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Georg Northoff is a philosopher, psychiatrist and neuroscientist working at the University of Ottawa in Canada. This, his most recent book, contributes to the now two-decade-old interdisciplinary attempt called neuropsychoanalysis to understand how neural activity in the brain transforms into psychic activity. Divided into nine chapters with titles inherently intriguing to psychoanalytic thinking such as ‘Self and narcissism’, ‘Dreams, depression and schizophrenia’, ‘Attachment and trauma’, and ‘Conscious and unconscious’, the book's main takeaway is that while it is true that certain parts of the brain certainly underpin specific functions (e.g., the occipital lobe for vision, the amygdala for fear), there is another dynamic, global aspect to brain function which depends on unique patterns of different kinds of brain wave activity.
You could say his aim in this book is to introduce another dimension to understanding the brain, so that space (i.e., where in the brain a function seems to reside) is augmented with an understanding of how the dynamics of time operate as an energetic and essential dimension of brain function as well. He is calling this lens through which he is looking spatiotemporal neuroscience, and each chapter explores how this new way of seeing can allow us to explore familiar concepts in a new way.
What he means by ‘spatial’ is how spontaneous activity in the brain occurs topographically through various interacting networks like the default-mode network, salience network, and central executive network, whose relationships seem to be modulated by the brain's global activity. The ‘temporal’ part refers to the brain's fluctuations or oscillations in various frequency ranges (in size order, largest to smallest, these are: gamma, alpha, beta, theta and delta waves) which, together, provide a certain temporal dynamic structure to different brain functions.
In his first chapter, ‘Self and narcissism’, Northoff draws on a concept of self he developed over a d