As groundbreaking synthesis that promises to shift our understanding of the mind-brain connection and its relationship with our bodies.

We understand the workings of the human body as a series of interdependent physiological relationships: muscle interacts with bone as the heart responds to hormones secreted by the brain, all the way down to the inner workings of every cell. To make an organism function, no one component can work alone. In light of this, why is it that the accepted understanding that the physical phenomenon of the mind is attributed only to the brain?

In The Embodied Mind, internationally renowned psychiatrist Dr. Thomas R. Verny sets out to redefine our concept of the mind and consciousness.  He brilliantly compiles new research that points to the mind’s ties to every part of the body. 

The Embodied Mind collects disparate findings in physiology, genetics, and quantum physics in order to illustrate the mounting evidence that somatic cells, not just neural cells, store memory, inform genetic coding, and adapt to environmental changes—all behaviors that contribute to the mind and consciousness. Cellular memory, Verny shows, is not just an abstraction, but a well-documented scientific fact that will shift our understanding of memory.

Verny describes single-celled organisms with no brains demonstrating memory, and points to the remarkable case of a French man who, despite having a brain just a fraction of the typical size, leads a normal life with a family and a job. The Embodied Mind shows how intelligence and consciousness—traits traditionally attributed to the brain alone—also permeate our entire being. Bodily cells and tissues use the same molecular mechanisms for memory as our brain, making our mind more fluid and adaptable than we could have ever imaged.

As groundbreaking synthesis that promises to shift our understanding of the mind-brain connection and its relationship with our bodies.

This is a superbly radical book, deeply researched and exquisitely clearly written. Even more so The Embodied Mind stands as a guideposted pilgrimage through nearly five decades' experience, introspection and explorations as a practicing psychiatrist and researcher whose best-selling The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, first published in 1981, still resonates today. The Embodied Mind is a terrific read, not least because Verny’s profound curiosity regarding the nature of human memory dovetails with the notion he rigorously advances: our bodies and mind, our emotions and our ruminations, our rational thought and culturally-endowed beliefs—all are of a piece, a complex of networked information, subject to free will and the environments we occupy, from a genetic fragment inside the individual cell’s DNA all the way to the most abstruse thinking humans can attain. We are, in stunningly elegant fashion, Verny maintains, not the result of predetermination but rather of a kind of genetic kaleidoscope, a kaleidoscope of genetic interplays subject to a
degree of voluntariness and emotional influence most readers will find remarkable. It’s early days yet but the outlines of a very different view of the human animal as a feeling creature who thinks and whose thoughts and emotions may well govern the threads of genetic expression is emerging. The Embodied Mind is a compelling journey into who we think we are (we aren’t); its destination is nothing less than who we might become.