A book that will bring you closer to your mind. | An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain |...

used alchemy: | An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain | Diane Ackerman

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	• An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain Diane Ackerman Scribner, 2005 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 26 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Alchemical magic and delight

As the alchemists from a time past, Ackerman observes, concocts, and maybe even lets herself mislead in her attempt to turning brain science research to poetry. Today, those alchemists are often characterized as liars, charlatans, and poseurs - though many of our greatest thinkers and observers of nature, such as Isaac Newton, Roger Bacon and Saint Thomas Aquinas, sought its quest. Many hard scientists may view Ackerman's alchemy with the same suspicions. Still, there is more than enough insight and informed science in her piece to lead the uninitiated to go off on his and her own to contemplate and search deeper into the workings of the human brain. For those new to neuroscience, and for many of you who are not, you may find yourself tingling with sheer delight to the interweaving of science and poetry.

An Alchemy of Mind was one of the first books I'd read in neuroscience. Ackerman's textured language and metaphors inspired in me a more thorough search not only into neuroscience, but also genetics, human prehistory, and cognitive neuroscience. True scientists and researchers like Robert Sapolsky, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and Brian Fagan are now prominent in my studies, in large part due to Ackerman's brilliance in sweet-talking me to a place of comfort with the words, language, mechanisms, and concepts of brain science.

Yes, when I return to her work, I can now see the errors, the omissions, and sometimes over-stretched metaphors. Still, when I do come back to An Alchemy of Mind, which I find myself doing quite often, it's like sitting in front of a favorite magician and asking her to dazzle me with her slight-of-hand yet one more time simply for the love of how she churns my thoughts while contemplating the wonder of it all.

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A book that will bring you closer to your mind.

This is not a typical book on the brain, or on the hammer and anvil of neuroscience. It is a blend of prose, poetry, and fact; the writer's imagination weaving it with the science and the human aspect of being both inside as well as outside the brain. This is clear at the very first glance at the contents: For example the first 5 chapters are grouped under "Miracle Waters", which she explains in the next line, is about "Evolution". The chapters are similarly clothed. For example the title of chapter 5 is "Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines", which is explained to be about "The unconscious; how it collaborates with the conscious mind".

Very few people have the golden ink with which Diane Ackerman is gifted. If you are picking this up for a casual read, you won't be disappointed. If you take the ideas home and she makes you think, I won't be surprised. Sometimes the dollar tag on objects can hardly define the value, and in this case, whatever the value you pay, you will be paid back many times over.

The science of the mind and the brain is still in its infancy, and I would not pick on the veracity of some of the facts as a detractor to recommending this book. The target audience are not subject matter experts. The technical treatment has been intentionally hidden beneath the accessible prose, and some readers who may have expected more details in a more transparent manner, as most are accustomed to, may feel misled. To these readers I must say, let variety replace the monotony we are all used to. If you must need the dry gritty sands go look for it in the desert, if you are looking for an oasis, you have arrived.

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used alchemy:

arrived within a week wrapped in a manilla envelope. cover intact, student ID sticker with name and address on inside cover. Probably not a good idea to have personal info.
Copy okay, readable but pages dry and a bit brittle. No obvious marks as I flipped through it.
Perhaps a bit overpriced for the quality of this paperback edition.

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A Sensualist's Portrait of the Brain

"I'm picturing the brain as a lightning-filled jar, where neurons fire millions of electrical bursts each moment, a silent crackling, while potent chemicals flow into and out of each neuron...through that lightening storm, the body speaks to the brain." ~ pg. 66

Diane Ackerman is fascinated by life and her enthusiasm is contagious. In "An Alchemy of Mind" she explores memory, dreaming, the mind's eye, traumatic memories, personality, happiness, laughter and such diverse topics as zoopharmacognosy and magnetoencephalography. Through her own vivid experiences she makes complex concepts understandable. She has lived an exciting life and draws on her experience, weaving facts with reflection. As a sensualist she is naturally inclined to take the reader on journeys to scented rose gardens even though her tales of harrowing mountain climbing experiences vie for your attention.

Diane Ackerman's writing style is intellectual and vivid all while invoking a sense of comfort, like you are talking to an intellectual friend. As she captures moments and then propels your mind into new territories she subtly teaches you more about the world and makes you curious for more. Fortunately she has written quite a few books and after reading one, you may feel compelled to duplicate the experience by reading them all.

~The Rebecca Review

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Metaphors vs. knowledge

Reading Diane Ackerman is always like entering a high octane bubble of some kind, being transported into a new and rarified atmosphere. It is astonishing how her imagination can fuse at every turn these hard gems of metaphor, can leap across the chasms that keep our more pedestrian meanings apart. One has presented to him/her in her writing not only new and interesting facts (often about animals and other beings that inhabit the natural world) but new and unaccustomed ways of thinking about things. Her work is testimony to the power of imagination and its ability, not only to delight, but to advance new perspectives and understanding.

But the subject she has chosen in this book - - mind, consciousness - -shows the limitation of metaphor, I think, as no other subject can. At the end of all this magic, we are still faced with the "hard" problem of how brain doings can get transformed into mind doings. The reductionists she relies on - - Dennett, Damasio, Searle - - have no clue. So perhaps it's time to turn to the other approach: instead of believing that "the mind is in the brain" (leading straightaway into physicalistic reduction), posit that "the brain is in the mind" (in the sense that "brain" is always either percept or concept, and these are mental entities). A phenomenological approach devolves from this direction, and I believe that we can gain from it not only a much healthier respect for mind and its phenomena, but genuine understanding as well.

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The most ambitious and enlightening work to date from the bestselling author of A Natural History of the Senses, An Alchemy of Mind combines an artist's eye with a scientist's erudition to illuminate, as never before, the magic and mysteries of the human mind.

Long treasured by literary readers for her uncommon ability to bridge the gap between art and science, celebrated scholar-artist Diane Ackerman returns with the book she was born to write. Her dazzling new work, An Alchemy of Mind, offers an unprecedented exploration and celebration of the mental fantasia in which we spend our days -- and does for the human mind what the bestselling A Natural History of the Senses did for the physical senses.

Bringing a valuable female perspective to the topic, Diane Ackerman discusses the science of the brain as only she can: with gorgeous, immediate language and imagery that paint an unusually lucid and vibrant picture for the reader. And in addition to explaining memory, thought, emotion, dreams, and language acquisition, she reports on the latest discoveries in neuroscience and addresses controversial subjects like the effects of trauma and male versus female brains. In prose that is not simply accessible but also beautiful and electric, Ackerman distills the hard, objective truths of science in order to yield vivid, heavily anecdotal explanations about a range of existential questions regarding consciousness, human thought, memory, and the nature of identity.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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