The Naked Brain Reviewed by deMause
Richard Restak, The Naked Brain: How the Emerging Neurosociety is Changing How We Live, Work, and Love. New York: Harmony Books, 2006.
Reviewed by Lloyd deMause
The revolution in neuroimaging techniques in the past two decades has produced such a new understanding of the effects of early experiences on the brain and the disorders from attachment deficiencies that are their result that psychologists-including psychotherapists and psychohistorians-simply cannot fully understand what the developmental causes of child abuse unless they keep up to date on what neuroscience has been discovering. If, for instance, you write about racism-from the Holocaust to Islamic terrorism-you cannot really understand what is happening unless you know early developmental problems affect the prefrontal cortex and later produce disabled medula (mirror neurons that enable one to empathize with others). Similarly, when you study group-fantasies of growing irrational fears of being attacked by other nations (who often have no designs at all on your nation), you really must understand how these fears (say, of Mother England about to pounce on you) were originally implanted in the amygdala, and unless you understand how kinds of experiences are making whole nations switch into these early amygdalan fear modules.
Restak provides an excellent summary of the basic advances in understanding neuropathology. I particularly learned a lot about what makes people-even groups-create in-group and out-group minds and feelings, which happens particularly before wars. That groups (tribes, states, ethnic groups, nations) carry over the fears they imprint from their parents to their later social lives is evident, particularly if their early attachments are insecure and they generate fears of being controlled by "enemies" (external and internal) should they try anything new and experience too much freedom in their adult lives. Studies are cited that scan the brains of hundreds of mothers interacting with their infants that show that the mothers who are postpartum depressed or otherwise were not adept at reading their infant's needs produce older children who have crippled prefrontal lobes and therefore are behind others in language and play skills by age two. It simply helps one to think this way about political events: "You remember quite vividly where you were on September 11, 2001, because the horrific events of that day aroused your emotions and activated your amygdala." And charts showing wars occurring during a nations' most fearful, most reactionary periods are actually amygdalan activation periods. Eliminating wars therefore must somehow affect this brain state.
