Our knowledge of the brain has grown by degrees of magnitude in the last decade. And so there is a growing rush of scientist-authors stepping forward to translate it all. Thankfully. How else would the rest of us make heads or tails of much of this information?

The downside of this, of course, is that we've been given a hefty stack of popular literature to sift through. Where do we start?

Any number of places, probably, but a very good one might be Dr. John J. Ratey's new book A User's Guide to the Brain. It is a big book, not so much in numbers of pages, but in scope and ambition.

The perennial problem of talking about the brain—aside from the fact that we don't understand an awful lot about how it works—is that it is just plain difficult to explain—and difficult to keep a non-scientist's attention while you do explain it.

Ratey takes an interesting approach in this and, I think, sidesteps some of the difficulty: he mixes research findings from a seemingly endless stream of important scholars with case studies, as well as anecdotes from his own experiences and patients (he is a psychiatrist at Harvard's Medical School). The result is a thickly textured work that both gives the feel of comprehensiveness and seems to allow a reader any number of entries into the material.

A fascinating thing about Ratey's approach—and what separates his book from a number of such ventures in the last few years—is that he has rekindled a once-discarded idea that the brain is composed of theaters: four of them, he says. They lie, he writes, “ along a neurophysiological river of the mind, with each theater further downstream from immediate experience than the one before it."”

Those theaters are (1) perception, (2) attention and consciousness, (3) brain function—things like memory, language use, and movement, and (4) the behavior and, ultimately, the identity that results. Ratey never veers far from this useful tool and stresses the importance of the interactions between the theaters—both upriver and downriver.

By this, he accomplishes a number of things. For one, a lay person can begin to see the relationship between brain centers, the way the environment interacts with our minds and bodies to help shape us, the utter complexity of life that the brain is part of.

Secondly, Ratey is calling into question some older notions about illness. Because at root, our understanding of the brain is largely based on illness, and this, in some sense, is the whole point of the book—to address ideas of mental illness, and to set us straight about the complexity of these things.

While applauding advancements in recent years toward a more biological understanding of mental disorders and illnesses, Ratey does his best to emphasize what he feels is a need toward a more holistic understanding of mental disorders. “Mental health praticitioners continue trying to treat affect directly,” he writes, “as if it were the illness itself, rather than attempting to investigate the ways in which it might be a consequence of a patient's underlying disorders.” By which he means to move beyond the surface of problems, and travel down the chain of the neurophsiological river to the source—sometimes one need go no further than memory, sometimes one must go all the way back to the initial point where mind and environment interact: perception.

A great example of this for Ratey is Temple Grandin, an autistic savant woman who eventually taught herself to overcome certain aspects of her disorder by merely training herself. Diagnosed in her youth with “brain damage,” Grandin struggled socially and academically. “Temple's state of hyper-arousal and her inability to manage environmental stimuli,” writes Ratey, “impaired her ability to cope with the normal surroundings of her family or peers.” Eventually Grandin, through perseverance and great effort, was able to control much of what Ratey calls her “offending behavior,” and she eventually earned a doctorate in animal science and became an internationally recognized expert in animal handling.

In her late 20s, though, Grandin felt isolated from the world socially and knew that some part of the reason for this was her social skills; she set about changing them. In particular, she in essence rewired her brain to achieve social interactions that before she had not been capable of because of her overly sensitive nervous system. Where she was not able to approach another person with any degree of reliability—she would in effect walk right into them—she practiced on the automatic doors at a Phoenix Safeway. She would approach the doors hundreds of times from five steps away and try to restrain herself from walking through until they had opened up all the way.

She in fact found analogous practices for a number of social interactions. Grandin, writes Ratey, “mastered each technique with practice, made it automatic, and then applied the newly imprinted pattern to other cognitive skills.”

He might have been writing solely about Grandin when he writes, “The sooner we replace our mechanistic model of the brain with an ecologically centered, systems-based view, the better off we will be, for such a model better accounts for much of human experience.”

Grandin is such a perfect example of what Ratey wants his readers to understand about the brain and how to use it. The brain, he insists, is dynamic. While the theaters idea of the brain may not be universally accepted, it is indeed a handy way for an outsider to think of the brain and learn about.