About this item
In this optimistic and inspiring book, Peter Whybrow, the prize-winning author of American Mania, returns to offer a prescription for genuine human progress.The Well-Tuned Brain is a call to action. Swept along by the cascading advances of today's technology, most of us take for granted that progress brings improvement. Despite spectacular material advance, however, the evidence grows that we are failing to create a sustainable future for humanity. We are out of tune with the planet that nurtures us.Technology itself is not the problem, as Whybrow explains, but rather our behavior. Throughout its evolution the ancient brain that guides us each day has been focused on short-term survival. But fortunately we are intensely social creatures. Without the caring behaviors that flow from intimate attachments to others, we would be relying on a brain that is only marginally adapted to the complexity of the problems we must now face together.
About the Author
Peter C. Whybrow is an English psychiatrist and Director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. An award-winning author he is best known for a series of books exploring the impact of modern-day culture on human behavior. The first of this trilogy, A Mood Apart; The Thinker's Guide to Emotion and its Disorder, is widely acclaimed as the definitive guide to the experience and science of mood and its disorder. Recent writings draw upon Whybrow's research into human emotion, and his broad experience as a physician, but also reflect his fascination with America's unique history as the great experiment of the Enlightenment. Thus American Mania: When More is Not Enough, explores America's migrant culture and the nation's extraordinary material and cultural achievements together with their impact upon everyday life. While the affluent environment we have created for ourselves is compelling it does not fit easily with our biological heritage, generating a mismatch that threatens disruption of both mind and body. In The Well-Tuned Brain: Neuroscience and the Life Well-Lived, Whybrow examines this disruption and argues that by harnessing modern science to understand the nature of ourselves and by returning to ancient human truths that in our everyday frenzy we now overlook, we can live better individual lives and also build a thriving future that serves the common good.
Whybrow's provocative books have been translated and published widely in an array of languages, including German, Polish, Dutch, Italian, Finnish, Russian, and Chinese. More information can be found at his website www.peterwhybrow.com
