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	Viking Jan 2002, hc $29.95

Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are
by Joseph LeDoux

Research on the brain continues to fascinate us, as it offers a glimps into the deepest foundations of humanity. But in spite of great progress in understanding specific mental functions, like perception, memory, and emotion, little has been learned about how the self -- the essence of who a person is, both in his or her own mind and in the eyes of others -- relates to the brain.

Joseph LeDoux's The Emotional Brain caused a sensation in 1996 for its revelations about the biological basis of our emotions and memories. Now LeDoux follows up that path-breaking volume with a new book that tells a larger and more profoundly important story: how the brain, and particularly their synapses, creates and maintains personality.

Synapses, the spaces between neurons, are the channels through which we think, act, imagine, feel, and remember, and also the means by which our most fundamental traits, preferences and beliefs are encoded. In short, they enable each of us to function as a single, integrated individual -- a synaptic self -- from moment to moment, from year to year.

Challenging the common view that regards the self in terms of self-awareness, LeDoux emphasizes the importance of both conscious and unconscious processes in its construction. Rather than taking sides in the age-old debate of whether nature or nurture is the determining factor in human development, LeDoux also shows how both contribute to synaptic connectivity and personality. Nevertheless, because memory plays such an important role in maintaining our personality over time, much of Synaptic Self concerns the mechanisms by which synapses store information, and how learning is coordinated across the many systems involved in encoding a given experience. Ultimately, it is at the level of the synapse that psychology, culture, and even spirituality meet, where memory joins with genes to create the ineffable essence of personality.

Joseph LeDoux, Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at New York University's Center for Neural Sciences, is the author of The Emotional Brain: the Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life and the co-author, with Michael Gazzaniga, of The Integrated Mind.

from the publisher