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Marvelously informative for the general public and a rapidly digested refresher and update on neurobiology for the psychiatric clinician, this smoothly written slim volume is a humane bridge to the latest insights that only a scientist of Kandel's stature and understanding could simplify and articulate.
The minds represented by the title are disordered by autism, mood swings, schizophrenia, dementia, Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases, anxiety and post-traumatic disorders, addictions, and gender dysphoria. There is a concluding chapter on the enduring mystery of consciousness and Kandel's stirring, forward-looking call for neurobiology and psychoanalysis to join for mutual progress. According to Wikipedia, Kandel was inspired to embark upon his Nobel-winning studies of learning and memory in the sea slug Aplysia by reading Freud, to whom he was introduced by Marianne and Ernst Kris. The readers surmise he has a soft spot in his heart for psychoanalysis, but remain critical that they have not done enough evaluation. Conventional studies of effectiveness have been and are being done at Columbia, but randomized controlled trials, even of easier-to-study drugs, are increasingly in disfavor at the NIH because of confirmation bias (finding what you are looking for).
As a neural underpinning of autism, Kandel cites difficulty in the superior temporal sulcus with perceiving that a given motion is that of a biological creature, with resulting difficulty reading the social meaning of actions, and reading or even properly looking at facial expressions. He describes Brothers’ social brain that comprises, in addition, the inferior temporal cortex (face recognition), the amygdala (emotion),