The Minder Brain

How Your Brain Keeps You Alive, Protects You from Danger, and Ensures that You Reproduce

Ambition, genius, thought, imagination, love, hate, greed and, above all, consciousness ourselves as alive and as part of our world — all this is somehow enabled by the brain. The brain is the person, and if it goes wrong, a person is ruined. This book is about part of what the brain does — a role of which many of us are hardly aware, but one that has ensured, the survival of mankind. Despite famine, drought, wars, cold, infections and hostile environments, we survive as a species — though not always as individuals. All this time, our brains have been coping with what fate throws at us — a process that some call adaptation. How does the brain do it? How does it know what's needed? How does it enable us to provide that need? How much do we depend on our own brains, or on those of others?

This book is different from other books on the brain. It deals with the brain's role in survival, rather than “higher” cognitive functions (such as language or thought). It describes the special part of the brain that keeps you alive: that makes you feel hungry when you need energy, makes you feel thirsty when you need water, drives you to reproduce so that your species survives, makes you fearful of things or individuals that might harm you, and defends you against adversity.

Contents:

• The Brain as a Survival Machine
• A Chemical Code for Survival
• Serotonin, Steroids and Signalling
• The Brain and Stress
• The Weight-Watcher in the Brain
• Staying Wet and Salty
• Keeping Warm, Staying Cool
• The Sexual Brain
• Bonding, Motherhood and Love
• The Brain Goes to War
• The Rhythm of Life
• The Brain Breaks Down
• Individuality

Readership: A general level book that will interest both non-scientists and scientists from other fields.
Key Features:

• A comprehensive easy-to-understand book on how the brain and mind function and why it is so important for survival
• Includes scientific quotes that give the reader some experience of what scientists actually say, and the evidence on which each chapter is based
• Includes literary quotes that illustrate the real problems of survival, stress and adaptation to adversity as portrayed by novelists, poets and other non-scientific writers
• Written in an accessible style, similar to articles in Scientific American or the New York Review of Books, and is intended for the non-specialist reader interested in knowing about some of the recent exciting advances in this area of brain research