Professional Documents
Culture Documents
E
very day you look at something right in front of
your eyes and yet you never see it. Your retina, the part
of your eye that picks up visual information, sits behind
a network of blood vessels at the back of the eye. This vascular
window shade is so obvious and ever-present that the brain has had
to make it invisible, creating a latticelike blind spot that is filled in
by the mind. Like the purloined letter of Poe’s tale, many of the
most fundamental features of the normal mind have been hidden
in plain sight. They are so basic to what we do, think, and feel, that
we hardly give them a thought. And, until recently, they have been
relatively invisible even to scientists who study the mind for a living.
This book is about the obscure and the obvious. It is about phe-
a skilled athlete is not on the list (luckily for me). There are certain
domains where the idea of normal matters, and many more where
it doesn’t. Charting that territory of normal is a crucial project for
psychiatry and all of the other fields, from psychology to econom-
ics, that are concerned with making sense of human behavior. The
point is that many disorders can best be understood as perturba-
tions of normal systems and mechanisms. As this theme began to
guide my own research, I discovered that a surprisingly coherent
picture of the normal human mind was emerging at the intersection
of the social, behavioral, and biological sciences. It is by no means
complete, but it provides a fascinating look at what makes us tick.
In the chapters that follow, I describe this emerging field: the
biology of normal. Along the way, I draw on the latest research from
a range of disciplines—psychology and psychiatry, developmental
and cognitive neuroscience, genetics, molecular biology, econom-
ics, epidemiology, ethology, and evolutionary biology—to shed light
on how the brain works. My hope is that by the end, you will begin
to see how the complex features of the mind fit together, which in
turn will give you a new way of looking at how we adapt to life’s
challenges.
Let me also say up front what the book is not about. First, my
aim is not to provide a comprehensive review of what we know about
normal brain function—that would be an encyclopedic project, and,
trust me, you wouldn’t want to read it. Instead, I will focus on how
genes, experiences, and even chance shape our emotional and social
natures. This is a book about what and whom we care about. Second,
I don’t intend to convince you that everything important about the
mind can be reduced to biology. It would be absurd to claim that
we can adequately explain or describe every mental phenomenon in
material terms. The mind does emerge from the brain, but that does
not mean there is a one-to-one correspondence between the firing
of nerve cells and what we mean by the mind. A purely biological
account of love, empathy, and other human experiences will never
be a fully adequate account in the same way that a detailed account
* Despite some scientific differences with his famous relative, Galton was a strong supporter
of Darwin’s theory: “The slowness with which Darwin’s fundamental idea of natural selection
became assimilated by scientists generally is a striking example of the density of human wits.”