The Balanced Brain. The Science of Mental Health: delightful, sharp-witted, down-to-earth

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Camilla Nord’s popular neuroscience debut provides an understanding of the brain which readers can leverage for their own mental health-enhancing experiments

, she proposes that our emotions are neither hardwired nor universal, but rather the result of complex predictions based on past experiences, bodily cues and contextual information. That is why your racing heart and sweaty palms can be interpreted by your brain as either terror or excitement, and why so many of us appear to misattribute our hunger to anger .

Offering us a glimpse behind the curtain, Nord exposes the pitfalls of brain imaging techniques and the curious dilemma of trying to decipher whether a rat’s lip licking signifies pleasure . With a clearer grasp of the tenets of sound science, the lay reader is empowered to digest wild scientific claims with a sprinkle of scepticism.

Compared to their neurological counterparts such as epilepsy or Alzheimer’s disease, where physical symptoms correspond to structural damage measured in the brain and body, functional disorders lie at what Nord describes as “the intersection of this arbitrary divide” between the physical and the psychological.

Former UK government drug adviser David Nutt’s provocative claim that alcohol was “more dangerous than many illegal drugs” was based on “accurate, scientifically sound” research. Placebos, which account for the benefits of homeopathy, are extraordinarily underrated. Electroconvulsive therapy, despite its negative public perception, is “more effective for severe depression than any other treatment”.

 

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