Mind Wide Open: Your Brain And The Neuroscience Of Everyday Life

Also by Steven Johnson Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate SCRIBNER 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 Copyright © 2004 by Steven Johnson All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work. Designed by Kyoko Watanabe Text set in Adobe Caslon Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Johnson, Steven. Mind wide open: your brain and the neuroscience of everyday life/ Steven Johnson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Neurosciences. 2. Neuropsychology. 3. Self-perception. I. Title. RC341.J648 2004 612.8′2—dc22 2003063308 ISBN 0-7432-5879-7 Portions of this book first appeared in Discover Magazine and The Nation. “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test and images used by permission of Simon Baron-Cohen. The test first appeared in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 1997. The “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test is based on photographs from commercial sources. The test itself is used only for research and is not distributed for commercial profits. Copyright of each individual photograph cannot be traced from these photo fragments. Visit us on the World Wide Web: www.SimonSays.com For my boys …let winged Fancy wander Through the thought still spread beyond her: Open wide the mind’s cage-door… —KEATS Contents Preface: Kafka’s Room 1 Mind Sight 2 The Sum of My Fears 3 Your Attention, Please 4 Survival of the Ticklish 5 The Hormones Talking 6 Scan Thyself Conclusion: Mind Wide Open Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments Index The author’s brain, seen through a conventional MRI scan. Preface Kafka’s Room How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room…. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world. —KAFKA The idea for this book began with a nervous joke—a handful of nervous jokes, to be precise. A few years ago, thanks to a lucky convergence of events and a long-standing curiosity, I found myself in the office of a biofeedback practitioner, lying on a couch with sensors attached to my palms, fingertips, and forehead. As we talked, the two of us stared into a computer monitor, where a series of numbers flashed on the screen like some kind of low-budget version of the CNBC ticker tape. The numbers documented precisely how much I was sweating and updated several times a second. I’ve never taken a lie detector test, but something about having a stranger ask me questions while keeping a close eye on my sweat glands put me on edge. And so I started making jokes. Getting a little tense was partly the point of the exercise. The machine I was attached to was tracking changes in my adrenaline levels, the “fight-or-flight” hormone secreted by the adrenal glands in situations that require a sudden surge of energy. Increased adrenaline can be detected through a number of means: because the hormone diverts blood from the extremes of the body to the core, drops in temperature at the extremities often suggest a release of adrenaline (hence the sensors on my fingertips). Sweating is also a telltale sign of heightened