The Rosetta Stone of the Human Mind

​Vincenzo Sanguineti was born in Eritrea and lived there until completion of Medical School at the “Universita’ Degli Studi” in Milan, Italy. He then spent five years in Nigeria, where he conducted published field research in Tropical Medicine and directed a missionary hospital. Consequently, he profited from the prolonged exposure to uncontaminated natural habitats and to the degrees of difference and similarity among different species, and different human cultures, which enhanced his fascination for the interaction between the unique subjectivity of the self and the interactive processes stemming from the profound complexity of the individual and collective variables participating to the phase-space of the mind. Such interests evolved into more programmatic research that generated various studies and formed the basis of his books: “Landscapes in my Mind,” “The Rosetta Stone of the Human Mind,” and his fictionalhistorical biography of Sarpedon, the mythical king of Lykia. Currently, Dr. Sanguineti is in private practice in Philadelphia, where he is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Jefferson Medical Center, within the Sidney Kimmel Medical College.

Learning the Languages.- Humanity’s Search for Mind and the Subject: A Brief Review of the Evolution of Neuropsychobiology.- An “Ideographic,” Suprapersonal Language of Rules and Universal Symbols: Alwyn Scott and Nonlinear Dynamics.- A “Demotic,” First-Person Language of the Individual and the Social System: Apuleius and the Myth of Psyche.- The Language of the Objective Observer: Gerald Edelman and Neurodarwinism: Antonio Damasio and the Feeling of Knowing.- Seeking the Understanding.- Consciousness.- The Unconscious.- The Database.- Affectivity.- The Neural/Mental Gap: Intuition, Self and Ego, a Trilingual Map.- Applying the Knowledge.- The Three Languages and Science: A New Scientific Paradigm?.- The Three Languages and Treatment.- The Psychotherapeutic Dialogue: Intersubjectivity.- The Role of a New Science for Psyche Upon Society and Culture.

From the reviews: "The brain can be studied and described on many levels, from the recording of a single cell to the subjective experience of complex behaviors. This book explores and integrates these different levels of study and communication to provide a novel survey of the human mind. … The intended readers include neuroscientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and anyone else interested in the human mind. … There are a good number of figures and illustrations. … is a story well worth reading with enticing case studies as the finale." (Christopher J. Graver, Doody’s Review Service, August, 2008) "Dr. Sanguineti writes in his introduction to The Rosetta Stone of the Human Mind: Three Languages to Integrate Neurobiology and Psychology that, "...this book has to be taken for what it really is: an admittedly naive exercise in the integration of the different approaches used to probe the mystery of the mind" (p. xxiii). Put less humbly, the book is a cogent set of working papers that synthesize physics and mathematics, neurobiology and psychology as each relates to understanding the concepts such as consciousness, the unconscious, knowledge representation, and emotion." "Among the most powerful demonstrations of this position is a retelling of the mythof Psyche as an illustration, "...which represents the creative expression of inner mental states in ways that are otherwise equaled by modern, rationalistic thinking" (p. 27). Against this backdrop, Dr. Sanguineti demonstrates the inadequacy of objective science in capturing inherently subjective concepts such as ego, self, and consciousness. This call for a redirection of the science to subjective mental phenomena is a provocative suggestion. However, the gold in the book is the honest attempt, evidenced in part by the significant number of footnotes, to synthesize complex and seemingly disparate ideas. "(Jacob Kean, P.h.D., Journal of Neuropsychiatry & Clinical Studies, August 2008) "The book is a cogent set of working papers that synthesize physics and mathematics, neurobiology and psychology … . The incredible breadth of material covered in the book is akin to a lively graduate seminar and, as such, may be of interest to scholars and clinicians alike. … Dr. Sanguineti’s adroit synthesis forces reflection on science and therapy of the human psyche in a way that is widely accessible and, for that reason, fills a void that exists in many current discussions of these issues." (Jacob Kean, Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, Vol. 20, August, 2008)