Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

Great book, but it stops short after telling you about the process. He doesn't actually walk you through using the process. Annoying.

I take brain science / cognitive studies with a grain of salt. (To his credit, he does mention peptides, the heart, and other systems, with a sweep of his hand.) That said, Dr Danny Siegel's work is at the forefront of my attention, and this may be his most accessible for a mass audience. His

Show More

illustration of the brain as your palm is worth a look, in and of itself. He finds the prefrontal cortex as regulating nine functions, and interesting what they are and how they interconnect; for instance positive "attachment" (as in Attachment Theory) and mindfulness.

Show Less

Superlative. I was resistant as I picked up Siegel's book for parents but then that was because anything written in the self-help vein causes brain freeze and or nausea. This book does the best job of any I have read tying together the practical (and often mechanical) discoveries of current

Show More

neurology and what was formerly thought of as psychiatry. The writing is lucid and yet the book is prescriptive. Siegel wants to advance the notion that we possess an integrative homeostatic capacity that the locates in the prefrontal cortex. He uses various patient studies to elucidate how mindfulness and meditation as well as other practices helped people regain a sense of themselves. While not all of it is well written - the ground up/top down section on integrating personal history with current reactions was not as strong as I had hoped, nonetheless this is a kind of enlightened owner's manual for the mind. As he says the mind creates the brain it needs, but then he goes on to show how. Much more to be done, I particularly need to better understand implicit memory and mirroring neurons but this is a fantastic book. I will read it every year until it goes out of date.

Show Less

An excellent inspiring book on the mind and how taking a introspective approach to your thoughts and feelings through simple mediation techniques. The author demonstrates through many stories of how he helped his clients, how to deal with psychological issues. I would have liked more practical

Show More

guidelines, but I think his actual techniques are so simple that they should be achievable. The impact his ideas and techniques have on the people he's worked with were dramatic. The human mind, and how the brain and body control it, are very important concepts that I will need to revisit by reading this book again sometime.

Show Less

The author talks about integrating the different parts of your brain with each other and even your brain with the brains of others using mindfulness practices. He ends with a lovely discussion on how we are connected to others and the world around us and meditating on this can give us peace of

Show More

mind. I found a lot of things to like about this book. The author is really doing an interesting job blending neuroscience and psychology with maybe a splash of spirituality thrown in. There were a couple of shortcomings in my mind. For one, the book is not really a how to, as his discussions of the actual techniques he uses are quite brief. Also, I'm a little weary of the psychology book that is really a string of case studies where the author has helped each person overcome some huge obstacle. I don't doubt the power of the personal antidote, but I find it to be a dry, slightly dull book format at this point to just string them together with each person's problem representing a new point in the author's thinking, even though I've read lots of helpful books that employ this strategy. Overall, I found it worth reading.

Show Less