New Books in Neuroscience

By: New Books Network
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  • Summary

  • Interviews with Neuroscientists about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
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Science
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Episodes
  • Adrian Keith Perkel, "Unlocking the Nature of Human Aggression: A Psychoanalytic and Neuroscientific Approach" (Routledge, 2023)

    Adrian Keith Perkel, "Unlocking the Nature of Human Aggression: A Psychoanalytic and Neuroscientific Approach" (Routledge, 2023)
    Mar 12 2025
    Today I began my discussion with Dr. Adrian Perkel about his new book Unlocking The Nature of Human Aggression: A Psychoanalytic and Neuroscientific Approach (Routledge, 2024) “Aggression is to the mind what the immune system is to the body. It doesn’t seek the fight.” With this perfect mind-body analogy Dr. Perkel proposes a clear way to think theoretically and work clinically with aggression. Throughout the book he links Freud’s formulations of the psyche with contemporary physics and biochemistry. Perkel’s assertion that “Where the aggressive drive goes, so therein lies the solution to many of the psychological problems that present to us in life” is broadly summarized in three essential points: 1. The aggressive drive in the human psyche has the aim of reducing stimuli and excitations brought on by internal and external impingements - it is not looking for a fight. 2. What constitutes a threat or impingement is not necessarily objective - in fact it is always filtered through subjective experience and the UCS associations that are revisited repeatedly giving rise to a lens through which experience is filtered. 3. This experience is driven by memory traces of experience that embed themselves in the UCS and are revisited and hence enacted in a repetitive manner. “My argument is that what wraps all those three points together is that you have life drive needs yes but they're often unfulfilled they're often frustrated and then we need a second mechanism which is what Freud called the death drive.” Acknowledging that the death drive is contentious in psychoanalysis “in neuroscience it's not contested.” I knew going into this interview that we would only discuss a few concepts and elaborations from his book. For more of Dr. Perkel’s writing and webinar on this book please go here and here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
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    1 hr and 11 mins
  • M. Chirimuuta, "The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience" (MIT Press, 2024)

    M. Chirimuuta, "The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience" (MIT Press, 2024)
    Mar 10 2025
    This book is available open access here. The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (MIT Press, 2024), Mazviita Chirimuuta argues that the standard ways neuroscientists simplify the human brain to build models for their research purposes mislead us about how the brain actually works. The key issue, instead, is to figure out which details of brain function are relevant for understanding its role in causing behavior; after all, the biological brain is a highly energetically efficient basis of cognition in contrast to the massive data centers driving AI that are based on the simplification that brain functionality is just a matter of neuronal action potentials. Chirimuuta, who is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, also argues for a Kantian-inspired view of neuroscientific knowledge called haptic realism, according to which what we can know about the brain is the product of interaction between brains and the scientific methods and aims that guide how we investigate them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
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    53 mins
  • Steven Lesk, "Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness" (Prometheus, 2023)

    Steven Lesk, "Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness" (Prometheus, 2023)
    Feb 26 2025
    Of all the mental illnesses, schizophrenia eludes us the most. No matter the strides scientists have made in neurological research nor doctors have made in psychiatric treatment, schizophrenia remains misunderstood, almost complacently mythologized. Without a reason for the illness, patients feel even more alienated than they already do, families are left hopeless, and doctors struggle to provide accurate care. Steven Lesk, though, after a medical career dedicated to those affected by schizophrenia and a determination to find the answer to its existence, presents a groundbreaking theory that will forever change the lives of the mentally ill. In Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Madness (Prometheus, 2023), Lesk threads evolutionary evidence with neurological evidence, turning the mysteries of our minds into a tapestry of logic. With his breakthrough theory and this unprecedented book, Lesk will invite necessary cultural dialogue about this stigmatized illness, provoke new psychiatric and pharmacological research, and provide unequivocal comfort to those afflicted and affected by schizophrenia. Lesk's "primitive organization theory" is based in human evolution, from Neanderthals to Homo sapiens, and the specific changes to our brains after the emergence of language. We have existed in human-like form for six million years, but we've only had language for 50,000; within the vast span of evolutionary time, that's hardly any time at all. Lesk elucidates us to the hormones affected by language, especially dopamine, and with brilliant clarity, connects human evolution, our brain affected by language, and those with schizophrenia whose dopamine doesn't flow in our new, adaptive way. In other words, the twenty million people who have schizophrenia in the world don't suppress dopamine in the way evolution has trained us, so their brains don't process language well and function as if they're in a hallucinatory, delusional dream state. Not only will Lesk's theory focus treatment efforts for schizophrenia, but it will also affect that of other dopamine-related mental illnesses like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's chorea, Tourette's, ADD, and more. Publishing Lesk's work will usher in a new era of psychiatric understanding, one that the field and the public desperately needs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/neuroscience
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    1 hr and 5 mins

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