THE BRAIN REVOLUTION: The Frontiers of Mind Research

It's nothing to look at and ordinarily weighs less than three pounds but who can dispute Ferguson that it's ""More mysterious than Mars, harder to plumb than the Mindanao deeps,"" and, most significantly, that this soft walnut-like mass of ten billion cells, the human brain, ""has been only tentatively charted""? The purpose here is to digest what we currently -- hypothetically, both scientifically and intuitively -- know or suspect about the brain and its properties, capabilities, functions, maladies, stimuli, and potentialities. Too casual and too readable to be classified as a text (though it might be so used with good results), the book more resembles a review of the literature or a state-of-the-art report; not only is the work of the outstanding socio-biochemical scientists (mind research is an interdisciplinarian's heaven) discussed -- the Neal Millers, Roland Fischers, Abraham Maslows, Andrew Wells, the Jose Delgados -- but articles and papers from such diverse sources as Science and Popular Electronics and the Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology and Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology by little-known researchers are drawn upon. Every important area is covered, from parapsychological phenomena to electronic stimulation of the brain to visceral learning to sleep research to the effects of mind-expanding drugs to the brain as ""the most important sex organ."" At the end Ferguson says that, while we are far from knowing the full extent of the mind's frontiers, we do stand a good chance ""of emerging from relative unconsciousness into the fuller awareness prophesied by such multi-dimensional scientists as William James, Carl Jung, and Teilhard de Chardin."" A fine survey.