has found is maps. Lots and lots of maps. They are referred to repeatedly as homunculi, but the book makes clear at the outset that these are not the dreaded homunculi of the philosophers' "homunculus fallacy". Rather that alleging that a human being is conscious because her head contains a little being or spirit which is conscious, these homunculi are representations - maps spread out in neural space corresponding to physical volumes and objects in external space. Some of these are very literal - a scientist can chisel a hatch in your skull and poke a section of your brain with a sharp stick and fingers and legs will twitch or tingle. He can then stick labels on the brain parts and, at the end, literally have a map of your motor cortex's representation of your skeletal musculature which he can pickle and show your family.
Some of these maps are more abstract or more indirect. There are maps of your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system dealing with interoception - the perception of organ states - which impact on your emotional state. There are maps dealing with proprioception - perception of muscle tension and limb position - and maps dealing with motor functions for those muscles. There are premotor maps generating the intention to activate those motor functions. There are maps defining the interactions of these maps. There are maps dealing with facial expressions. There are maps in which mirror neurons - possibly the scientific find of the century - are active, modelling the actions and intentions both of yourself and of others, without which we could probably not learn by physical mimicry of others, empathy and introspection.
Many or most of these maps are characterised by the principle of neurological plasticity, and this has some amazing implications. When you use a tool, hook up to a virtual reality interface or pilot a vehicle, your maps adjust to modify your model of your personal space. Extra space and extra capabilities are incorporated into your "you". Moreover, over time they become physical reality and yield measurable increase in the sizes of the associated maps. If you drive regularly, practice a martial art or work at a computer, your perception of your body space grows to include new domains and becomes increasingly automated and unconscious with time. Moreover, these maps are strengthened even by thinking in a coordinated fashion about using them - practice your sport assiduously in your mind and, under the right circumstances, you physically improve at it.
The aspect which struck me perhaps most strongly is the devastating effect these findings have on any lingering or resurgent sympathies for dualism. Dualism is a dead letter anyway among philosophers and neuroscientists and has been for some considerable time, but the notion of the ghost in the machine holds on among the public. This is probably mainly for religious reasons and can therefore not be eradicated, but you cannot read this book and still seriously entertain the notion of a "soul" or a vis vitalis.
The mind and the self are modular, and their modules can be selectively knocked out. Show test subjects a series of pictures of their own faces blended with that of a friend and they can reliably recognise themselves up to 50% and their friend above 50%. Knock out a portion of the correct map with a virtual lesion induced by transcranial magnetic stimulation and they can no longer recognise their face. Knock out another map section due to a stroke and the victim can no longer notice things on their left. Poke the motor cortex and the subject will move their hand. Poke the corresponding section of the premotor cortex and the subject will want to move their hand.
There is clearly no ghost in this machine. Only machine parts. Knock the whole machine out and the whole self must go.
The one slightly jarring little note came close to the end, where the book appears briefly to endorse the idea of "free will": "And crucially, you clearly have the precious faculty of free will." This cannot be, and is wildly inconsistent with the picture painted by the rest of the book. The authors' meaning rapidly becomes clear, and further reading overturns this impression of abdicated rationality: this is the "common sense view", not a notion compatible with the neuroscience elucidated in the remainder of the work. It felt a little like suddenly stepping on a thorn, a brief pain passing almost immediately.
All in all, this is stellar science writing.
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Fascinating! by Ramona L. Voight (Big Lake, MN)  5 Stars
June 02, 2009
Well-written, easy to understand and even witty. It gives insight into many physiological and psychological processes. It helped me understand why I was able to reconnect with some damaged body functions after a stroke, just by thinking of "re-inhabiting" those areas.
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Very interesting take on the mind-body connection by Mary Beth Sodus 3 Stars
April 25, 2009
The book was suggested to me by a fellow yoga teacher. As someone who works on the mind-body-spirit connection it was fascinating to read about the the science and experiments that are mapping out these connections. The chapters on how to change body image were especially well done. I think it radically expanded my understanding and sensitivity to body maps. I could not put it down.
Very interesting and strongly recommended. Can't wait to pass this book on to friends.
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Insightful read by K. Smith (Texas, USA) 5 Stars
April 23, 2009
Excellent read, simple and accessible for the masses while still being informative and insightful.
For anyone who has ever been called an 'empath' it is a must read...Why? You'll know....
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