Lionel Tiger and Michael McGuire

Non-Fiction


 

Michael McGuire began his career as a psychiatrist at Harvard and MIT. He now studies nonhuman primates and their neurophysiology. He directed a behavior and neurophysiology research lab for investigators from Harvard, Yale, McGill, and UCLA for 18 years. Later, at UCLA he directed the Nonhuman Primate Laboratory and its associated biochemical laboratory.  He is a pioneer in isolating many of the behavioral impacts of serotonin, norepinephrine, and cortisol which have had immense medical consequences. He lives in Cottonwood, California

Lionel Tiger identified male bonding in his 1969 bestseller, Men in Groups. In Optimism: The Biology of Hope, he analyzed the chronic knack humans have for overestimating the odds in our favor and neurochemistry which favors it. In 1971, with Robin Fox, he wrote The Imperial Animal. Other titles include The Pursuit of Pleasure, and Decline of Males. His articles have appeared in Playboy, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review,, and Brain and Behavioral Science. He is Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers and he lives in New York City.

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God's Brain

In the fractious debate on the existence of God and the nature of religion, two distinguished authors radically, and in fact fundamentally, alter the perspective and the conversation.

Surprisingly, they assert that big questions of existence, which have eluded us until now, can indeed be answered: What is religion? What is it for? What does it do? What is its source? The answers reside in the natural and social sciences, but above all, in the exploding field of brain science.

Lionel Tiger has been exploring the evolutionary roots of human behavior in a number of widely published books. Michael McGuire is a noted psychiatrist who shifted to the study of non-human primates and their neurophysiology.

Brain science reveals that other primates and humans alike are afflicted by disturbances of the main emotional centers of the brain. The quest for both is to “brainsoothe.” How humans use religion and social structures to convert “brainpain” to “brainsoothe”  is the subject of this ground breaking book.

Refreshingly non-judgmental about specific religions, the authors observe that religion exists in all known societies. The common factor is the brain. It is the reason a neurosurgeon can work as effectively in Mecca as in the Vatican.

“Our goal is to understand the roots and reality of what can’t be seen and the personal and group behavior which is clearly linked to the mystery of belief,” they write. “Their fruits are a suite of activities and social associations of profound importance and reach in human affairs.”