This really is your brain on drugs

In "Mind Wide Open" Steven Johnson looks under the cranial hood to find out what makes him -- and us -- tick.

By Andrew Leonard

Feb 18, 2004 | My frontal lobes purred smoothly as I finished Steven Johnson's new book, "Mind Wide Open." This was satisfying on a number of levels. For starters, it seemed appropriate to be operating an efficiently working brain while reading a book about brain science. Brains are complicated mechanisms, even when written about by as fluid and intelligent a writer as Johnson. When you are pondering the mysteries of the amygdala and the hippocampus, you want your own neocortex to be precision tuned.

Setting aside the happy congruence between the subject and my own instrument of comprehension, I also simply enjoyed feeling my synapses firing like a Ferrari's pistons, feeling "on." Everything seems possible when your brain is gung-ho. Flush with cerebral power, I was poised to write the best book review of my life, scattering profundities like flower petals at a wedding. Alert, sensitive, focused -- I felt like a fine designer drug was coursing through my system.

Which, as Johnson takes pains to stress, is entirely accurate. Our brains are always on drugs, the natural kind; our moods and intellectual states are generated in a seething cauldron of complex chemicals -- mind-altering substances with names like dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin. I (and Steven Johnson) feel high when the ideas are pumping out, and that is not a metaphor.

Helping us understand how our brain chemistry shapes our daily emotional and mental ups and downs is one of Johnson's main missions in "Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life." It's a personal story -- Johnson's own brain is the protagonist, and those of his wife and children are also key characters. That coziness fueled a third level of appreciation for my brain's attraction to this brainy book. The ongoing contemplation of my brain design is a chore I've never been allowed to ignore: My mother is a neuroscientist, a woman who has always displayed an obsessive fascination with my frontal lobes.

She's run me through an MRI to get up close and personal with every dendrite in my neural neighborhood. She has a way of sighing that screams "danger, danger, cerebral malfunction in firstborn offspring!" I will never forget the look she gave me one day, after I returned home from a debacle of major proportions. Her expression said, "Just let me get in there with a scalpel and a screwdriver and I know I can fix that damn thing!"

Though not the kind of scientist to completely discount the role of nurture or environment in shaping her children, she has always had a fairly determinist streak when it comes to brains. Big frontal lobes: good. Small lobes: very, very bad.

And I always rebelled at that -- just as, at times, I found myself bridling at Johnson's analyses of laughter and love and fear in terms of brain structure and chemistry. Was it all really so simple, so many Legos snapping together neatly? What about my will, my consciousness? Are we not more than mere neural nets? And nobody gets to take apart my brain, thank you very much. Not my mom. Not Steven Johnson.

But by the end of this fascinating and graceful tour of the brain, my jaw had unclenched. With his third book, Johnson, the co-founder of the pioneering Web magazine Feed, has reached that lustrous point in his career where, if he's interested in writing about something, I'm interested in reading about it. And his basic thesis, that the more aware we are of how our own brains work, the better we can manage our daily tumbles through the white water of our mental lives, isn't deterministic at all. It's really pretty sensible.

"Mind Wide Open" is an incredibly accessible journey through a complicated wilderness. There are (very) occasional lapses into neuroscientist-ese ("Extended release of the stress hormone glucocortocoid causes atrophy in the neurons of the hippocampus"), but for the most part Johnson is crystal clear, drawing on his own experiences and his own firsthand encounters with state-of-the art brain science to illustrate what top neuroscientists understand about the way our minds work, today.

Johnson is amusing when he takes us on a tour of current neuro-feedback technology --- machines that allow users to manipulate computers simply by thinking -- and when he attempts to capture his own creative process by undergoing a set of brain scans (excerpted here). But he is most compelling as he deconstructs essential human characteristics in terms of brain chemistry and evolution. He ties his own fears, ever since 9/11, of crisp, clear New York weather to his amygdala's sense of self-protection. He theorizes that his wife's odd sense of calm in the aftermath of the attacks has to do with heightened levels of oxytocin in her system as a result of just having given birth.

His goal is to give us tools to better understand ourselves. And for this reader, he succeeds.

A few hours after typing the opening paragraphs of this review, I realized with a start that the glorious rush of working with my totally on-the-ball brain had faded. More than faded -- it was gone completely! I was feeling a little irritable, a little antsy, not quite interfacing neatly with my children as I picked them up from school and fed them dinner. I started to wonder: What just happened? Had some stray event upset the smooth operating efficiency of my once mighty neural machine?

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