Your Brain and Your Self: What You Need to Know

✍ Scribed by Jacques Neirynck, Laurence Garey (auth.)

• Publisher: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 118
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

How does my brain work? Why am I conscious? Where is my memory? Is what I perceive around me reality or just an illusion? We all ask these questions, which we could sum up in a single question: Who am I?

How is it that I have memories and that I feel I exist? What does it mean that my mind is free in time and space, and yet I am imprisoned in a body that is doomed to disappear? What happens to my mind when my body disappears? What are the risks of my suffering from a brain disease? Could my whole being eclipse because of a disease in which my body survives but my mind ceases to exist? What remedies are there? What hope does reasearch hold out?

Recent discoveries about the brain allow us to ask such questions more pointedly, hoping to define more clearly the relations of the brain with the mind, of man with his body.

This book is based on numerous discussions with specialists. It attempts to determine the state of the art. It is organized in chapters that can be read in continuity, but it is equally possible to discover the chapters in a different way.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xiii
The Controversial Seat of Myself....Pages 3-15
A Simple Architecture of the Brain....Pages 17-33
Seeing Through Oneself: Brain Imaging....Pages 35-41
Dispersed Memories....Pages 43-47
The Prevention of Parkinson Disease....Pages 49-58
The Treatment of Alzheimer Disease....Pages 59-63
The Cerebrovascular Accident....Pages 65-71
The Fatality of Tumors....Pages 73-77
Altered States of Consciousness....Pages 79-83
The Myth of the Artificial Brain....Pages 85-103
The Power and the Fragility of Oneself....Pages 105-112
Back Matter....Pages 113-119

✦ Subjects

Neurosciences; Neurobiology; Behavioural Sciences