Scientific American Mind-June/July 2007

(reviews)
The Oasis Within
The Mindful Brain: Refl ection
and Attunement in the
Cultivation of Well-Being
by Daniel J. Siegel. W. W. Norton, 2007
($26.95)
For thousands of years, spiritual traditions
around the world have emphasized
the importance of living “mindfully”—using
prayer and meditation
techniques to free ourselves from daily
distractions, enabling us to look inside
ourselves, to become sensitive
to what is happening around us and to
live compassionately. Anecdotal evidence
has suggested that these practices
have a positive infl uence on people’s
emotional lives and physical
health, but science has only recently
begun to investigate their effects. The
impact of mindfulness on the brain is,
for the most part, still a mystery.
Enter Daniel J. Siegel, a psychiatrist
and co-director of the Mindful
Awareness Research Center at the
University of California, Los Angeles.
Siegel has both a meticulous under-
standing of the roles of
different parts of the
brain and an intimate
relationship with mindfulness.
He brings
these strengths together
in The Mindful Brain
to come up with insightful
proposals, bolstered
by preliminary research
data, for how mindful
awareness might engage
parts of the brain
in novel ways and lead
to permanent neurological changes.
His speculations are interesting in
and of themselves, and they also may
provide neuroscientists with ideas for
experiments that could test the effects
of mindfulness on the brain.
Throughout the book, Siegel also
shares his own deeply personal experiences
with mindfulness techniques,
such as the challenges he faced the
fi rst time he attempted to meditate.
To those who are unfamiliar with such
experiences, his detailed descriptions
might seem overly sentimental and tedious,
but those who have similar sto-
ries are likely to welcome
his wisdom.
Toward the end, Siegel—
who at times seems to
be uncertain about who
his audience is—discusses
the ways in
which mindful awareness
can inform education,
clinical practice
and psychotherapy.
As both a scientist
and an avid promoter of
mindfulness, Siegel
walks a fi ne line of credibility. But he
is to be commended for repeatedly
pointing out that his ideas about the
mindful brain are just that—ideas. Although
he is confi dent that mindfulness
effects benefi cial neurological
change, he also acknowledges that it
could be a long time before science
agrees, if indeed it ever does. Nevertheless,
in bringing together what we
know and have yet to learn about this
fascinating subject, Siegel offers an
exciting glimpse into an uncharted
territory of neuroscience.
—Melinda Wenner
Mind Reads
Why We Believe
Six Impossible Things before Breakfast:
The Evolutionary Origins of Belief
by Lewis Wolpert. W. W. Norton, 2007 ($25.95)
Humans have been called the believing animal.
Obsessed with fi nding explanations, we fashion
viewpoints about the world and then cling to them
tenaciously, even if they are self-contradictory
and incoherent.
In Six Impossible Things before Breakfast, biologist
Lewis Wolpert of University College London
tries to get to the bottom of why we are such ardent
believers, how we form our notions, why they are so
often wrong and how we sometimes get them right.
(The title comes from Lewis Carroll’s Through the
Looking Glass, in which the White Queen explains to Alice that
believing in impossible things merely requires practice.)
Wolpert argues that, unlike animals, humans have “causal
beliefs,” which address the mechanisms by which a cause
leads to an effect. A chimp can learn that wind shakes fruit out
of the trees, but, according to Wolpert, only a human will fi gure
out he can shake the branches himself when he is hungry.
So how did we get this way? Wolpert thinks our believing
brains arose because of tool use. He argues that
people had to understand basic mechanical principles
to make and use even simple implements
effi ciently. Good tool users were more likely to survive
than incompetent ones were, resulting in the
evolution of humans who could think in terms of
cause, mechanism and effect.
Wolpert makes an interesting argument, but
he is not completely convincing. Are human
ideas about the world really of a different kind
than those of other animals, or are we just
smarter and better at reasoning things out?
Wolpert himself admits that many researchers
do not agree with the distinction he draws. Likewise,
his argument for tool use as the driving
factor seems plausible but not conclusive.
The book also suffers because the author meanders
across a number of topics—faulty reasoning, false beliefs, the
paranormal, religion and rationalism—which, though interesting,
do not cohere into a unifi ed argument.
Although readers will probably wish that Wolpert had
managed to better discipline his material, they will fi nd much
to enjoy in his fascinating explanations of human and
animal reasoning. —Kurt Kleiner
84 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND June/July 2007
COPYRIGHT 2007 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC.