The Undiscovered Mind
Subtitle: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation
Publisher: Free Press
Published: September 14, 1999
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 336
ISBN-13: 9780684850757
Subjects: Neurology & clinical neurophysiology; Physiological & neuro-psychology; Science/Mathematics; Neuroscience; Neurology (General); Medical; Science; Psychology; Neurosciences; General; Psychology & Psychiatry / General; Neurology - General; Neuropsychology; Brain; Popular works
First sentence: In Phaedo Plato described the last hours of Socrates, who had been imprisoned and sentenced to death by Athenian authorities.
Description: "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.".

"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.
Table of contents: label: INTRODUCTION
title: I-Witnessing
pagenum: 1; label: ONE
title: Neurosciences Explanatory Gap
pagenum: 15; label: TWO
title: Why Freud Isn't Dead
pagenum: 47; label: THREE
title: Psychotherapy and the Dodo Hypothesis
pagenum: 75; label: FOUR
title: Prozac and Other Placebos
pagenum: 102; label: FIVE
title: Gene-Whiz Science
pagenum: 137; label: SIX
title: Darwin to the Rescue!
pagenum: 167; label: SEVEN
title: Artificial Common Sense
pagenum: 199; label: EIGHT
title: The Consciousness Conundrum
pagenum: 229; label: EPILOGUE
title: The Future of Mind-Science
pagenum: 258; label: Notes
pagenum: 269; label: Selected Bibliography
pagenum: 309; label: Acknowledgments
pagenum: 313; label: Index
pagenum: 314