The more we understand how we engage with the world as living, caring creatures, the more we are drawn to rethinking long-established assumptions about our brains. Thomas Fuchs offers a fresh vision of the brain as a resonant organ that mediates and shapes the relations between bodily processes, sensorimotor activity, personal experience, and the interpersonal world. This evocative image is consistent, complex, powerful, and beautiful.
Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Ikerbasque Research Professor, Basque Foundation for Science, Spain. If you think you are your brain, then think again ! In this original, wide-ranging, and thoroughly compelling critique of brain-centric science and medicine, Thomas Fuchs puts the human brain back where it belongs : inside a living, feeling, thinking human being, dynamically situated in a social and cultural environment.
Matthew Ratcliffe, Professor for Theoretical Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Austria. A much anticipated book, Ecology of the Brain is for anyone wanting to understand the important role the brain plays in the relationship between the body and its surrounding environment. Critical of neurobiological reductionism, Fuchs approaches this topic with great theoretical clarity.
The brain does not produce the mind, Fuchs tells us, but it is an organ of relation and interaction : with the human body, with the natural environment, and with the sociocultural world. Essential reading for anyone interested in the real role of the brain. Shogo Tanaka, Department of Psychology, Tokai University, Japan. In Ecology of the Brain, Thomas Fuchs, psychiatrist and philosopher, provides a timely and thought-provoking account of the intimate relationship between brain, body, and life.
The traditional divide between mind and brain is here reconciled within an ecological, embodied, and enactive perspective. A must-read for psychiatrists, psychotherapists, neuroscientists, and everyone interested to learn more on human nature. Vittorio Gallese, Professor of Physiology, Department of Medicine and Surgery, Unit of Neuroscience, University of Parma, Italy.