Brave New Brain

Brave New Brain is a travel guide to the future. Scientists are presently mapping both the terrain of the brain and the geography of the genome. Psychiatry has joined them on a quest to conquer mental illnesses - those illnesses that strike the most human part of our bodies, our brains and minds. Brave New Brain is designed as a resource book for following this voyage of discovery. It explains the nature of mental illness and genome and brain mapping. using clear simple language, interesting case histories, and extensive illustrations. Scientists today know more about the brain than ever before. Andreasen gives us an engaging and readable description of how it all works, from the billions of neurons to the tiny thalamus to the moral monitor in our prefrontal cortex. She also shows the progress made in mapping the human genome, whose 30,000-40,000 genes are almost all active in the brain.