Handbook of Adult Resilience Review

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Handbook of Adult Resilience ReviewEver notice that some individuals seem to be able to push back healthfully against most of life's adversities, while others fold under far less pressure? Is this kind of reslience to stress a natural gift? Something that can be learned? If so, when and how early should such training begin?
The large size and scope of this Handbook of Adult Resilience is justified by its being a one-stop-shopping resource for both researchers and clinicians in the field of stress and stress management. The book begins by emphasizing that resilience is not just a quality that inheres in individual personalities, but that interacts with biological predispositions, ethnic and cultural factors, and relationships to the community. Early chapters discuss the biological foundations of resilience and its opposite - stress vulnerability - and then go on to consider cognitive, emotional, temperamental, and spiritual dimensions of resilience and their role in shaping personality and psychopathology in the context of ethnicity, culture, and community norms.
But does a person who is resilient at one age retain that quality over time? The book goes on to consider resilience across the lifespan, including the role of early childhood and later adult experiences, as well as the broader social environment in shaping resilience to different kinds of adversity. The emerging lesson seems to be that, like intelligence, resilience is not a static, monolithic characteristic. Just as some individuals can be more or less skilled and clever in math or reading or art, so there may be many different kinds of resilience that are applicable to a variety of challenges, and at different points across the lifespan. The resilience that gets you through the death of a loved one may not be nearly as effective for buffering your reaction to rejection at work, and so on.
For me, the measure of a book like this is the "so-what" factor: How is all this empirical research, theoretical scholarship, and clinical wisdom going to help people deal with the practical challenges of managing stress in the real world. Happily, the final chapters tackle this subject, describing a variety of formal programs for inculcating, shaping, and reinforcing stress resilience on the individual, group, and commuunitycommunity levels. I would have liked to see a chapter on resilience-based individual psychotherapy modalities and perhaps another chapter devoted to critical incident stress. Also, there is a whiff of trendiness detectable in the frequent evocation of the new darlings of stress research: mindfulness, happiness, and transcendent coping. One problem with studying stress in university clinics is that we academic types typically assume self-actualization as an entitlement, and are therefore often opaque to the sheer grubbiness of the ordinary lives eked out around us every day, wherein happiness and transcendence are dreams deferred for basic survival and sustenance.
Overall, Handbook of Adult Resilience is a solid work that makes a substantial contribution to the field of stress, coping and resilience. The many references in each chapter will whet the reader's appetite to learn more about how some people do manage to rise above their adversities, and how we can help others aspire to do the same.
- Laurence Miller, PhD, International Journal of Emergency Mental HealthHandbook of Adult Resilience Overview

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Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain Review

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Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain ReviewThe deep enigma of consciousness has been explored from many directions, including contributions by neuroscientists, psychologists, philosophers and a few physicists (both quantum and complex systems scientists). An important study area consists of injuries or diseases that destroy specific brain structures; these clinical events are often closely correlated to nuanced effects on selective aspects of consciousness. Professor Damasio's book makes good use of these data to describe many known neural correlates of consciousness. For purposes of this book, he adopts the working hypothesis that mental states and brain states are essentially equivalent. While many (including this reviewer) find this idea questionable, such tentative hypothesis is quite appropriate for a book of this kind. In science we often adopt useful, if highly oversimplified, models in the early stages of our studies with no illusions that they are perfectly accurate. In this manner "Truth" is (hopefully) approached in a series of successive approximations. Thankfully, Damasio does not claim to "explain" consciousness.
The book's title is based on Damasio's suggestion that our evolutionary history reveals many simple creatures with active "minds" (defined broadly), but only much later did self (awareness) develop; in other words the human self is built in steps grounded in the so-called "protoself." An essential step is the development of homeostatis (life regulation needed to survive) in single cell creatures like bacteria, followed by progressively more complex "societies of cells" in more complex creatures like insects, reptiles, and mammals. Thus consciousness, rooted in our evolutionary past, helps to optimize our responses to the environment so that we may continue our existence. Damasio also describes the self in terms of stages: the protoself, core self and autobiographical self, along with specific brain structures that may support these distinct stages. He concludes that conscious minds emerge from the brain's nested hierarchy of neural networks operating at multiple spatial scales (levels); I will expand on this last point later.

Several chapters consider brain structures that are most essential to mind and consciousness, providing more status to the brain stem and its sub structures than is normally acknowledged by neuroscientists. Damasio's arguments here are based on observations of children born without a cerebral cortex and on several evolutionary considerations. The book cites quite a bit of detailed brain anatomy so non experts should probably read the excellent Appendix on brain structure before tackling any material beyond chapter 2. Normally this suggestion would be offered in a Preface, but this book has none.
I gave the book four stars based on my evaluation of both the good and not so good features: 1) the nice development of a number of important ideas on conscious correlates, 2) the fluff, e.g., some unnecessary technical jargon and the belaboring of obvious points, 3) important omissions. In an example of the latter, I found the memory chapter inadequate given its central role in consciousness. I would have liked to read more about how, where, and at what spatial scales are various kinds of memory stored, or at least given some sense of which parts of the memory puzzle have actually been solved. By loose analogy, if I ask how a TV works, I am unsatisfied by explanations of how to dial in specific channels. Rather, I want to hear about electromagnetic fields and electron guns.
Many readers avoid Endnotes; this may be a mistake. Here is one shining gem involving an interchange between Damasio and Francis Crick, who pointed to several provocative definitions in the International Dictionary of Psychology (1996), providing both these guys quite a laugh. I will not spoil the story by relating the dictionary's definition of "consciousness," but here is this dictionary's definition of "love," "A form of mental illness not yet recognized by any of the standard diagnostic manuals." (Note to my wife, I do not endorse this definition.)
The apparent critical importance of the brain's nested hierarchy to consciousness seemed to me to be substantially understated in Damisio's book. I say this because nested hierarchy is a hallmark of many if not most complex systems, and brains are considered by most to be the pre-eminent complex systems. Think of social systems, for example. They typically consist of persons, neighborhoods, cities, states and nations; their observed dynamic behaviors are fractal-like (scale dependent) and the essence of their behaviors is rooted in the nested hierarchy of interactions at multiple scales, both top-down and bottom-up, the so-called "circular causality" of Synergetics, the science of cooperation and self organization (see books by Hermann Haken). The brain's nested hierarchy and its apparent critical importance to consciousness are discussed in Todd Feinberg's From Axons to Identity: Neurological Explorations of the Nature of the Self (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology) and my new book Brain, Mind, and the Structure of Reality, 2010, which also explores the possible fundamental role of information in both the physical and mental realms. This latter topic is also covered in a series of essays edited by Paul Davies and Neils Gregersen Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics, 2010.
An alternate view of Damasio's book by Steven Rose was posted February 16, 2011 on this site (an excellent read for those interested in the hard problem).Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain Overview

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The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us Review

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The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us ReviewJames Pennebaker studies words. Originally interested in the beneficial effect of writing about personal trauma, he and his students developed software to analyze this writing. Their investigation soon expanded to include spoken conversations, emails, political speeches, and other language samples. They discovered that much can be learned from the short "stealth words" that we barely notice, but that make up more than half of our speech. "Pronouns (such as I, you, we, and they), articles (a, an, the), prepositions (e.g., to, for, over), and other stealth words broadcast the kind of people we are."
Pennebaker summarizes his trauma research, noting that "people who benefit from writing express more optimism, acknowledge negative events, are constructing a meaningful story of their experience, and have the ability to change perspective as they write." Searching for reliable linguistic indicators of these processes identified writing style rather than more substantive content words. The resulting LIWC software works well regardless of a text's content.
Using both research findings and representative everyday examples, Pennebaker reviews what he has learned. Topics addressed include gender, status and social class, personality, leadership style, deception, interpersonal attraction, and group solidarity. The author not only presents conclusions from his own research, but links to supporting findings using non-linguistic methods. Specific findings include:
-LIWC correctly identifies an author's gender 72% of the time using writing style. This increases to 76% when content words are included. (Human guesses range from 55 to 65%.)
-On detecting depression: "Sadness generally causes people to focus inwardly. Pronouns tend to track people's focus of attention, and when in great emotional or physical pain, they tend to use I-words at high rates. Sadness, unlike most other emotions, is associated with looking back into the past and into the future. In other words, people tend to use past- and future-tense verbs more when they are sad or depressed compared to other strong emotions."
- "No system has ever been shown to reliably catch liars at rates higher than 65 percent. And even those with hit rates in that neighborhood (including me) have done so in highly controlled and artificial circumstances."
- "Linguistic style matching" across nine categories of function words occurs within the first 15 to 30 seconds of an attentive conversation. It is generally beyond conscious awareness. LSM profiles can predict a number of things better than chance, including whether a "speed dating" couple will pursue a further relationship after their initial four-minute discussion.
Pennebaker clearly wants to share, not just his insights, but the methods used to achieve them. Much of his research was done collaboratively, not just with students and fellow researchers, but with public figures, professionals in other fields, and anyone else with interesting documents. Readers are pointed to web sites that let them experiment with Pennebaker's techniques and a version of his LIWC software is available for more in-depth investigations. An appendix includes "A Handy Guide for Spotting and Interpreting Function Words in the Wild."
This book is an accessible summary of James Pennebaker's work with helpful citations of similar research by others. It serves as a guide to more technical discussions of text analysis through an extensive Bibliography and References section--and pointers to downloadable research reports from the author's web site. Interested readers might also enjoy Roderick Hart's Campaign Talk or one of the other related books the author mentions.The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us Overview

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Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution Review

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Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution ReviewThis is the kind of book that blows your mind on a regular basis. The studies that Bailenson and Blascovich design and report on are difficult to stop thinking about. These authors look at technology as a way to understand who we are and who we will become, answering key philosophical and psychological questions along the way.
They have described their approach as Transformative Social Interaction, and if anything, this is an understatement. These researchers use the virtual world as a testbed to examine psychological issues in ways that simply were not possible before. And rather than this being reported to you through the lens of a journalist, this comes straight from the pioneers in the field.
And while its easy to imagine this kind of heady stuff being dense and difficult to read, or full of techie jargon, your imagination would be wrong. The book is a delight to read, with humor and insight and intellectual curiosity mixed in equal doses.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the human condition, in how technology is transforming our future, or in reading some of the most cutting-edge, fascinating psychology out there.Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution Overview

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The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy: Healing the Social Brain (Second Edition) (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology) Review

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The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy: Healing the Social Brain (Second Edition) (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology) ReviewAfter over a century of the 'talking cure' helping people with their mental suffering, we finally are able to shine a light on the physical, neurological basis for the changes that happen in the brain after a prolonged therapeutic interaction between patient and therapist. Louis Cozolino is an excellent teacher and with great ease and clarity shows how the brain changes as a result of experiences, both traumatic and healing. He explains how it can become a strong and integrated organ that regulates our emotional states and focusses us towards our goals, if the person it inhabits has a successful experience of attaching securely to the caretaker. He also illustrates the damage that the brain suffers when deprived of the needed opportunity for a secure relationship. Fortunately our brains are able to change given new experiences. This 'plasticity' is what allows us to learn new things at any age, by growing new neurons and new pathways between them and prior structures. The author illustrates in great deal the regulatory architecture of the brain, and how psychotherapy when based on a trusting, safe and emotionally significant relationship helps the rational left brain sooth and modulate the affective right hemisphere, and the cortex in general to exert top down inhibition of the emotion generating limbic system. Excellent and highly recommended.The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy: Healing the Social Brain (Second Edition) (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology) Overview

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Networks of the Brain Review

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Networks of the Brain ReviewThe label "networks" in the title of this impressive book may fail to fully capture the incredible richness of intricate (multi-scale) brain structure depicted here. Perhaps an added adjective like "genuine" might serve to contrast this work with the many "toy" neural networks illustrated in other publications. To get some idea of the complexity of the genuine brain networks discussed here, picture your living room fully packed top to bottom with centimeter scale worms representing (scaled up) axons linking 100 billion cell bodies. Your worm visitors occupy multiple intricate paths; many are short and form local worm societies (modules), but some cross the entire room and allow remote worm modules to interact non-locally.
Sporns asks what network science might tell us about the brain. He begins with a non mathematical overview of graph theory, "graphs" being mathematicians' abstract label for "networks." Sporns considers both structural (fixed wiring) and functional (dynamic) interactions between brain network nodes and modules. "Modules" are defined here as communities of nodes with large numbers of internal interconnections that may, in some cases, be viewed as "super nodes" or nodes defined at larger scales. To adopt the metaphor of human social networks, neurons are analogous to persons and the modules at various scales are analogous to neighborhoods, cities, and nations.
Like social systems, brain networks exhibit a striking (nested) hierarchical modularity, essentially small networks within larger networks within still larger networks, much like nested Russian dolls. This multi-scale structure may account for much of the brain's complex behavior. I quote the famous neuroscientist Vernon Mountcastle with Sporns' provocative suggestion added in brackets, "the dynamic interaction between brain subsystems [organized in modular hierarchies] lies at the very essence of brain function." Sporns emphasizes this point by pointing out that descriptions of the brain at large scales should not be regarded as poorly resolved approximations of an underlying microscopic order; rather different scales offer parallel and complementary views of brain organization. Failure to appreciate this critical issue and focus only on a single favored level of organization may be labeled "scale chauvinism" (my words).
One important idea emerging from graph theory is that of "small world" networks, illustrated in social networks by strangers (perhaps living on opposite sides of the world) linked by a few acquaintances. The high density of short-range brain connections coupled with a small admixture of long-range connections favors small world behavior. Small worlds also promote high complexity; they appear to be quite abundant in brain structural networks, across systems, scales, and species. Network disruptions, perhaps due to lesions of network hubs, are believed to be associated with mental disturbances or other diseases.
A later chapter focuses on the neural complexity issue addressed in several earlier chapters. While there is no agreed upon rigorous measure of neural (or any other system) "complexity," many complex systems have certain common features, including the hierarchical modularity evident in brain tissue. Sporns argues that system complexity is high when order and disorder coexist. For example, the molecules in a gas exhibit (random) disorder, whereas the molecules in a crystal are ordered, but neither system qualifies as a complex system. Rather, organizational mixtures of order and disorder are hallmarks of complexity. Another common feature of complex systems is that segregation and integration of structure and dynamic activity coexist. Different parts of the brain do different things; yet they work together to produce a uniform behavior and consciousnes, a condition greatly facilitated by small world networks.
This book should have broad appeal among many neuroscientists working in disparate areas of brain science. The writing is clear with many useful figures (including beautiful color plates) and directed examples absent even a single equation. The latter feature will evidently broaden the book's appeal, although some may wish for some mathematical support in an Appendix. In any case, one can confidently predict that Sporns' book will become an essential reference on many neuroscientists' bookshelves well into the future.
The material in this book overlaps several other books aimed at broad audiences. Earlier in his career, Sporns worked closely with Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi; their book A Universe Of Consciousness How Matter Becomes Imagination (1995) provides and nice introduction to Sporns' conceptual framework in "Networks of the Brain." My own book, Brain, Mind, and the Structure of Reality (2010) emphasizes the critical importance of nested hierarchy in brain tissue, and also speculates in the wider world of intra and extra cranial information and its possible fundamental role in the production of consciousness.
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