If You're Curious About These Questions...
You should listen to this audiobook
- What can the visual perception of autistic individuals teach us about the neurotypical brain's automatic 'mind-reading' capabilities?
- How does the excessive pruning of neural connections in schizophrenia potentially unlock the brain's hidden creative abilities?
- Why do modern neuroscientists classify addiction as a permanent, chronic disease of the brain's reward system rather than a simple failure of willpower?
Listen to The Disordered Mind — Free Audiobook
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Key Takeaways from The Disordered Mind
- Studying mental disorders and abnormal brain function provides profound insights into how healthy brains process thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
- Autism highlights the existence of a specialized 'social brain,' revealing that our ability to automatically attribute thoughts and emotions to others is a hardwired biological function.
- Schizophrenia is driven by an aggressive over-pruning of synapses during adolescence and an excess of dopamine, which alters brain structures linked to thought, memory, and creativity.
- Degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's are caused by misfolded proteins that clump together and slowly erode specific neural systems governing explicit memory or motor control.
- Addiction permanently hijacks the brain's habit-forming and dopamine reward systems, fundamentally altering neurological pleasure associations and functioning as a chronic disease rather than a lack of willpower.
The Disordered Mind — Full Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: Recommendation
Chapter 2: Abnormal brains can show us how normal brains function.
Chapter 3: Autism shows how profoundly social our brains really are.
Chapter 4: Mood disorders stem from chemical disruptions in our brain’s emotional circuits.
Chapter 5: Schizophrenia disrupts key brain areas for thinking, memory, and imagination.
Chapter 6: In Alzheimer’s and dementia, damaged proteins eat away at our conscious memory system.
Chapter 7: Parkinson’s disease helps us see how brain chemicals control movement.
Chapter 8: Addiction seizes the brain’s reward system – often for life.
Chapter 9: How our bodies and brains develop creates many possibilities for sex and gender.
Chapter 10: Neuroscience is starting to decode how the brain gives rise to consciousness.
The Disordered Mind Summary & Overview
The Disordered Mind (2018) explores what disorders and diseases of the brain can tell us about the inner workings of our minds. Acclaimed neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel draws on a lifetime of research to explain what depression, schizophrenia, addiction, and more reveal about how our brains affect our thoughts, feelings, and behavior – and explains how new scientific methods could help solve the big puzzle of consciousness.
Who Should Listen to The Disordered Mind?
- Armchair philosophers, hobby psychologists, and aspiring neuroscientists
- People affected by Alzheimer’s, depression, schizophrenia, or other neurological disorders
- Anyone puzzled by the mystery of consciousness
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