I am half-way through the book,
The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God by Johns Hopkins neuroscientist, David, J, Linden. I just wanted to alert anyone out there interested in the relationship between the latest neuroscience and psychology (who, like me lives in the less technical, depth psychology district) that this is an excellent book on neuroscience that is very readable for a layperson.
I recommend it very highly (and I haven't even gotten to the parts about love, dreams, and God yet!). There are many things that my previous dabbling in neuroscience reading left me fuzzy on that are easily cleared up in this book. The author should also be commended for being very clear about what scientific research of the brain proves, what it does not prove, and what it merely suggests. He is fair-minded (not overly ideological) and a good, clear writer.
I will eventually get around to recording some quotations from the book here and will try to add some (more speculative) depth psychology parallels when possible. Thus far, I've found the scientific data presented by Linden to accord comfortably with my own more-intuitive, relevant depth psych. theories. That's nice, I have to admit, but not necessary. My objective is to develop theories that are compatible with strong scientific data from fields like neuroscience and evolutionary biology without either ignoring credible scientific data or co-opting scientific data that is still fringe or controversial in an attempt to seemingly advocate my views. I like to only use the scientific data that is best understood and most widely accepted in the scientific field that generated or recorded it.
I am not a scientist, and most of the time I can make no claim to be able to determine the credibility of scientific data that scientists in the field are still debating. I've seen other Jungians and New Age pseudoscience co-opters use a lot of highly questionable scientific data (and at the expense of other contradictory data), sometimes even misrepresenting them (or scientific criticisms of them), to seemingly support the pseudoscientific intuitive and foundationless spiritualistic claims. As seductive as the allure of "data" might be, I think a truly scientific mind must resist this selfish temptation and do his or her best to use data accurately and responsibly, allowing it to express what it has to express and not molding it to say something it inherently doesn't.
The use of pseudoscience in depth psychology is becoming increasingly common . . . and regrettably, many depth psychologists and depth psychology readers don't have the ability to discern the credible from the incredible uses of scientific data. As a result, our field (if it can even be called that anymore) has grown very muddied, even polluted by spiritualistic co-opting or literalization/misinterpretation of illegitimate or semi-legitimate claims.
This happens in many areas of literature, especially those areas that have less connection to scientific method and concrete data (and data collection means). I saw it a lot in literary theory (that co-opts many sociological claims that are not founded in legitimate research or come from flawed and biases studies) and I see it even more in depth psychology and its hunger to appropriate any fringe drivel from the fields of theoretical physics and neuroscience it can get its hands on. But notably, these attempts take only the data that serve the authors' pre-established ideas. This is not scientific in the least.
Therefore, I have always been very cautious about trying to source elements of my theory to either "named thinkers" or studies . . . unless I feel fairly certain that I can verify the data these studies produced and understand why it is credible and why the studies were functional means of collecting such data. For the most part, I prefer to argue and build my theories from logic and personal experience . . . while doing my best to look in on the credible scientific data from fields like neuroscience and evolutionary biology as helpful signposts. But I come from an area (literature and creative writing) in which namedropping and unnecessary citation of one's "betters" and allies passes for real argument and scholarship. And that was never acceptable to me.
In any case, please pick up a copy of
The Accidental Mind if you have any interest in investigating the relationships between brain and psyche or if you are just looking for a good, laypersons' book on today's neuroscience.
I haven't had a chance to check it out yet, but there is also a website for this book:
http://accidentalmind.org/