Cognitive Dominance: A Brain Surgeons Quest to Out-Think Fear

COGNITIVE DOMINANCE: Enhanced situational awareness that facilitates rapid and accurate decision-making under stressful conditions with limited decision-making time. Brilliant! Paradigm-blasting and profound." - Steven Pressfield, Bestselling author of Gates of Fire and The War of Art Get a Grip. The first time he cut open a patient's skull, neurosurgeon Mark McLaughlin found himself confronting a powerful force that his fellow brain surgeons agreed was best never spoken of. Fear. But Dr. McLaughlin knew that if he couldn't find a way to cope with this formidable foe, all he had striven for as a physician would be lost. So, with a scientist's analytical precision and a philosopher's worldview, McLaughlin derived and formalized a method by which he could act rationally and confidently under the operating room's lights and in all of the complex relationships in his life, especially under fear's profound influence. With inspiration and guidance from intellectual titans like Rene Descartes, Charles Darwin, William James, Carl Jung, and contemporary thinkers like Nate Zinsser, Jordan Peterson, Iain McGilchrist, and J.K. Rowling, McLaughlin lays out his twenty-year intellectual adventure story. The payoff of his odyssey is as life-changing as it is thrilling. Mark McLaughlin, (www.markmclaughlinmd.com) is the founder of Princeton Brain and Spine Care specializing in trigeminal neuralgia and cervical spine surgery. A former NCAA Division I wrestler, McLaughlin was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2016. His commentary regularly appears in Business Insider and other national media outlets.