I feel like I should give this a one-star review, but also a three-star review. Ergo, the compromise.
One stars for its personal appeal: I found it bor...moreI feel like I should give this a one-star review, but also a three-star review. Ergo, the compromise.
One stars for its personal appeal: I found it boring. Considering I love pop cog in general, I found this a little surprising. On reflection, I realized this book's appeal (except, perhaps, to comedians and professionals in the cog biz) is theoretical. It is unlikely that any disease will be cured if someone nails the theory of funniness, and the only profound change foreseeable in society at large will be when someone creates a humorbot, which appears to be some ways off. I've read plenty of books that only have theoretical applications, but they help me understand social problems that I find important (such as how the cognition of morality heightens partisanship and reduces the likelihood of our civilization solving some pressing problems).
Three stars for those that do find the theory of humor appealing. Even for them, this is a pretty dry book, I think.
For someone who wants to create jokes or humor, there is plenty of material here that will provoke thought as to where to experiment, and why those approaches are likely to work.
Oh, there is some humor interspersed, of course. There are plenty of examples of what the authors are dissecting, and some of them are good.
Here's a sample from the exploration of one-liners: "Dog for sale: Eats anything and is fond of children." If you get bored of the actual content and skim for the jokes, you'll find better and worse.
So here is the joke I transposed and updated from one of theirs:
An engineering team was demonstrating their voice-synthesis software to their executives, and decided to have some fun. So they built a cardboard robot on stage, hiding the computer within, programmed with a series of jokes making fun of management. On the day of the presentation they watched and enjoyed the mixture of discomfort and ironic amusement among the audience when, to their surprise, someone in a back row seat stood up and started complaining. "Managers play an important role in business! Just because engineers and their managers see the world from a different perspective isn't evidence that managers are stupid — I'm sick and tired of being treated like an idiot just because I've taken a job that isn't as hands-on as the people I'm managing".
The engineering team nervously glanced at each other, until the team manager stood up and apologized: "Uhm, we meant this in good fun, and certainly didn't intend any" —
The manager cut him off: "Quiet — shut up! I'm talking to the robot, not you."
This was actually a blonde joke in the book; I thought I would update it to a group that is more a politically correct target for scorn.(less)
(Darn it, the SFPL copy is LIB USE ONLY, and I really don't wanna sit and the library reading it, nor do I want to buy it. Huh, I wonder if Interlibra...more(Darn it, the SFPL copy is LIB USE ONLY, and I really don't wanna sit and the library reading it, nor do I want to buy it. Huh, I wonder if Interlibrary Loan will work for books like that.)(less)
Check out Politics, Odors and Soap by Nicholas Kristof, over at the New York Times. He writes a very enthusiastic little review of yet another book o...moreCheck out Politics, Odors and Soap by Nicholas Kristof, over at the New York Times. He writes a very enthusiastic little review of yet another book on the intersection of cognition and politics. No big surprise, it's by Jonathan Haidt, who's doing the pioneering research into how the brains of liberals and conservatives are wired in fundamentally different ways. Oh, also see the review in the Wall St. Journal, Conflicting Moralities. The longer, "official" Ney York Times review is at Why Won’t They Listen?, and explores the book in more detail.
Note for when I get around to doing the review: on-topic interview re "War on Science", at NPR's Science Friday, Oct. 14, 2011, When Politics Meets Science.(less)
Okay, yeah, this has to go on the to-be-read shelf. And the over-stuffed cognition shelf. Hey, at least I was reading Kahneman before he won that Nobe...moreOkay, yeah, this has to go on the to-be-read shelf. And the over-stuffed cognition shelf. Hey, at least I was reading Kahneman before he won that Nobel Prize, before he got really popular. But I have to admit I never actually finished his Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases — it was due back at the library when I was only halfway through. That is a slow, engrossing grind of an academic tome, though.
All the reviews have been glowing. Kahneman is golden, of course — he's ascended into the pantheon of the intelligentsia's demigods. The first one I read was from The Economist, then there was the one from the New York Times, and then I caught the one in The Wilson Quarterly, but what finally made really this the zeitgeist was when I came across a review in the fluffy “Paper” magazine (I was sitting in a coffeeshop waiting for some friends to finish a boardgame and picked up a free copy. More pop culture snuck into my brain in that twenty minutes than I permitted during the balance of 2011.)
They’re coming in so fast and furious now that the New York Times has to review ’em in batches. Check out Is the Brain Good a...moreYet another PopCog book.
They’re coming in so fast and furious now that the New York Times has to review ’em in batches. Check out Is the Brain Good at What It Does? to read reviews of this one, plus two others.
Well, I’ll probably never get around to reading this one. I’ve read quite a few PopCog books, and don’t see any immediate evidence that this one will...moreWell, I’ll probably never get around to reading this one. I’ve read quite a few PopCog books, and don’t see any immediate evidence that this one will add anything fundamentally new. But it does seem like a good selection to point towards for someone new to the topic.
Quite a few months ago I learned the term “decision fatigue,” and then I noticed it in action a few days later. I play boardgames quite often, and pre...moreQuite a few months ago I learned the term “decision fatigue,” and then I noticed it in action a few days later. I play boardgames quite often, and prefer strategic games. I was in the middle of a tough game, playing in a coffee shop, and during a break I ordered a slice of cake for a snack. Which is strange, because I’m usually very, very good at not going for those sweet treats. It immediately occurred to me that this was an instance of this new-fangled cognate.
Even though I’ve read quite a few PopCog books, I haven’t hit one yet that details it, but as I understand, the idea is simply that the brain has a limited amount of activity to allocate between different tasks. If the highest priority is thinking hard about one’s next move in Hansa Tuetonica, then the subconscious motivation to avoid temptation will receive less activity, and one is more likely to indulge.
This is one of the many complexities that affects our “willpower,” a distinctly old-fashioned term that is getting some well-deserved scrutiny.
This new book, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, seems well conceived. It’s written by a top social psychologist, Roy F. Baumeister, along with New York Times science writer John Tierney. I’m a bit frustrated that I still haven’t gotten around to studying the previous Baumeister book on my to-be-read shelf, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty.
Personally, I think there’s an epidemic of annoyances around.
The authors of this book, Joe Palca and Flora Lichtman (both of NPR’s Science Friday) tel...morePersonally, I think there’s an epidemic of annoyances around.
The authors of this book, Joe Palca and Flora Lichtman (both of NPR’s Science Friday) tells us in their teaser video (on their website at annoyingbook.com) that there seems to be an equation:
annoying = unpleasant + unpredictable + temporary
which seem to be the key ingredients.
I’m pretty certain from my own experiences that they’re missing something there, and I suspect it’s because there are multiple types of annoyances. What isn’t in their equation is the problem of disappointed expectations.
Sure, the scraping of fingernails down down a chalkboard is irritating, but it usually misses that other aspect. What their equation doesn’t explain very well is the annoyance of the sidewalk — you’re moving along efficiently down a city sidewalk and suddenly you come across a group of people two or three abreast, causally strolling at an a snail’s pace and oblivious to the fact that they are blocking the path. Or that person who unlocks their bicycle from a post and leans it against their body so it blocks that same sidewalk until they finish their little chore. Or the motorcyclist who doesn’t care how staggeringly and obnoxiously loud their exhaust note is on a city street, or the driver that leans on a horn in a parking garage, again oblivious to how it affects anyone other than themselves.
The annoyances I feel more often are based in people’s all-to-frequent insensitivity to the effect of their actions on others when I think they should know better.
Did Palca and Lichtman capture that side of annoying, or only the superficial stuff?
(I dunno — looks intriguing, but do I really need that deep of an education in Bayes’ theorem, for example? It should be mentioned that the single two...more(I dunno — looks intriguing, but do I really need that deep of an education in Bayes’ theorem, for example? It should be mentioned that the single two-star review here actually reads more like a three or four star review, and the two more detailed reviews over on Amazon are four and five stars. Hmmm.) (less)
Disappointing. First, since I’ve read so many books one related topics, much of what Chorost spends time explaining I’ve already long since learned, s...moreDisappointing. First, since I’ve read so many books one related topics, much of what Chorost spends time explaining I’ve already long since learned, so the book felt slower and less intriguing that it probably would for other folks.
But the second reason — and why it barely gets those three stars — is that the author ends up with an almost Pollyanna-ish view of the prospects of integrating the Internet into the human mind.
He pays lip service to the dangers, but doesn’t really do any significant examination of what those threats might be like. For example, he notes that VR pioneer Jaron Lanier warns of “cybernetic totalism” in his You Are Not a Gadget, but dismisses that on the grounds that “the Internet is separate from the human body,” and that a direct connection can “enhance empathy and the direct recognition of another person’s uniqueness.” Uh, well, sure — that’s possible. But isn’t it also quite possible that some folks will get an even more visceral thrill out of bullying or attacking someone with that direct connection?
The problem with the predictions and suggestions in this book are that they universally imagine a pleasant outcome, and then proceed as if that outcome were more than just plausible, but likely, or even guaranteed.
Part of this seems to be due to the author’s clumsy reliance on metaphorical thinking. When imagining how wondrous it will be when human can actually share thoughts, he pauses and notes that granting the thoughts of others access to your own brain is a bit problematic, considering how similar that comes to schizophrenia:
It raises the possibility that even if [a World Wide Mind] could be created, it would present a threat to users’ sanity. However, I think the risk of schizophrenia is not as substantial as it might appear. As I explained earlier, input from others would probably feel distinctly different from one’s own self-motivated brain activity by virtue of its lesser intensity and relative incompleteness. It would no more fool the user than a photo fools the viewer into thinking he is seeing the actual scene.
There is no real reason to believe that the reality of a photo is or is not a reliable predictor of inserted thoughts and emotions beyond its superficial similarity, but that’s as far as he goes with respect to that problem. You could easily expand the “photo” analogy to bring in trompe l’oeil, for example, if you really want to examine the analogy.
But even beyond that, the consumer entertainment industry would undoubtedly be striving mightily to make those impressions “more real than reality,” wouldn’t it? Once those techniques were known, who is to say what malefactors might want to do? I can easily imagine a viral advertisement that sneaks into the brain to make every memory and thought of Disneyland warmer and fuzzier, or changes my taste buds to go positively orgasmic when I suck down a Coca Cola.
These are not the kind of ideas that Michael Chorost has examined in this book. What he has presented is a first peek at that world, and one that is heavily biased towards the positive.
An excellent if — obviously — idiosyncratic addition to the Popular Cognition genre.
Macknik and Martinez-Conde, spouses and neuroscientists, began to...moreAn excellent if — obviously — idiosyncratic addition to the Popular Cognition genre.
Macknik and Martinez-Conde, spouses and neuroscientists, began to examine how magic works for the insights into cognition, and were seduced by the craft, which after all has been implicitly accumulating knowledge about how our minds work for centuries. In hindsight, the attraction in obvious: as they describe, magicians are artists whose manipulate not form and color, but attention and cognition. Just as a painter implicitly relies on how our vision works to produce beauty on the canvas, a magician implicitly relies on aspects of cognition that are only now available for study.
Tricks of magic involve many of the same “flaws” in cognition that are explored in other books, such as Ariely’s Predictably Irrational and Gilovich’s How We Know What Isn’t So. But Macknik and Martinez-Conde draw our attention to what was implicit in some of those earlier arguments: these aren‘t flaws, just understandable compromises that sometimes have peculiar side effects. Our brains only have a limited energy budget, for example, so it is perfectly comprehensible that the organ would simply stop paying attention to things we consistently ignore. So people can drive down a street and not notice that bicyclist until a terrible accident — they literally didn’t see them because they’d implicitly trained their brains to pay attention only to cars. Back on the savanna, our ancestors could save precious calories by only focusing on what mattered: the bright red of ripe fruit, the rustle of leaves that might indicate a lioness, the smooth but camouflaged surface of a python dangling overhead. They probably wouldn’t have seen the bicyclist either.
The only problem the authors here face is that the discussion of magic tricks and how they are done is so engrossing that the background cognition and neurology feels boring in comparison. It’s like the intermittent reinforcement that hooks gamblers: you’re so looking forward to that next “hit” of revealed magic that the intervening pages seem less interesting, more quotidian.
Nevertheless, a very fun and interesting book, and quite a worthwhile addition to anyone that enjoys PopCog. (less)
I studied this while in grad school. My thesis, which never got much beyond the notes stage, used Popper and other epistemologies to examine the diffe...moreI studied this while in grad school. My thesis, which never got much beyond the notes stage, used Popper and other epistemologies to examine the difference between "natural" sciences and "social" sciences. The basic hypothesis was that the latter rested on "essentially contested" propositions. For example, Galileo's observations of the solar system and the conclusions he drew therefrom depended on the underlying theory of optics being correct. Since both the theory and instruments were new and crude, that was originally probably a pretty formidable attack. However, there is nothing about whether or not the theory of optics is correct that is a direct affront to anyone's ideological holdings. Meanwhile, over in the social sciences, my suspicion is that there will always be unresolvable debates about the essence of things: which is more important, charity or justice? Seniority or quantifiable capability?
Popper provided the foundation for much of my thinking, and more. But my thesis advisor thought I was straying pretty far from International Relations and I was finding there was too much more recent epistemology to be read to sustain my interest.
I still think I'm right :-) but it doesn't really matter, does it? (less)
Three stars seems a bit paltry, because I like Lehrer as an author, but it does, after all, mean “I liked it.”
I like the idea of what this book could...moreThree stars seems a bit paltry, because I like Lehrer as an author, but it does, after all, mean “I liked it.”
I like the idea of what this book could have been more than the actual execution. In our bookclub meeting, someone suggested a better title might have used a question mark: Proust Was a Neuroscientist?, but I think a better idea would have been to drop the “w”: Proust as a Neuroscientist. Lehrer traces the history, personal development and impact of each artist’s contribution and points out how those advances presaged much later changes in our understanding of cognition.
The idea that artistic revolution might intuit things that scientists hadn’t yet noticed is wonderful; showing such foreshadowing is the pleasant core of this book. What I didn’t like was when Lehrer presented the artists as actually understanding cognition or neuroscience. So he claims that Proust spent so much time and effort examining his flawed memories that he “understood how the brain worked”, and his ”hypothesis”, “model” and “theory of memory” have since been ratified by contemporary science.
Our current culture is atrociously science-averse. Lehrer’s assertion that these artists really are cryptoscientists diminishes science in service of further glorifying select artists. Although radical insights and creative explosions are the visible highlights of scientific endeavors, they are precisely what is shared by every creative field, and focusing on them as the sine qua non of science is precisely what is misleading. Science is the drudgery of data gathering, experimental replication and hypothesis testing. Most of it is, necessarily, ”little science” in Kuhn’s paradigmatic scenario: not glorious at all. Lehrer’s eight revolutionary artists were not engaged in science, but radical creativity. Look to inventors like Nikola Tesla or Alexander Graham Bell, perhaps, as their equivalents.
In Lehrer’s final chapter, he repeats C.P. Snow’s lament at the divide between art and science. Frankly, I’m a bit of a heretic on that point; I think the divide is as natural as that between, say, shoe-making and ice cream production. Science and art are both important to our society, but that does not mean they have a natural touching point. When Lehrer attempts to build a bridge between these two domains, he diminishes some important points and emphasizes lesser points, inevitably to the detriment of one field or the other — which is precisely what he complains in his afterword what science popularizers often do.
This is a pleasant book to read, especially if you re-imagine it as a book showing artists intuiting and foreshadowing later research into neuroscience or cognition. That might not be quite as grand as Lehrer had intended, however.
For those of us who read a great deal of the Popular Cognition subgenre, a great deal in this book won’t be surprising, although Strauch has molded it...moreFor those of us who read a great deal of the Popular Cognition subgenre, a great deal in this book won’t be surprising, although Strauch has molded it into a story that pays special attention to the aging brain, with an emphasis on the strengths and weaknesses of the middle-aged brain.
Just like that proverbial middle-aged brain, things are a bit fuzzy. For example, what precisely is meant by middle-aged? If it is based strictly on age, then the definition she seems to be leaning towards is from, roughly, 45 to 68. More or less. If one relies on cognitive ability, the range is apparently much wider, with folks into their 80s sometimes doing as well as some in their 30s. And while she doesn’t mention it, if we were to rely on how mature people act, well, clearly many of us are jumping straight from sophomoric adolescence to senior citizen.
The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain delves into what current science says about what makes brains different at varying ages, and also explores why there seems to be such a wide range of abilities within an age range. For cognitive strengths, speed of thinking goes clearly to the young, as well as the ability to remember isolated facts. But it turns out that older brains have some dramatic strengths, especially in dealing with complex thought. Which isn’t really surprising, once you think about it: experiences accumulate in those synapses for a reason. Sometimes someone even gets a nice enough blend of experience that we call them “wise.” Strauch explains that the underlying reason seems to be that the dendritic network becomes richer over time, and myelination dramatically increases the efficiency of those deep connections. Whatever the reason, this is probably why no one is eligible to be the President of the United States until they’re at least thirty-five years old. In ancient Greece, no one could even be on a jury until they were fifty.
She points out — too often, really — that the same folks that are forgetting where they put their keys are the same folks that are pretty much running the world. The ability to deal with complexity is hitting a peak at the same time that these annoying difficulties start showing up. Colloquially, we might feel there is a clear divide between cognitive declines due to dementia and those simply due to aging, but things aren’t really all that clear. It turns out dementia-related diseases can start much earlier than once thought, but it also seems clear that some folks can build up a “cognitive reserve” that eliminates any symptoms of the disease even as their brains are being ravaged.
The chapters on “But what can we do about it?” follow, with some of the usual suspects showing up. Diet and exercise, for example. Hypertension, obesity, cardiac troubles — all those things epidemiologists are worried about — are also predictors that cognitive difficulties lay ahead. How about this:
The researchers looked at the records of 1,449 randomly selected men and women when they were fifty-one and then again when they were seventy-two and found that midlife obesity, like high blood pressure and high cholesterol, doubled the risk for dementia — and that those who had all three risk factors were six times as likely to become demented. (p. 168)
So the scientists involved agree that lifestyle factors will be important — but which ones, why and how? That is still being vigorously debated, although based on Strauch’s interviews, it seems like the researchers themselves are eating plenty of blueberries (“brainberries!”) and other antioxidant-rich foods, and exercising like crazy.
Even more controversial is whether and how brain exercises might help. The evidence that it does help is slowly appearing, but until the “how?” questions start getting answers, most of what is being marketed to consumers is of doubtful utility. But many researchers are forming companies in anticipation of making mucho moola once the results start coming in.
There’s a bit of neurobiology, but not too much, and even less of neuropharmacology, so this is really aimed at the lay reader. Strauch is, after all, a journalist and not a scientist. She repeats herself a bit much, but maybe that’s for the best, considering her audience.
One of the highlights of the book is the fact that brains of middle-aged folks today are in dramatically better shape than those of previous generations. The baby boomers were the first generation to overwhelmingly benefit from revolutions in education, medicine and hygiene, and this seems to be showing up substantially in cognitive performance.
Which leads to my favorite tidbit, from the final pages of her epilogue. Because, according to this, I and most of my friends aren’t even yet actually middle-aged!
Stanford University economist John B. Shoven recently came up with an entirely new way of calculating when we reach the crest of that hill. Given the fact that we’re all in better shape and living longer, he argues that our true age should be determined not by years since birth but by years left to live. In this way, he has reconfigured the traditional arc of our lives to create a long period of youth followed by shorter periods of middle age and old age. That means that if you have less than a 1 percent risk of dying within a year you can consider yourself young, and you’re not old until you have a 4 percent chance of dying within a year. Middle age, according to this marvelous system, would be defined be a mortality risk between 1 and 4, a span of time that, by Shoven’s analysis of 2000 U.S. Census data, now begins for men around age fifty-eight and for women at age sixty-three.
Of course, with the obesity epidemic showing no signs of reversing, it is questionable whether we actually all are in better shape, but this at least gives us another incentive to stay out of that doomed demographic.
• • • • • • • • • •
Heard about this book in an interview with Ira Flatow on NPR Science Friday. Download it, listen to it, or read the transcipt (or all three!) here: Brains, Like Red Wine, Get Better With Age.
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