The Undiscovered Mind: How the Brain Defies Replication, Medication and Explanation

I'm familiar with John Horgan's earlier book, The End of Science, and I recently came across this book. Although I disagree to some degree with perhaps its most basic assertion--that science never will fully understand or explain the mind--The Undiscovered Mind is outstandingly well written and researched, and was a pleasure to read. I was expecting a more one-sided polemic, and there is a slight element of this, but Mr. Horgan is actually quite objective and journalistic, and seems mainly to just be very interested in the subject. Plus he may be a bit exasperated by what he sees as science's lack of progress in understanding the mind, or at least is a naturally skeptical person. If the latter point is true, he might make a good scientist himself! He covers such topics as Freud, antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs, the placebo effect, psychotherapy, genetics, Darwinian evolution, artificial intelligence, and consciousness. He interviews quite a few prominent scientists and clinicians, including some discussion with Peter Kramer, author of the classic Listening to Prozac. Mr. Horgan may be a bit disdainful toward some of these folks he interviews. Overall, though, a highly enjoyable and informative read, written by someone who obviously cares a lot about the subject. Author of Adjust Your Brain: A Practical Theory for Maximizing Mental Health.

After reading several scientific books on the neural basis of consciousness, this book was a breath of fresh air. Mr. Horgan was appropriately critical of all theories related to the study of mind (ie. neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, psychoanalysis, behavioral genetics...etc). I am tired of reading about the interesting sexual habits of song birds and how this has implications of understanding the evolution of human behavior. I'm frustrated at books that describe consciousness with literary nonsense eg. "being conscious of being conscious." I'm annoyed at behavioral geneticists trying to extrapolate from twin studies theories of human behavior. This book was one of the best attempts at pseudo-science bashing. I don't think that the explanatory gap will ever be filled. However I do not advocate the worst type of pseudo-science ie. DUALISM. The neural activity of the brain generates the mind. The best explanation of cognition will be a neural correlate. Thinking about "a lovely spring day" can and never will be substituted by any materialist theory. However a neural correlate describing the temporospatial binding of multiple brain areas/different neuronal populations would be, in my opinion, a worthy problem to solve. Building such bridges between mind and brain would be leap forward in science. I would envision a day when the the first day of class (high school, college, etc...) would be a discussion of what our brains do to generate our minds.Dr. Shekar Raman, M.D. Neurologist

So readable and accurate an overview of the babel of sciences and pseudo-sciences trying to reduce the human mind to the behaviorist/physicalist dogmatic assumption that we really have no minds at all certainly merits five stars. (For some "sciences," their accurate description is equivalent to a refutation of them by reduction to the absurd.) And Horgan's delightful word sketches of his interlocutors and their ideas make his presentation both entertaining and intellectually stimulating. Horton correctly notes that the "explanatory gap" between physical and mental processes is as wide today as it was in Plato's day. But (tacitly) he seems to accept the physicalist (materialist) assumption that we are dealing here with a matter of degree rather than kind; i.e., the failure or impossibility to bridge the gap is ascribed to the complexity and vastness of the project, or the absence of a unifying, reductionist, theory, not to the more plausible hypothesis that we are dealing with realities of different orders, i.e., realities beyond (or more than) the sum of quarks, electrons, genes and neurons. This indeed is the true implication of the citations of scientists and philosophers he presents in italics at the beginning of Chapter 8, "The Consciousness Conundrum," particularly Leibnitz's and Gunther Stent's. Let me hasten to add that I'm not asserting - though neither do I exclude the possibility of - the existence of some sort of psyche or soul dependent on, but not of the same "stuff" as the body. Science has certainly established a close parallelism between mental and neural processes. But there is no evidence, that these parallels will every "converge" by reduction of the mental order to processes in the brain. Quite the contrary. Conceptually, mental processes are not reducible to physical concepts. The great positivist effort to do so in the 20th century through the medium of semantics failed miserably, as its principal proponents (Carnap, Quine) have acknowledged. So are minds "by-products," (epiphenomena, halos, emanations) of physical world? And if so, what is to be said of free will upon which the "truths" of justice and all of human history, and all of human endeavor, including science, are based? For doesn't every experimental setup represent a series of deliberate choices made by the mind? All theory, including mathematical theory, resides in the mind. Would theories of any sort exist if human minds didn't? Horgan tacitly accepts that minds are one or more of these (epiphenomena, etc) - on page 228 he calls consciousness "one of the BY-PRODUCTS (emphasis added by reviewer) of the brain" - but this only shows how orthodox he is to the conventional wisdom about science as the only source of "truth," a term neither he nor his interlocutors bother to define. All other discourse is little else than "ironic science," akin to literary criticism, which cannot produce any definitive answers; therefore, no knowledge. But math isn't s

Horgan leaves you open-mouthed at the breadth and depth of his reporting. From Prozac to psychoanalysis to PET scans, he puts all of mind science in place; and does it so deftly and entertainingly that you don't realize till later how much you have learned. He has made fewer waves with this book than with The End of Science, but if anything this one's even better. He is not the bad boy of science journalism (as he's been called lately) so much as the smart man --capable of handling any subject with grace, wit, and honesty, and appropriate levels of skepticism. Where he is skeptical he is judging scientists by their own standard: the evidence. My favorite chapter was his deconstruction of evolutionary psychology. I found myself less pessimistic than Horgan about the potential of neuroscience, but it didn't affect my enjoyment of the book. He writes with a point of view, which makes him interesting, but he doesn't abuse you with it.

I am writing, firstly, to recommend this book. Along with the End of Science, it is a tonic in an age of hype that has leaked into even the most rigorous disciplines. Secondly, I have to disagree strongly with the reader from San Francisco below. Horgan may be fed up with a lack of answers, but I hardly think his response should be to withdraw from the scene. His skepticism is healthy! Reading even the most respected periodicals would lead you to believe we are much further along in linking specific genes to specific maladies than we really are. Horgan makes this point clearly and efficiently. Other points like it abound. While dreams of consilience dance in people's heads, it's refreshing to read Horgan's seemingly rational stance -- that, while humanity has done an admirable job of finding concrete answers in most sciences, psychology continues to be a field of largely untestable, and therefore unscientific, theories. He may be proven wrong, but who cares? A grain of salt will do until that time.