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The mind does not like uncertainty. Have you noticed? Perhaps as unease, or discomfort, distress or fear? A felt sense in the body, calling forth the work of the brain. An innate unconscious rapidfire response. Over millions of years, the evolutionary process of adaptation to changing environmental pressures bequeathed to us a human nervous system continuously monitoring our internal
and external state, as if our life depended on it. For more than 2 years, a global pandemic has acutely focused our conscious attention on daily life-and-death risks and decisions. An assumed sense of a shared reality has been destabilized, disrupting a world we thought we knew. Resurgent authoritarianism threatens and open warfare in Europe shatters presumed security. At home, gross societal disparateness requires a reckoning with conscious and unconscious bias in ourselves, and a recognition of how much we do not know and were never taught. The fact of the subjectivity of perception, of belief systems, and of human mental life itself is documented and has acquired a sense of urgency in a period of intense chronic stress.
How timely is the publication of Interpersonal Neurobiology and Clinical Practice, the latest volume in the Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology of 75 books (“Over 1 million books sold!”) published by W. W. Norton & Company. It offers a dimension of mental life quite literally derived from its name and extrapolated from the multidisciplinary research of the past few decades. A consilient approach, in the words of Daniel J. Siegel in his introductory chapter. What new information has been added since the 1990s, the Decade of the Brain? Generally, interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB) is defined as an evolutionary model of human development in which our individual mind/brain/body is conceptualized as innately interactive, interrelated, continuously communicating, and subject to a degree of plasticity throughout life. To support physical survival in the presence of