Reading Minds: A Guide to the Cognitive Neuroscience Revolution

Moskowitz, a psychoanalyst and organisational consultant, promises a great deal having captured our attention with his title, and he manages to deliver. Through his engaging, casual and accessible style, with stories from daily life, the clinical arena and the laboratory, Moskowitz will succeed at informing, provoking and entertaining the lay reader, although his scholarly rigour will also make this book appealing to clinicians and academics. He effectively brings together the theory and practice of a range of disciplines in a refreshing way, making them comprehensible even to the untrained reader, a skill seldom displayed in this field. . . This is, in fact, what he sets out to do in his introduction: an 'attempt to bring together and to connect what (he) can of this vast new field... to better understand human nature'. Essentially, he aims to provide a practical guide to the cognitive neuroscience revolution and to demonstrate how to use scientific principles to improve our understanding of and relationship with others. Of course, it is over a hundred years since Freud outlined his wish to integrate knowledge of the brain with evolving concepts of mental functioning. Moskowitz draws on ideas from developmental psychology, learning theory, neurobiology, anthropology and linguistics, to name a few . . . this is an exciting book, written with boundless enthusiasm - a joy to read. The British Journal of Psychiatry (2011) 198: 497. doi: 10.1192/bjp.bp.110.084467   Reading Minds is a practical guide to the cognitive science revolution. From the brain scans of lovers and liars in London to the eye movements of babies in Budapest, this book takes the reader into the laboratories of the most innovative psychological researchers around the world. "Many researchers live in their laboratories, and their careers and self-esteem - like most everyone's these days - are built on gaining recognition, not doing what is right. Most have never seen a patient in pain - someone who might shock them back into seeing what they know to be true. Academics rarely read outside their area of interest and often actively ignore related research if it threatens to make their work seem less special. As an idealistic graduate student, I was able to take a course at another university with an esteemed researcher whose work I then greatly admired. My disillusionment came when I enthusiastically said that his general conclusions were supported by the work of another psychologist who was studying the same subject with different methods. 'I don't know his work,' he said, shaking his head and grimacing with disgust. It was as if I had asked him to taste something horrible. I guess I had.The particular path chosen connects what I can of this new field before us in order to better understand human nature, and especially what leads to our self-imposed inhibitions and self-inflicted mental pain. It offers a view from a practical perspective that addresses central clinical questions: What keeps us from fully realizing our capacities to understand ourselves and others, and what can be done to change?I am not an expert in statistics, or the interpretation of brain scans, but I believe I have learned enough to exclude the merely sensational. I have chosen not to present controversies in the interpretation of MRI data, although I know they exist - because I know we are far from the end of the story. Some findings will remain accepted and others will not. I try to present the work of reputable researchers that has gained support, either through replication or by virtue of fitting in with a pattern of related studies. I do not privilege brain science over social science or from what we gather from the clinical encounter. I believe we have to struggle to see how it all fits in order to better understand what it means to be human."  Michael Moskowitz