“Poe's Heart and the Mountain Climber : Exploring the Effect of Anxiety on Our Brains and Our Culture” by Richard Restak

This book gave me anxiety. I should have paid more attention to the small shrift in the title of “Poe's Heart and the Mountain Climber : Exploring the Effect of Anxiety on Our Brains and Our Culture” by Richard Restak. Generally, the book is Neither about Poe Nor about Mountain Climbers. IT IS ABOUT ANXIETY and is heavily geared toward scientific enthusiasts and/or medical students. I seriously believe that if an anxiety suffering patient picks up this book by the time he/she reaches the end, he/she would’ve experienced an increase in anxiety symptoms.

For me it started unexpectedly with the lengthy exploration of how best to define what anxiety is…page after page, test after test…But I quickly brushed aside any fears of growing anxiety associated specifically with my worries of wasting my time yet again with a bad book and proceeded to read.

More pages followed with more definitions and tests and again the same feelings creped up on me of time wasted again. This time I listened to these feelings and found them to be true especially after the medical terminology kneed me in the groins of my brain with statements like

“... the next time you're feeling anxious, think about the brain circuitry that underlies your anxious responses: the role of the amygdala, the conditioning responses, and, most of all, the power of the frontal lobes to override or at least moderate the ..."

or
“…During the evolution of our brain, the massive growth of the prefrontal cortex resulted in an increase in back-and-forth traffic between that area and the amygdala….”

and also

“…But despite their inability to recall seeing the fearful face, PTSD veterans show an exaggerated amygdala response on íMRI testing, a response that varies directly with the severity of their PTSD symptoms…”

By the time I reached the Epilogue, I was hyperventilating. Thankfully, it proved the most helpful portion of the book and it is in this portion that the author redeems himself from causing my anxiety.

While in his “Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot: Unleashing Your Brain's Potential” mr. Restak give frequent and helpful advices within each chapter of the book, he does this only in the Epilogue of this book. My advice, unless you absolutely need to know how anxiety is linked physiologically with your mind, skip to the Epilogue. My overall impression is that a lot of the information in this book is unnecessary unless you are planning to go to med school or are preparing for a scientific conference on the brain and its imbalances.

-by Simon Cleveland