Book Review: Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan

New York Post reporter Susannah Cahalan suffered psychosis and hallucination and was hospitalized by a mystery disease for several weeks until Dr. Souhel Najjar of New York University Langone Medical Center diagnosed her of anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, an autoimmune disease caused by antibody B-cell attack neurons in brain.

Susannah is lucky to have two parents who don't give up on her and keep pushing for answer and seeking medical treatment for their daughter.

Book Review: The lessons of History by Will Durant and Ariel Durant

The first biological lesson of history is that life is competition. Cooperation is a tool of competition. Cooperation is within a community so that the community can compete with other community. So to solicitate cooperation within a community, create a competition with another community will help.

Book Review: How to Change Your Mind What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

Some keywords to ponder after hearing the audio book:

1. psychedelic
2. psyilocybin
3. Being rather than doing
4. LSD
5. 5-MeO-DMT
6. Default Mode Network (DMN)
7. Burning Man
8. Mushroom
9. Mediatation
10. Left brain vs Right brain
11. Ayahausca

The Glossary section of the book is the most valuable as it contains a lot of terms, organizations and concepts of the psychedelic movement, and best of all Amazon website for the book offers this gem of the book for free.

Book Review: My Stroke of Insight, A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey by Jill Bolte Taylor

First hand account of Jill Bolte Taylor's brain hemorrhage on her left hemisphere caused by Arteriovenous Malformation (AVM), and her insight of right hemisphere influence on mental health.
Two main takeaways from the book:
1) Brain anatomy and physiology of strokes: Ischemic and hemorrhagiv
2) The insight into analytical side (left hemisphere) and right now right here mentality (right hemisphere) and how to tap right hemisphere to gain inner peace.

The book was recommended by Ray Dalio and he is proponent for mediatation and this book although not specifically promote mediatation, it sure sounds like a endorsement for daily mediatation.

Book Review: River out of Eden A Darwinian View of Life by Richard Dawkins

The main theme is life (as author termed as replication bomb), how it began and where it is heading. Darwin's survival of fittest translated by author into survival of gene (the God's utility function). And the gene that survives will be the ones that are good at surviving in the average environment of species.
Still a little abstract for me to fully understand, and hope reading the author's other better known Selfish Gene will help

Book Review: Don't Call Me Crazy edited by Kelly Jensen and Same Time Next Week edited by Lee Gutkind

These two books are case studies and personal narrative on mental health, the former one from patient perspective and the latter from care giver perspective. I didn't finish reading them, maybe later can ref them for case studies.

Book Review: Mind Fixers, Psychiatry's troubled search for the biology of mental illness by Anne Harrington

The author is Harvard history professor, and the book documented psychiatry's repeatedly frustrated struggle to understand mental disorder in biomedical terms. The conundrum of psychiatry is that it tried to define itself as a branch of medical science but failed to find much biological explanation for most of ailment it tried to help: schizophrenia, depression and bipolar depression. And most of drugs psychiatrist relied on today are found decades earlier, and due to awareness of placebo effects and patient's awareness of severe side effect, drug companies seems to lost interest in developing new drugs for psychiatry.
The root cause for the stalling of psychiatry today is the lack of breakthrough in understanding in biomedical terms of mental illness.

Book Review: Treasury's War, The Unleashing of a New Era of Financial Warfare by Juan Zarate

• A better title for the book may be "How to bully other countries by leveraging dollar as international trade currency and New York as financial center"
• The book did provide some useful insights on financial weapons(main one is Provision 311 of US Patriot Act) US can leverage in a conflict with another country, but these information doesn't warrant 500+ pages book, a 2000 words piece will suffice
• All the weaponry author touts were derived from US dominant position in international trade (largest financial markets, New York as world financial center, dollar as currency of international trade), but overused these tools will greatly diminish US credibility and destroy US dominant position. Case in point: forcing SWIFT data already led to mistrust of US and attempt from Europe (INSTEX) and Asia countries (Russia has an inititiative supported by China, India, Iran and Turkey) in creating alternative to SWIFT system