Review of "The Mind and the Brain" by Jeffrey Schwartz

I just read a fairly interesting book called

The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

by Jeffrey Schwartz and Sharon Begley.

The interesting part of the book is the wealth of biological examples, which illustrate the powerful ways in which the human brain can modify its own structure during adult life. When I first studied neuroscience in the 1980's we were taught that the brain can't grow new neurons or synapses after childhood. I was always skeptical of this and now it turns out that the old wisdom was false: brains can and do grow new neurons and synapses during adulthood, and this is a significant aspect of the way humans learn over their lifetimes.

The lead author is an expert on the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder and gives interesting examples of how appropriate therapies allow patients to overcome OCD via neural restructuring (which can be observed via brain scanning).

The frustrating part of the book is the end where the author draws on Stapp's ideas to argue that neural restructuring is a consequence of quantum dynamics in the brain -- that this restructuring is caused by some quantum-enabled "force of will". None of the biological material presented seems to demand this kind of recourse to quantum magic, and it weakens the book considerably (although from the author's perspective it's one of the main points of the book!).

(A concise version of my own current view on the relation between quantum theory and consciousness is here:
http://www.goertzel.org/blog/2005/10/quantum-theory-and-consciousness.html)