Brainstorm

Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain Hardcover – January 7, 2014

Author: Daniel J. Siegel MD | Language: English | ISBN: 158542935X | Format: PDF, EPUB

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Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain – January 7, 2014
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• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Tarcher (January 7, 2014)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 158542935X
• ISBN-13: 978-1585429356
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,353 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #1 in Books > Medical Books > Psychology > Adolescent Psychology
  • #1 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling > Adolescent Psychology
  • #2 in Books > Medical Books > Psychology > Neuropsychology

Firstly and as usual, I received this book for the ripe sum of nothing via a giveaway, this time from Shelf Awareness. Despite that kind consideration from all involved my candid opinions follow below. To extend the preamble a bit, this book wasn't quite what I expected. Because of that I'm going to keep the value judgments to a minimum and instead just try to describe what the book tries to be. It's up to you whether it's what you want to be reading or not. I just make with the descriptions.

What I expected out of this book was something rather harder and more specific about the science. The book jacket says it's based on the latest research and I have no doubt that's the case but none of that research seems to have made its way directly into the book. Instead what you have is very soft and results-based approach to the topic. So if you're expecting data on brain chemistry changes through the adolescent years then, like me, you'll likely be disappointed. Instead you'll get instruction through analogy with concepts like "Mindsight" and the "Wheel of Awareness". This all seemed a bit soft to me but I suspect that for the majority of the population this sort of 'softness' is actually a ringing endorsement. Siegel has made a decidedly complex topic easily readable and provides parents with the tools they need to deal with a historically difficult period of parenthood.

Even more usefully, the doctor doesn't just dole out information but provides mental exercises the reader can perform to help internalize the lesson being taught and make it easier to implement personal changes. His text is also filled with abundant anecdotes from his own practice to reinforce the idea that the situations parents face are far from unique and have been dealt with successfully in the past.

I read with alacrity "Brain Based Parenting: the neuroscience of caregiving for healthy attachment", on which Daniel J. Seigel was the third author, and gave that book 5 stars in an Amazon.com review. So I started out with high expections for Siegel's more recent work, Brainstorm. Really, I did. Unfortunately the weaknesses of the book far outweighed its strengths, for me anyway, as I'll outline below. There are multiple other books on raising and understanding teenagers I'd recommend before this one, as I'll list at the end.

Strengths:
(1) It's always good to remind oneself of the positive aspects of the developmental phase of the adolescent. Siegel lists these strengths as: intense and spontaneous emotions, intense and powerful peer and social connections, a spark of uniqueness and originality, and a profound search for one's identity and place in the universe. Frustrated parents can easily fall into the trap of seeing only your teenager's faults and negative behaviors. Remembering to see the upside (which is really only discussed in the first chapter of the book) is a good thing.

(2) Somehow Siegel wanders into the topic of healing your brain from trauma. During the course of this digression, he reviews an intriguing theory of psychological trauma (p. 176ff) that painful memories that are 'locked up' in the right hemisphere - the seat of emotion, imagery, and "implicit" (timeless and voiceless) memories - cause intense pain, fear, and flashbacks. When the right and left (verbal, analytic, logical and chronological) brain are integrated, the left side of the brain can give a coherent narrative to the trauma story and place it into a past perspective.

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