Friday's footprint : how society shapes the human mind

Author(s)

Bibliographic Information

Friday's footprint : how society shapes the human mind

Leslie Brothers

Oxford University Press, 1997

  • : pbk

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. [161]-179) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Volume

ISBN 9780195101034

Description

The image of Robinson Crusoe, an isolated individual, embodies a metaphor for the human mind. It is the metaphor that has determined the practices of contemporary neuroscience until now. To bridge the worlds of mind and brain, Leslie Brothers replaces this isolated mind metaphor and reveals the brain as a social organ. Findings from neuroscience, cognitive science, psychiatry, neuropsychology, anthropology, palaeontology, and sociology together present a convincing argument: that it is not possible to understand the products of human evolution - whether language, consciousness, or emotion - in the absence of a social context.

Table of Contents

  • 1. When Mindmaking Fails
  • 2. More on Making Mind
  • 3. The Brain's Social Specialization
  • 4. The Editor Speaks
  • 5. The Shift to a Social Perspective
  • 6. Talking Faces
  • 7. Worlds We Create
  • 8. In Search of Emotion
  • 9. Psychoanalytic Performances and Narratives
  • 10. Exile's End
  • Index
Volume

: pbk ISBN 9780195147049

Description

A psychiatrist who has received international recognition for her research on the neural basis of primate social cognition, Leslie Brothers, M.D., offers here a major argument about the social dimension of the human brain, drawing on both her own work and a wealth of information from research laboratories, neurosurgical clinics, and psychiatric wards. Brothers offers the tale of Robinson Crusoe as a metaphor for neuroscience's classic (and flawed) notion of the brain: a starkly isolated figure, working, praying, writing alone. But the famous castaway of literature, she notes, came from society and returned to society. So too with our brains: they have evolved a specialized capacity for exchanging signals with other brains - they are designed to be social. This can be seen in the brain's sensitive attunement to the meanings of facial expressions and physical gestures and the way it assigns mental lives to physical bodies - a feat we too often take for granted. (Brothers describes fascinating case studies that show that certain kinds of brain damage can destroy a patient's ability to interpret faces, leaving him or her with the sense that they are surrounded by zombies.) She takes us down to the level of the individual neuron, exploring the response of brain cells to social events. Perhaps most important, she connects neuroscience, psychiatry, and sociology as never before, showing how our daily interaction creates an organized social world - a network of brains that generates meaningful behavior and thought. Emotion, the sense of self - the entire spectrum of the mind - has no existence outside of a social context. Brothers conducts her argument with grace and style. By broadening our approach to the brain, this groundbreaking book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the human mind.

Table of Contents

  • 1. A Failure to Connect
  • 2. Building the Experience of Mind
  • 3. The Brain's Social Specialization
  • 4. The Editor Speaks
  • 5. The Shift to a Social Perspective
  • 6. Talking Faces
  • 7. Worlds We Create
  • 8. In Search of Emotion
  • 9. Psychoanalytic Performances and Narratives
  • 10. Exile's End

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