Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology EPUB

Many fields have explored the nature of mental life from psychology to philosophy, literature to linguistics. Yet no common home where each of these important perspectives can be honored and integrated with one another has been created in which people seeking their collective wisdom can find answers to some basic questions. These inquiries have puzzled our species for centuries. What is the purpose of life? Why are we here? How do we know things, how are we conscious of ourselves? What is a thought or a feeling? What is the mind? What makes a mind healthy or unwell? And in modern times, we can even ask: What is the connection among the mind, the brain, and our relationships with one another and with this planet which we all share?

As a student in high school and college, I was fascinated by these basic questions. After studying biochemistry, researching fish metabolism during the day, and working at night on a suicide prevention help line, I longed to find a way to connect the power of objective science with the centrality of our subjective mental lives. Could the molecules I had been studying in the lab that allowed salmon to transition safely from fresh to saltwater be in some way related to the equally important reality that the way we communicate with another person in crisis can mean life or death? I entered medical school eager to explore the interconnections between science and subjectivity our different ways of knowing about the realities of life. I found that the various divisions of the field of medicine, each studying a different system of the body, did not communicate well with one another. An internist would know the organs of the body but would not communicate well with the surgeon about to perform a procedure on her patient. A pediatrician would be helpful to a child but would not have been taught about how the psychiatric illness of the parent might be negatively impacting the child ™s development. When I was in school, too, many of the fine teachers we had approached their patients, and their students, as if they had no center of inner experience ”no subjective internal core we might call our mental life. It was as if we were just bags of chemicals and bodily organs without a self, without a mind. After leaving medical school for what ended up being a year of travel and internal exploration, I returned to my medical training thinking for the first time that I might enter the field of psychiatry.