This book explores how the brain processes that generate our minds can become disrupted, leading to devastating conditions like autism, depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
…just as our sex and gender identity are determined by how the brain develops and differentiates, it also shows that examining normal variations in brain function can provide a deeper understanding of how the brain works.
Finally, the book also shows how a biological approach to the mind can begin to unravel the mysteries of creativity and consciousness.
In particular, through people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder who display remarkable creativity, it explains that their creativity emerges from the interconnected patterns of brain, mind, and behavior that are common to everyone.
--From pp.12-13

How do the coded signals sent by the trillions of neurons in our brains give rise to consciousness, love, language, and art? How does this astonishingly complex network give rise to our identity, a self that develops, grows, and yet remains remarkably constant throughout our lives?
---From p.17

People with major mental illness often exhibit exaggerated behaviors in everyday life.
Everyone feels blue from time to time, but when you have depression, this feeling is greatly intensified.
Everyone feels excited when things are going well, but during the manic phase of bipolar disorder, this feeling becomes excessively heightened.
Normal fears and pleasure seeking can escalate into severe anxiety and addiction.
p.51

Bruno Bettelheim popularized the misleading term "refrigerator mother" to explain the origins of autism.
Bettelheim argued that autism is not caused by biological factors, but rather by mothers failing to give affection to unwanted children.
Bettelheim's theory of autism, which caused great distress to many parents, has now been completely discarded.

--From pp.68-69

Both implicit and explicit memories can be stored for short-term periods of a few minutes, long-term periods of days, weeks, or even longer.
Each type of memory storage requires specific changes in the brain.
Short-term memory is the result of strengthening existing synaptic connections to make them function better, whereas long-term memory comes from the growth of new synapses.
In other words, long-term memory causes anatomical changes in the brain, whereas short-term memory does not.
As synaptic connections weaken or disappear over time, short-term memories become blurred or lost.

---From p.174

What we've learned from biology so far is that creativity arises when inhibitions are somewhat relaxed, allowing the brain to unconsciously create new associations.
As Andreessen noticed, this allows us to see the world from a new perspective, sometimes accompanied by intense joy and excitement.

---From p.232

Recently, Edna Foa and other researchers have shown that prolonged exposure therapy works particularly well for people with fear-related disorders.
This type of psychotherapy essentially works by undoing learned fear associations in the amygdala, teaching the brain to stop being afraid.
For example, if we wanted to alleviate the fear felt by a LeDoux mouse, we would play the same tone repeatedly to the mouse without the electric shock.
Eventually, the synaptic connections underlying the fear association will weaken and disappear, and the mouse will no longer flinch in response to that sound.

--From pp.274-275

Francis Crick, the most important biologist of our time, devoted the last 30 years of his life to studying how consciousness arises from brain activity.
“Your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and your free will are really nothing more than the actions of vast combinations of neurons and their associated molecules,” Crick wrote in his 1994 book, The Astonishing Hypothesis.

---From p.335

I have found through research that learning (experience) changes the connections between neurons in the brain.
This means that one person's brain is slightly different from everyone else's brain.
Identical twins have the same genome, but their brains are slightly different because they have been exposed to different environments.
In the process of elucidating brain function, brain imaging will also reveal the biological underpinnings of our individual mental lives.

---From the text