medicine

When I was first recommended this book, the title made me very uncomfortable - too New Age for me. I thought it would be another book that would claim to find the bridge between mind and body, to point some unscientific pseudofacts that we should all be aware of. However, after the third recommendation I bought the book and delved into it.

Dr Candace Pert is a neuroscientist and she speaks biology, which is a recognised territory for me, since my wife is a scientist as well.

At the beginning of her book (which is, more than anything, a novel, a very good novel and very well written) Candace unfolds her scientific history and experience, mainly from a biological point of view but also from an autobiographical one. I was excited to enter her lab, when she invited me in, with her enthusiastic approach towards science and with professional knowledge phrased in words I could understand. Very gradually, she draws you into the basics of information-substances, which create the core of information flow in our bodies, communicating with the outside world and the inner one. With regard to facts - the book is full of them. If you are looking for scientific approval of complementary medicine, of hypnotherapy or any mind-body approach, you will surely find references for it there.

It is so heart-warming to find a western scientist who not only acknowledges the unity of mind-body (the body is the unconscious mind, she says), but also further serves the public in the endeavour to shift the old paradigm of separation and move towards a new, integrated one.

Candace's future flows right into her past (since information and metaphors are boundless in terms of space and time), creating a shift in her language. She stands on the edge of a new paradigm, explores her own boundaries, with beauty, love, excitement and humble humanity. Personally, I found a lot of the knowledge in the first part of the book irrelevant - when a paradigm changes, it needs a new language, new metaphor, but I acknowledge that we are on the threshold of an exciting shift. Hence, the old language is gradually twisting itself, until barely recognised, before finally moving forward to the new one. Speaking more languages is always better, having more choices is what we aim for - as humans, and as therapists.

She takes the reader in a shamanic journey of self-exploration, through the realms of her private life, through the realms of science, as she shapes it with her knowledge. I found myself joining her journey, holding her hand and showing compassion in her difficult moments, happy in her growth, always from within. You really ought to read this book.

Pert, will one day be generally regarded at least as highly as Sherrington or Penfield in the archives of neuroscience and probably higher. In her typically atypical style, she breaks all the rules as she wrote this remarkable book. And why not? She broke the nearly three hundred year Cartesian (the mind and body are separate) paradigme, one of the most enduring in all of science! This is not just a clearly written book on the neuroscience of emotion carrying peptides/receptors, but also of the emotional human drama of her journey of scientific discoveries. For the scientist in us, Pert clearly spells out how ligands (substances which specifically bind to selective receptors initiating sometimes dramatic intracellular biochemical changes) and termed "information molecules" or "information substances" communicate across systems which were for the most part traditionally considered separate. The "new neurology" demonstrates ligand communication between the neurological, immune, endocrine, and gastrointestinal systems. The reader may well be astounded to see that the traditional neurotransmitters (ligands such as dopamine, histamine, GABA, etc.) only comprise a tiny fraction of nervous system communication. The peptides, carriers of emotion and other information make up 95% of all ligands. Beyond the science however, Dr. Pert also provides an interesting inside look at the real world of scientific research. Her struggles, defeats and triumphs are told as she describes the dog-eat-dog culture of competitive neuroscience research in the suppressive and male dominated pharmacological, governmental, political realms. Only rarely in history does discovery, high intellect, and raw courage meld in one human being. And when it does, a revolution is born.

"Molecules of Emotion" was certainly not what I expected from the jacket blurbs. Yes, there is some discussion of the scientific discoveries regarding emotion, but only in the first half of the book, and even there, it's a small minority of the content, couched in a personal narrative more centered on Candace Pert's viewpoint of her own career.

Yes, the saddening politics of paper publication, awards selection and grant approval in the world of government- and industry-funded biological research is quite an interesting read for an outsider. It even got my blood boiling to think of the promising therapies that are possibly being ignored due to their lack of profit potential (though this wasn't a new idea to me). It's too bad this ends up being the high point of the book.

From the very beginning, Pert's own ego comes to the fore in places in a way that detracts from the information that I (and presumably some others) bought the book for in the first place. There is something about the way she describes her personal experiences (more extensively and less modestly than might have seemed appropriate for a presentation of important scientific information) that made me wonder how much differently other people must perceive her than she perceives herself (even before she admits as much later on).

Unfortunately, this is not the worst of it. The early content is clearly scientifically validated, and describes in some detail (just enough for plausibility) the experiments that were conducted and the meaning of the results. But by the second half of the book, she seems to have thrown scientific inquiry to the wind in favor of unfounded speculation, including extensive quotations of flighty lunchtime conversations she's had with psychics and others, with no foundation or evidence to back up any of the wild ideas that spring forth. It degenerates into such drivel that I stopped reading entirely 50 pages from the end (and I rarely fail to slog through the last pages of even the dreariest tome).

Not that it isn't a bit fascinating what this woman believes (some of which is entirely plausible, insightful, and well founded, while some is just the opposite, with seemingly little discrimination between the two extremes), but I didn't have much interest in paying money and spending time on someone's not-very-interesting life story or wild speculations.

In sum, the first half of the book is reasonably interesting, both in terms of the science and the politics of science. The second half is only interesting as a personality study of a scientest appearantly so frustrated with the politics of science that she to a large extent rejected science itself, no longer discriminating between theories backed by experiment or other evidence and those that are not.

Fans of alternative healing, particularly those just savvy enough to be impressed by passing references to terms like "quantum mechanics" and "information theory" (in close association with "chakra" and "subtle energy", a supposed force beyond those of electicity, gravity, etc. invented to explain the power of love) but not sophisticated enough to actually understand what they really mean, will eat up the second half of this book, as will insecure psychologists threatened by successful drug treatmenets for depression.

Don't get me wrong: I have nothing against self-help books, spiritual healing or holistic approaches to a healthy body and mind. (And some of Pert's later musings are perfectly valid wise words for how to live a good and happy life.) But this book ends up in a VERY different place from where the jacket summary and testimonials would suggest.