Reviews for Dr. Gavin's Health Guide for African Americans: How to Keep Yourself and Children Well

The average rating for Dr. Gavin's Health Guide for African Americans: How to Keep Yourself and Children Well based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-03-26 00:00:00 David Nagassar Have you ever wondered exactly how we learn? How we remember? Remembering, of course, is a crucial part of learning. This book takes us deeply into the realm of neuroscience, into the brain itself, and particularly into those synapses that fire (or don't) from time to time. As yet, the exact mechanism for remembering has not been found, but various disciplines have been merging toward a common conclusion. The persons studying the science of memory have come from neuroscience, biology, physics, and even philosophy and computer science. The different researchers headed in different directions for years, until finally in the 1990s they started to pull in the same direction. Honestly, a lot of the specific explanations for how the synapses fire and what the neurotransmitters do did not stick firmly in my head. I can't really blame Johnson for that, however, because he has done an amazing job of explaining without dumbing down. I found the stories of the individuals involved sometimes more interesting and absorbing. We may think scientists are devoid of envy and ambition but of course that is not true. There are many different ways to go astray, even for a scientist. The general ideas I did take away from this book serve me well. It makes good sense to me, for example, that we can retrain certain paths that we have developed over time, to go in different directions. This was not the focus of the book but one of the side effects. If you are interested in how it all really works, this is the book to start with. I am guessing that there are others written more recently that might build on it.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-04-08 00:00:00 Keith Doss It's very odd that after playing the computer adventure game "Gray Matter" I suddenly get hold of a book dealing with neuro(psyscho)logy. The consequence of this is that inside my head all the text was read to me by Steven Pacey, who does the voice of the character David Styles in said game. The book makes me think of the version of Sherlock Holmes played by Benedict Cumberbatch, where he often retreats into his "mind palace". This book talks about how a biologist, a physicist and a philosopher try to explain how the human brain stores everything we see, hear and do, in such a way that we can retrieve them sometimes even decades later. Intriguing, but the book dates from 1991, and I wonder how far science has advanced since then, and what we are capable of today, as well as in making it easier to remember, as in blocking bad memories.