Portraits of the Mind

The practice of Buddhism ultimately can lead to an understanding of the true nature of mind. This book, Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century [Hardcover] approaches the subject from a mechanical point of view and assumption that mind resides only in the brain. A very informative book, understanding how a car works its engine, care and maintenance can surely makes us better drivers.

Portraits of the Mind follows the fascinating history of our exploration of the brain through images, from medieval sketches and 19th-century drawings by the founder of modern neuroscience to images produced using state-of-the-art techniques, allowing us to see the fantastic networks in the brain as never before. These black-and-white and vibrantly coloured images, many resembling abstract art, are employed daily by scientists around the world, but most have never before been seen by the general public. Each chapter addresses a different set of techniques for studying the brain as revealed through the images, and each is introduced by a leading scientist in that field of study. Author Carl Schoonover's captions provide detailed explanations of each image as well as the major insights gained by scientists over the course of the past 20 years. Accessible to a wide audience, this book reveals the elegant methods applied to study the mind, giving readers a peek at its innermost workings, helping us to understand them, and offering clues about what may lie ahead.
About the Author
Carl Schoonover is a doctoral candidate in neurobiology and behavior at Columbia University, where he is a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow.

A human skull inscribed by a nineteenth-century practitioner of phrenology. According to this now discredited theory, bumps on the skull betray the volume of the brain areas beneath each one, and thus can be employed to divine a subject’s cognitive or moral strengths and weaknesses Photograph: Eszter Blahak/Semmelweis Museum

Photomicrograph of the microscopic blood vessels that carry nutrients to neurons in the brain, obtained with a scanning electron microscope. This sample, from human cerebral cortex, shows a large blood vessel at the surface of the brain (top), which sends down thin, densely branched capillaries to deliver blood throughout the entire cortex Photograph: Alfonso Rodríguez-Baeza and Marisa Ortega-Sánchez (2009)


Image taken from a transgenic “Brainbow” mouse that enables neuroscientists to distinguish between neighbouring, densely packed neurons by illuminating them in different colours. This photomicrograph shows a few of the many neurons that are found in the neocortex Photograph: Tamily Weissman, Jeff Lichtman, and Joshua Sanes (2007)

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If you have mind to, Buy Now. Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century
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