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| An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain | 
| Author: Diane Ackerman
Publisher: Scribner
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy New: $6.99
You Save: $8.01 (53%)
New (6) from $6.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  26 reviews
Sales Rank: 151851
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.9
Dewey Decimal Number: 612
ASIN: B000WMQHZ8
Publication Date: September 27, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new - Most copies have a publishers overstock mark (Publisher close-outs usually have a small ink mark or stamp at the base of the book, but are otherwise brand new.)
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| Customer Reviews:
Great book to stimulate the imagination, but some errors and other problems September 12, 2006
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
In AN ALCHEMY OF MIND, Diane Ackerman takes on the mystery of the brain and she is successful in captivating the imagination and provoking the right kind of questions about its mysteries.
The other reviewers are correct to point out that there are some errors and bad science. However, there is also much good science and the book accomplishes its goal of sparking us to appreciate our brains in a different way.
Diane Ackerman has an excellent command of words and a very lyrical style that engages the emotions. Her explanations and examples are clear and poignant.
While this might not be the best book for understanding the brain at the deepest levels, it is certainly a worthwhile read for the average person. It is a relatively light read and it will certainly prompt more curiosity.
Despite some errors and bad science, I recommend this book for its ability to deepen understanding of this very difficult to approach topic. While it is not perfect, there is much excellent and accurate content. Think of it as a novel about the brain, which is mostly accurate, but there is some poetic license in play. If you are a hard core scientist or scientific type, there are other books which you would enjoy much more.
Another book about the brain that I recently read was the FEMALE BRAIN. I highly recommend this to anyone, but it's a deeper exploration and although it's fairly light, it's not as light or readable as this. It also contains a lot of information on males despite the title.
 A portrait of the mind February 23, 2006
I really enjoyed reading "Alchemy of the Mind" and found it enlightening. Reading the previous reviews it seems that a number of people were expecting something different -a hard-science overview. While this book is based on both science and experience it's purpose is not to teach you the biological basis or behavior - if that is what you are after, I highly recommend Sapolsky's course by the Teaching Company.
What is valuable about this book is that it is an artist's view - Diane melds her own life experiences with what we know about the mind to paint a picture as she sees it, and in doing so she makes you think.
The most cogent criticisms are leveled at her accuracy and sources, but to me this is nitpicking in view of the aims of the book. For example Paul Pomeroy says: She makes references to theories that are not at all widely accepted (from ESP to...). Either Paul or I misread her book because when she wrote about telepathy, my understanding was that she by no means was invoking ESP as an explanation, but referred instead to highly sharpened reading of bodily and facial cues. Other criticisms including things like inaccurate quotes. Even if correct, none of these in any way alter the view we are being offered, or the value of its insights.
In many ways we are really similar to our closest animal relatives, something Diane portrays well. In this book at least, she touches on, but does not explore in very great depth the huge gap that also exists, which I would think is because we are actually part of a human super-organism which has become way more powerful at processing information than anything that has existed before. This is very hard to accept because our feelings of individuality are so strong.
We live in an amazing age. Science is beginning to do what religion has failed to do miserably for thousands of years - give us a true sense of ourselves and our place in the cosmos, and to let us know just who we are and why we are here. Far from making our lives "meaningless" as one religious reviewer said, it is giving many of us a wonderful sense of satisfaction and awe. Diane's book is a clear illustration of this.
 Interesting, but self promoting January 6, 2006
4 out of 13 found this review helpful
You expect a beautiful and informative book, and you get a little of that, but you get more personal details of Ackerman's life and plugs for her other books. Skip it.
An Alchemy of Telling October 30, 2005
13 out of 14 found this review helpful
An Alchemy of Telling
Diane Ackerman totally turns me on. And that's what she tells us about in most of her writing--getting turned on by experience, by living itself. Her writing inspires me to put more into my own, and her living, as she describes it in her books, inspires me to get more out of mine. Her 2004 book, An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain, is the latest of her guided tours through human experience, and mostly it continues her delightful series of explanations about how we come to be the way we are and what that means in learning to live life fully.
As she did in her first best seller, A Natural History of the Senses and the natural sequel to it, A Natural History of Love, she grounds everything on extensive research into biology, phenomenology, psychology, anthropology, neurology and physics-all the relevant sciences, as well as the major spiritual traditions of East and West-and (most rewarding of all to us readers) embeds her facts in prose so rich and vibrant that we are carried enchanted through her images.
Alchemy begins with a description of evolution as it has created the human mind by means of "that shiny mound of being, that mouse-gray parliament of cells, that dream factory, that petit tyrant inside a ball of bone, that huddle of neurons calling all the plays, that little everywhere, that fickle pleasuredrome, that wrinkled wardrobe of selves stuffed into the skull like too many clothes into a gym bag." In other words, our brain. It's this kind of elaborate metaphoring that gives her writing its rich bouquet. Some may find it tiring, if they are simply looking for the facts. But like observing life itself, it's in the myriad of details, the subjective impressions that our minds take in (even if we choose to ignore them in our focus on "substance") that give us what it's really like out there. There's nothing dry in Diane Ackerman's writing. "Juicy" describes it as clearly as any other word this writer can come up with.
She goes on to describe the physical brain, and memory, and the fiction we call a self, and emotions, and language, and then ties it all together in a final section she calls "The Wilderness Within: The World We Share." A graduate-level course, sans final exam. If you want academic support, there are endnotes, bibliography and an index.
As Ken Wilber points out in his elaborate theoretical system on the structures of consciousness, everything in the Kosmos (which includes but is not limited to the Cosmos) has four aspects of manifestation: the individual interior, the individual exterior, the plural interior, and the plural exterior. He charts them into four quadrants: upper left, upper right, lower left and lower right. Our minds are in the upper left, the individual interior. Our brains are in the individual exterior. One cannot separate them, except in the abstract. We have developed the means to examine the activity of the mind-very roughly-by observing electrical activity in different parts of the brain, but we cannot observe a person's thoughts except as that person reports them. We know, from our own individual experiences that such reports are but a weak representation of what's really going on in one's mind. Couple that fact with the severe limitations of language itself, and we can perceive only the tiniest fraction of someone else's consciousness. It's a wonder we can understand each other at all. Diane Ackerman surely adds to our understanding through her use of language. Her three advanced degrees from Cornell and the list of her published books may impress the skeptical, but it's her way of looking at the world that made me fall in love with her.
Now, hungry as I am for understanding of myself and how I fit into the universe, I'd probably read her books along with all the other credentialed writers I hear about-Steven Pinker, Susan Blackmore, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, and others--but from her I get something more. I read her for mental nutrition and enjoyment. It's not just "a spoonful full of sugar helps the medicine go down," it's a spoonful of expensive amaretto blended with a hint of chocolate and a dozen other flavors that I can't always identify. But yum.
And the thing about it is that she doesn't just make taking in the medicine of knowledge easier, her medium (her use of language) is also her message (to resurrect poor old Marshall McLuhen's theme). She illustrates her secret formula, not only for writing in a way to communicate subtle nuance, but for observing the world around us. How much clearer is our mental image of the mind-as-object after reading, "Sometimes as the fog of sleep lifts, the mind becomes aware of the traffic, like commuters on an expressway, messages speed across the corpus callosum, a thick bridge of 200-250 million nerve fibers spanning the brain's two hemispheres. More will follow in a continuous stream of hubbub going in both directions. The brain is a duet of specialists which produces a single experience that's part enterprise, part communion, but all process, all motion."
Mental images translate the language of our outsides to the language of our insides. Metaphors and similes don't only add entertainment to messages; they increase the possibility of true understanding. Details can make the difference between "getting it" and simply not quite.
Which brings me to my other point: that if I intend to function as a writer who puts words together with the desire for other people to understand what I'm thinking and experiencing, then I need to take the examples provided by other writers who move me, and shape my own writing accordingly. Not to copy, but to make use of the inspiration, the message in the medium, of writers I admire.
At the top of my list, beyond a doubt, is Diane Ackerman. I can't think of a better role model.
 Pretentious, boring, pedantic, and patronizing October 8, 2005
7 out of 25 found this review helpful
This book is a bit pretentious, and many of the random facts thrown in I already knew from reading or else hearing from other people, so it didn't really strike me as that imaginative or different.
Also, I don't like the assumption the author has regarding her belief that there is nothing really "spiritual" or meaningful about life. Maybe her life has no meaning behind it, but that's her belief, not mine. I have noticed that many atheists and agnostics (this includes obnoxious intellectuals) often make a religion out of their own obsessions with their own beliefs about the lack of an afterlife and the lack of meaning of life, and I find it annoying that they throw their beliefs at me just as incessently and just as annoyingly as religious fanatics.
I really would have enjoyed this book if the author wasn't so pretentious and seemed to want to show off her writing prowess or else her knowledge of factoids that I already know, not mentioning her bragging about having synesthesia. I myself experience this on various occasions and I don't think it is that amazing.
In sum, my main complaint is that the author kept denying me my own ability to think for myself. It almost seems that many people who live by "the wits" alone are just obnoxious idiots. Let us decide for ourselves what we want to believe in! As another reviewer commented, this book is mainly about the author's experience of her own mind and personal experiences, and it is extremely self-centered and narrow in many ways, often going off-tangent into long stories from her childhood and . . . I'll spare you the details.
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