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Jean-Pierre Changeux is a world-famous neurobiologist.
In an era when scientists have become specialists, he is
one of the rare few who has not only disregarded interdisciplinary
boundaries, but in fact, bridged them. Published originally
in France, where it was a runaway bestseller for months,
his Neuronal Man is our most wide-ranging and in-depth synthesis
of the most current knowledge we have of the human brain
-- a balance sheet of twenty years' worth of discoveries
as revolutionary as those in atomic physics at the turn
of the century or genetics in the fifties. But more than
a guided tour of the fabulous universe of the human brain,
the book presents the author's radical, groundbreaking hypothesis
currently shaking up scientific circles: that there is no
"mind" in man, nothing psychic, but rather only
neurons, synapses, electricity, and chemistry.
The human cerebral cortex alone (the "rind"
of the brain whose evolution culminates in man) contains
at least 30 billion neurons (nerve cells). As Changeux explains,
these communicate with each other at the level of gaps called
synapses, which are so numerous that "if one counted
a thousand of them each second, between 3,000 and 30,000
years would pass before they had all been numbered."
Here he leads us through this complexity, with clarity,
elegance of style, wit, and rigor. For the first time, the
layperson can understand just what happens each millisecond
in these 1400 grams of white and gray matter, and how these
events generate other events and effects in the body.
Moving from this solid factual base, Dr.
Changeux allows us to see the reasoning behind his theory
of the biology of mind. Avoiding the traditional stumbling
blocks on which attempts to link the mind and body usually
collapse, his approach is neither "reductionist"
nor "holistic"; that is, he neither reduces the
functioning of the whole to that of its elements, nor sees
a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Rather,
his method is global, systematic, and open. Each element
of the human system contributes to its functioning as a
whole, which in turn influences the characteristics and
development of each element. The accent is on the highlighting
of relations and interdependencies.
At once historical and didactic, scientific
and philosophical, witty and shrewd, the story he tells
is an exciting one of territorial struggles, conflicts of
schools, retrogressions, and dazzling breakthroughs. We
explore a wealth of fact, theory, lore, and speculation,
which sets into relief the lines of research and attitudes
that have influenced the development of our knowledge about
the brain and mind. Along the way we consider a variety
of questions: What weight should be attached to heredity,
to environment, to training, and to stimulation, among other
things, in determining how our brain works and how personality
emerges, how the human becomes a feeling and social being?
How did psychology grow away from its roots in neurology?
What can the history of phrenology, and the implications
that have been read into it, tell us about our social attitudes?
How do the theories of Descartes, of Spinoza, of the ancient
materialists and the modern psychiatrists, fit into the
picture? How has the most recent technology affected scientists'
thinking in this field?
In Neuronal Man, Dr. Changeux has
allowed us to reconquer our internal space, on the basis
of a new logic that allows us to grasp the logic of our
brain from the outside, and that finally bridges the gap
between the biological and the social, between body, mind,
and soul.
An internationally renowned expert in
his field, Dr. Jean-Pierre Changeux is professor of neurobiology
at the College de France and director of the molecular neurobiology
laboratory at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Neuronal
Man (originally published in France as L'Homme neuronal)
won the Broquette-Gonin Literary Award from the Academie
Francaise in 1983. Dr. Changeux currently lives in Paris.
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