Biology 202 Book Commentary

Caroline H's picture

The Female Brain

In her book, The Female Brain, Louanne Brizendine describes the stages that the female brain goes through during life, citing brain structure and chemistry as the departure for differences between the male and female brains. Most of the misunderstanding of female psychology, Brizendine notes, stems from the misconception held by scientists during most of the 19th and 20th centuries - “that women are essentially small men in psychology and physiology”. She says that it is important to make the distinction between male and female psychologies because physiological sources for these differences do exist, contrary to the reality that they are usually just brushed off as mere deviations during studies.

ewippermann's picture

Metaphors We Live By: Conceptualizing Through Metaphor

Metaphor as a term is rarely taken out of the context of rhetorical and figurative language, and is overwhelmingly viewed as a product of language, an imaginative linguistic output. In Metaphors We live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson provide a rebuttal of this two-thousand-year-old fallacy, and argue that the use of metaphor is inherent in cognition and perception, and that the nature of our conceptual system is entirely metaphorical.

JJLopez's picture

The Psychopath

AndyMittelman's picture

Neurobiological Reflections on "The Matrix"

"Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? If you were unable to awake from that dream, how would you know the difference between that dream world and the real world?" -Morpheus 0:31:45

skim's picture

Sound and Reality, Jonathan Stern's Audible Past

Riki's picture

The Emperor's New Drugs


Controversial news has broken loose in the mental health community: antidepressants are hardly better than placebos!

cschoonover's picture

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

   Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink is an exploration of rapid cognition, of the thinking that happens in the blink of an eye, and is an attempt to “understand this magical and mysterious thing called judgment” (Gladwell 260). He refrains from using “intuition” to describe this kind of thinking, as he believes we use that word to describe irrational thought. Gladwell argues that those first two seconds of rapid cognition are completely rational and just involve thinking that moves a little faster and operates a little more mysteriously than deliberate, conscious thought and decision-making.

Vicky Tu's picture

Book Review: "Inevitable Illusions"

 “The Eyes sees what it sees, even when we know what we know”(P17).

rkirloskar's picture

My Stroke of Insight


              Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard-trained neuro-anatomist who wrote a book called “My Stroke of Insight”, which is an account of her experience of a stroke that took place in the left hemisphere of her brain, when she was thirty-seven years old. She suffered from a major hemorrhage that was a result of a congenital malformation of blood vessels that erupted in her brain. As a result she experienced her brain function deteriorate within a period of four hours to such an extent that she was unable to read, write, walk, talk or remember any of her life.

egleichman's picture

Book Review

Eve Gleichman

Neurobiology 202

May 12, 2010

Paul Grobstein






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