The Healing Brain
Breakthrough Discoveries about How the Brain Keeps Us Healthy
Robert Ornstein and David Sobel
Robert Ornstein and David Sobel
The psychologist and leading expert on the brain, Robert Ornstein, teamed up with noted physician and health education specialist David Sobel in a series of endeavors over several decades to help lay the groundwork for the burgeoning field of mind/body health. This book is a masterful expression of that important collaboration.
The Healing Brain
Breakthrough Discoveries about How the Brain Keeps Us Healthy
Robert Ornstein and David Sobel
“Entertainingly written and authoritative. A superb, comprehensive, balanced review of how the brain guards the health.”
–Jerome Frank, M.D., Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry,
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
This pioneering book helped to bring about a new way of looking at the brain, one which restored the perspective that the major role of the brain is to mind the body and maintain health. The Healing Brain provided much of the raw material for the new view: A complex internal pain-regulation system underlies turning off pain in response to sugar pills. The death of a loved one can cause immunity to disease to plummet. A sudden cardiac arrest after a shocking trauma could be due to signals deep within the brain’s frontal lobe. Our social nature links us fundamentally to others throughout our lives, and when these links are strained or ruptured, the health consequences are profound. Though individual bits of evidence may have been debated and speculative links challenged, the collective weight of the findings helped close the artificial gap between mind and body.
“The Healing Brain is a gem. The authors have managed to synthesize, summarize, and clearly communicate a broad body of knowledge into a coherent description of how the brain affects our health and well-being. It is a treasure trove of information and insights into an area of vital importance to us all.”
–Philip R. Lee, M.D., Professor of Social Medicine,
University of California, San Francisco
“This is a very readable, thoughtful, creative book. It brings together a vast amount of information…in a new way that I have never seen before. This is a brilliant tour de force that will be a major force in setting a new direction for research in the years ahead.”
—S. Leonard Syme, Ph.D., Professor of Epidemiology,
University of California, Berkeley
