The Balanced Brain

The Science of Mental Health

Author: Camilla Nord

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Description

A refreshing antidote to prescriptive ideas about wellness and a profound reframing of how body and brain work together to interpret our experience of the world around usThere are many routes to mental wellbeing and award-winning neuroscientist Camilla Nord is at the forefront of finding them. In this ground-breaking book, she offers a revelatory tour of the scientific and technological developments that are revolutionizing the way we think about mental health, showing why and how events - and treatments - can affect people in such different ways.In The Balanced Brain, Nord reframes mental health as an intricate, self-regulating process, one which is different for all of us. She examines a huge diversity of treatments, from therapy to medication, to show how they work, and why they sometimes don't. In doing so, she reveals how the small things we do to lift our mood during the course of a day - a piece of chocolate, a coffee, chatting to a friend - often work on the same pathways in our brain as the latest pharmacological treatments for mental health disorders. Whether they help us to manage pain, learn from experience or expend energy on the things that are important for our survival, these conscious actions are part of a complex self-regulating process that is unique to each individual and the constant backdrop to our everyday lives.Nord shows that, with so many factors at play, there are more possibilities for recovery and resilience than we might think. This book is an invitation to discover those pathways, in order to help us identify what makes each of us feel better - and why.

Critic Reviews

A fascinating read, one that is able to make sense of unexpected connections . . . Nord makes a compelling case for rejecting any clear distinction between mental and physical illness -- Sophie McBain The Times
Compelling, revolutionary, compassionate . . . sharp-witted and intelligent . . . both down-to-earth and insightful . . . Nord provides an understanding of the brain which readers can leverage to conduct their own mental-health enhancing experiments -- Niamh Jimenez The Irish Times
Engaging, refreshingly open and fair-minded . . . Explains how our brains come to experience the world as they do, considering pain, pleasure, the mind-body connection and how events shape our outlook -- Pippa Bailey New Statesman
Highly accessible and elegantly crafted . . . It wasn’t until reading Camilla Nord’s The Balanced Brain that I felt excited about the contributions that neuroscience is making to mental health . . . Nord masterfully distils what seems like a lifetime’s worth of research into a synthesis that is both readable and engaging . . . it has the potential to be the foundational popular text in the field -- Toby Engelking The Psychologist
Rigorous, engagingly personal . . . provides an exciting snapshot of what we know so far about this vital organ’s importance for maintaining our mental health -- Peter Carty iNews
Compelling…optimistic…her writing is masterfully nuanced in its treatment of depression, without sacrificing the clarity of her argument -- David Robson the Observer
Simply brilliant. This is science writing at its best. If you want to understand mental health - really understand it - read this book -- Nichola Raihani author of The Social Instinct
This excellent book is a breath of fresh air . . . anyone reading it will come away with a kinder, better understanding of themselves. A clear-thinking tour of the latest research from a leading mental health scientist and an accessible exploration of how our bodies and minds make us feel the way we do - for better or worse -- Lucy Foulkes author of What Mental Illness Really Is… (and what it isn’t)
Extremely relevant . . . a highly readable synthesis of the neuroscience underpinning mental health and its treatment -- Simon Baron-Cohen
Fascinating . . . Camilla Nord, one of our most original thinkers, writes compellingly about the complexities of the brain and mental health. She presents new insights from neuroscience about how the brain generates our mental state, thoughts, moods and feelings, and what happens when things go wrong. This thought-provoking book is an essential resource -- Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, author of INVENTING OURSELVES

About the Author

Camilla Nord leads the Mental Health Neuroscience Lab at the University of Cambridge. Her work has been featured in the New Statesman, on Sky News and BBC Radio Four's The Naked Scientist. The Balanced Brain is her first book.