Serendipity, chance and the anatomy of discovery in Happy Accidents

From The Week of April 6th, 2014

Serendipity is a constant throughout our lives. Whether it is the tragedy narrowly avoided or the good news received at just the right moment, its unexpected gifts and arrows have the power to delight, to terrify and to change our world. For who hasn't had the course of their existence altered by a moment unlooked for, a circumstance not considered? But for all of serendipity's capacity to change our moods and our lives, is it not, on some level, merely a means by which to explain the strange oddities that chance sometimes throws up? Is it not an evocation of some external force to explain a lack of vision? The absence of the mental clarity to consider all that lies before us? Whatever its implications, it lies at the heart of this fascinating history of medicine from Mr. Mayers.

Of all the industries that have been redefined over the last two centuries, few have experienced more change, and more advancement, than medicine. As late as the 19th century, doctors were little more than priests when it came to their capacity to heal. They had a handful of steadfast remedies with which they could attempt to mend the broken, but their knowledge of the human body was about as poor as their comprehension of the world around them. Germs and diseases had yet to be discovered, let alone studied. And curatives were often as poisonous to the patient as the affliction. Comprehension of the world and all its forces was so poor that, even when radiation was discovered at the turn of the 20th century, it was thought to be beneficial, even therapeutic. It wasn't until cancers began to erupt from these applications that the true cost of playing with such fundamental forces was revealed. Ignorance, creating assumptions, creating dogmas, until those dogmas were shattered in the face of hard truths.

But as dark as the 19th century may have been for medicine, the 20th was a revolution. Where prior centuries had been a wasteland of discovery and understanding, treatments for cancer, Tuberculosis, bacterial infection, heart attacks and high blood pressure all became widespread. Even the mysteries of the brain were, to some degree, conquered with drugs that successfully fought numerous strains of mental illness. In les than a hundred years, the doctor's toolbox expanded from prayer and good fortune to hundreds of possible remedies for any of a host of formerly lethal conditions. But just how did these magnificent discoveries eventuate? Were humans suddenly smarter, more intuitive, more understanding of the human form and its connection to the broader world, or were there other forces at play?

A persuasive argument for the virtues of screwing up, Happy Accidents is an engaging adventure through the slap-dash, serendipitous world of medicine and the discoveries that have shaped its last hundred years. Morton Mayers, himself a medical doctor, divides his chronicle up into sections, each of which sheds light upon the fundamental workings of the heart, the cell,the circulatory system, the blood and even the brain. His intent is not so much to give his readers a refresher on high-school biology, though he does this admirably, as to illuminate the anatomy of the breakthroughs, the circumstances that surrounded the key insights that not only pulled back the curtain on the innerworkings of these systems, but that lead to revolutionary cures that have restored life to the terminal and sanity to the doomed. In each case, from antibiotics to antipsychotics, from Lipitor to Lithium, he exposes a startlingly clear pattern of ignorance that was dispelled by happenstance, leading to awareness and, finally, to solutions.

Underpinning Mr. Mayers' work here is the understanding that humans invariably operate based on a collection of assumptions that become, in their certainty, unhelpfully dogmatic. X should not work on Y because of Z. But of course, truths are only true until they are proven false. The sun revolved around the Earth until it didn't. The Earth was 6,000 years old until it wasn't. Emotions stemmed from the heart until they didn't. Certainty; giving way to puzzlement in the face of contradictions; forcing the forging of newer, better certainties; starting the process all over again until perhaps something like knowledge is possessed. However, given the discomfort of living in constant doubt, we like certainty. We cling to it and we are damned by it. For it blinds us to the discoveries, the connections, that would be obvious to us if we were willing to try everything rather than being dismissive out of hand and waiting for random chance to drop fortunate outcomes into our laps.

But as wonderfully as the author constructs this argument, and as much knowledge as he drops on the reader during its repeated demonstration, his proscriptions for its rectification seem inadequate. Mr. Mayers levels an accusatory finger at everyone, from big pharma to big government, to explain why this age of rapid discovery has slowed, why fewer treatments than ever are being discovered. And perhaps he is right to blame these forces interfering with good research. However, Happy Accidents is nothing if not a book about the narrow mindedness of humanity, of how we have to practically be smashed over the head with a gong before we see what's before us. And so crediting serendipity for the golden age of medicine and then blaming institutions for its end seems, at best, inconsistent and, at worst, blind to the possibility that we have plucked all the low-hanging fruit. We have made most, if not all, of the simple discoveries that it's possible for chance to gift to us, that what remains are more systemic discoveries that will require open minds and collaborative efforts to achieve.

Happy Accidents is a dense and deeply rewarding adventure through the human body and the men and women who reduced it from mysterious phenomenon to a highly complex machine that we've gone a long way to explaining. For this knowledge alone, a must read. For those intrigued by happenstance and randomness, no disappointment will be found within these pages. But for those looking for solutions to the intriguing problems posed here, the answers will have to be sought out elsewhere. (4/5 Stars)

The neurological mechanics of reading revealed in Proust and The Squid

From The Week of November 10th, 2013

Of the many gifts with which evolution has blessed us, none are as consequential as humanity's ability to adapt. Our physiological capacity to endure the cold and the heat, the dry and the damp, the grim and the barren, have ensured the continuance of our species, but even these achievements pale in power next to the might of neuroplasticity, the ability of the human brain to literally re-program itself in response to the necessities of the individual. In the event that areas of the brain are damaged, malformed, or even underutilized, neuroplasticity allows the brain to re-task its other regions in order to regain necessary skills. It is a wonder that has saved and empowered humanity countless times, and yet, little did we know the critical role it has played in our capacity to read. Maryanne Wolf explains in her engaging work.

Without the written word, we would not have civilization. It's a grand claim, and yet, there can be little arguing it. After all, the written word has been, throughout our history, the most stable means by which to transmit information from generation to generation. Oral traditions served admirably well in the many millennia prior to the advent of alphabets, but such a means for knowledge transfer is highly unstable, subject to misremembering and misinterpretation, not to mention genocide. More than the accumulation of knowledge, though, the written word has given us complex mathematics with which we've built up a world capable of delivering us to the stars. A substantial achievement for something that does not come naturally to the human brain.

From signs to messages, from magazines to novels, we read every day, largely without conscious effort. And yet, in Proust and The Squid, Ms. Wolf argues that this fundamental element of our daily existence is, to us, an unnatural process, one that we have trained ourselves to perform. Drawing on her own research, as well as work from neuroscientists and linguists, she describes how reading is an outgrowth of the brain's capacity to recognize patterns and to extract meaning from them. This evolutionary talent, no doubt the result of the necessities of survival, is, in the reader, cultivated, over some 2,000 hours of intense training, into a system by which the individual can associate shapes with letters, letters with sounds, and sounds with language, creating a closed, linguistic circuit that allows us to not only communicate with our fellows but to imbibe knowledge from the troves of information left to us by the countless members of humanity who have come and gone.

Proust and The Squid is more than a rumination on the mechanics of reading, however. It is an examination of the many manifestations of this talent, how languages based on alphabets and hieroglyphs make different neurological connections, and how these connections can sometimes go astray. The most famous of these maladaptations is dyslexia, a disability Ms. Wolf has clearly studied at length. For these disabilities, and the social and emotional price they exact upon their sufferers, inject passion into the author's work here, transforming it from a thing of pure science to something of a call to arms, to understand and to eliminate such challenges.

While Proust and The Squid is, at times, fascinating and inspiring, it is plagued by a troubling narrowness of perspective. Ms. Wolf uses several admittedly potent statistics correlating reading with personal success to argue that it is a talent that must be cultivated for a full and informed life. But this advocacy seems to run completely counter to her fundamental premise, that reading is an unnatural cultivation of a neurological system that isn't designed to actualize it. Is it truly possible for reading to be so profoundly important when it is clearly not intrinsic to our natures? Is it not possible that reading is, rather, the most obvious means of knowledge transfer for the present? Ms. Wolf is alarmed by the propensity of our newest generation to immerse themselves in a world of touchscreens rather than books. And yet, touchscreens seem to be far more in line with the brain's natural visual systems than reading is. Perhaps, in the future, we will discover other means of knowledge transfer that are more efficient than the laborious programming of alphabets.

In this vein, that Ms. Wolf completely ignores those who read through listening is deeply disturbing. Entire industries have been created to service the many communities that either prefer or depend upon audiobooks for learning. In fact, I read Proust and The Squid as an audiobook because I lack a visual means to consume it. By Ms. Wolf's logic here, I too am cause for concern because I've chosen another way to learn. The author's alarmism over new technologies is a rejection of the very glory that gave us reading in the first place, our ability to adapt. Trust seems in order here, not dismay.

An interesting read, but one that is far more interested in providing encouragement to the dyslexic than it is in recognizing and mitigating its author's own lack of foresight... (3/5 Stars)

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An excellent, playful takedown of the DSM5 in The Book of Woe

From The Week of May 27, 2013 Compared to the talents and the weapons claimed by the great diversity of life on Earth, humans are an unremarkable species. We cannot hide ourselves in plain sight nor poison our enemies with venom. We cannot glide through the skies nor survive at the bottom of the oceans. But what we lack in tusks and gills, wings and exoskeletons we make up for with the power to think, an ability that has given rise not just to dreams and language, science and culture, but the only advanced civilization to have ever graced our planet. Our minds are remarkable machines that evolution has shaped into tools that we will use to rise beyond our base genetics, our root circumstances, and take to the stars. But for all its glory and its plasticity, the human mind is not without its flaws. For while it has enabled some to make discoveries that have re-imagined our world and our universe, it has also steered some into the pits of hell, condemning them to lives of madness and confusion, obsession and disassociation from which it is difficult to recover. And it has encouraged yet others to study these malformed minds to both glean knowledge of their illnesses and to aid in their healing. But just how successful has that effort been to catalogue and heal the array of human mental afflictions? Gary Greenberg explains in his fascinating polemic. The diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) is the psychiatrist's handbook. An oft-revised classification of mental illnesses, it is an encyclopedia of disorders that range from the disassociative to the obsessive. Though largely confined to the psychiatric community, the alphabet soup of its terminology, BP, OCD, BPD, has spilled over into mainstream culture, causing some to prematurely diagnose themselves with its theatre of mental horrors while motivating others to rebel against its labels, rejecting them as nonsense. Between, it has given rise to an eruption of proscriptive drug use unimaginable fifty years ago, a result that none of its authors could have predicted. The DSM has undoubtedly been beneficial to some. Its classifications, assembled from thousands of studies, have helped clinicians accurately recognize and properly treat mental illness in their patients. However, the DSM is simultaneously, and unavoidably, the work of men and women who cannot escape the biases of their culture. Thus, over the years, "afflictions" such as homosexuality have been included in its pages, proscriptions offered for its curation. These incidents damage the Manual's credibility. For if illnesses can so easily slip in and out of its pages, then what truly is mental illness? Can we ever know? The result of both a career as a clinician and the most recent and controversial revision of the DSM, The Book of Woe is an excellent and utterly unforgiving examination of the DSM: its history, its implementation and its architects. Though Mr. Greenberg pays particular interest to the pointed criticisms of the DSM5 by Allen Frances, the author of the previous version, this exercise in mud-slinging is merely an entertaining and clarifying lens through which to view the ways in which the DSM has impacted psychiatrists, their patients and the wider culture. In this, Mr. Greenberg is clinical in his ruthlessness, raising awareness of the numerous ways in which the DSM's various revisions have been exploited by doctors and pharmaceutical firms to create highly profitable drugs of dubious effectiveness at the expense of patients and their concerned families. This work is hardly the first to raise such concerns, but they are handled here with both care and passion. Though much of The Book of Woe's critiques of the DSM5 will be of little interest to non-psychiatrists, Mr. Greenberg is effective in taking the reader into the anatomy of a diagnosis, not only revealing how thin the line is between mental health and mental illness, as defined by the DSM, but the ways in which such diagnoses offer hope to bewildered families seeking answers. The author poignantly captures just how desperate some people are to get help, help that, at times, the DSM actually hinders instead of aids. The Book of Woe only re-enforces the critical importance of being one's own best advocate, of questioning everything as a means to getting the proper diagnosis, a task made all the more difficult when one's mind is clouded by illness. The Book of Woe is certainly not without its flaws. Mr. Greenberg barely even attempts to be objective about the DSM5, featuring here its critics far more than its promoters. Moreover, he has chosen to prominently focus on the bumps in the road to the DSM5's publication, making it seem as though the book is a nonsensical result of bureaucratic bumbling. His desire to emphasize these flaws gives what would appear to be a distorted view of the DSM5's quality. However, even in this, Mr. Greenberg's work serves a purpose, chiefly, to reveal the degree to which the APA has deployed all the typical and despicable tools of a bureaucracy on the defensive to fend off criticisms and discredit its criticizers, a reality that leaves the APA looking both disorganized and greedy. For those interested in the history of the DSM, The Book of Woe is a wonderful read, full of colorful characters and powerful minds. But for those looking for a good catfight between deeply interested parties, looking to preserve both fame and fortune, look no further. (4/5 Stars)

The cultural and medical histories of Rabies engagingly explored in Rabid

From The Week of March 25, 2013

Viruses reek havoc upon the human mind. For not only do they have the power to starve it of resources, reducing it to an unintelligent sludge, they can attack it through fear, divesting it of all rationality and making of its host an exceedingly soft target. Despite the innate difficulties of battling a scourge one cannot see, however, many of these viruses have been brought to heel, their effectiveness muted by science. And yet, some remain to haunt us, some that refuse to have their claws so easily clipped. Mr. Wasik and Ms. Murphy marvellously documents the most infamous of these vehement holdouts in his excellent chronicle of Rabies.

For all but the last few centuries of its existence, humanity has been blind to the threat of viruses. Its conceptions were limited to what it could taste, touch and feel. So while the species had soem understanding of what was harmful to its health, it could not even imagine the ecologies that lingered beyond the vistas of human vision. And yet, something had to be there. For tribal man could see quite well the consequences of contracting deadly viruses, chiefly, the loss of their companions felled by nothing more than the sudden onset of ill health.

First with the ancient Greeks and then with the Arabs, this understanding began to evolve, but not before superstition had taken hold. Before we knew why, we knew how. And in the case of Rabies, this was particularly apparent. For one had to but wait a few days after being bitten by an enraged subset of mostly friendly animals to feel the deadly consequences: the nightmares, the fear of water, the sleepless nights, the creeping death.

Devils and demons were conjured up to explain such violent and terrifying punishments. And yet, few of these could imagine the truth, that Rabies was a most insidious virus, a chain of genetic information with the singleminded goal to propagate, to spread, to consume. Eschewing the most conventional routes of pathogen's (the blood stream), it attacked the nervous system, inching its way up to the brain which, defenseless against its ravages, succumbed to that most straightforward kind of madness, the bite, a most expeditious method of passing copies of itself on to the next, inviting target.

From the characteristics that made it legend to the scientists who reduced it to mere mortality, Rabid is an entertaining journey through the history of Rabies. Penned by a veterinarian (Murphy) and a journalist (Wasik), it competently mixes humor with fact to create a most edifying illumination of a genetic sequence that, though relatively rare, particularly within civilization, has nonetheless had a profound impact on our conception of horror. The authors contend that the myths that gave birth to vampires, werewolves and zombies were all heavily influenced by our fear of the bite which does not merely emanate from our distaste for pain, but from something far more elemental, an aversion born of memories written into our heritage.

Rabid has its stumbles. It makes almost no attempt to advance our understanding of Rabies' genetic properties. Moreover, it seems, at times, much more concerned with its cultural impact than its medical one. But these are minor gripes in what is otherwise a thoroughly engrossing read that winningly captures the full might of science, particularly its capacity to isolate a problem, reduce it to its component parts and to deduce, through trial and error, a method of rectifying it. Here, this is particularly exemplified in the time the history devotes to Louis Pasteur, the famous French scientist who, in addition to discovering germs, took a largely successful swing at Rabies as well, reducing it from a fearful unknown to a problem that could be vaccinated if not cured. This, along with an intriguing comparison of how the East and West conceive of Rabies' primary carriers, allows Rabid to easily overcome its drawbacks.

This is eminently consumable work. And yet, for all its lightness, Rabid possesses sufficient depth to leave the reader's knowledge of the world of viruses significantly advanced. Most satisfying... *4/5 Stars)

A Quantum Murder: Greg Mandel 02 by Peter F. Hamilton

From The Week of February 06, 2011

Though the twin forces of progress and innovation ensure that almost every aspect of our world is in a constant state of change, there remain, in our lives, a handful of immutable truths. The sun will always rise and fall; the seas will always ebb and flow; and the human mind will forever be ours. For as much as drugs can alter our consciousnesses and various meditative techniques can elevate our state of mind, our thoughts, our emotions, our essential selves, belong solely to us. No matter how hard they try, no one else can steal them from us. But what if, someday, this unshakable law could be violated by the advancement of technology? What if, in the future, our minds are open books that can be rewritten against our will? What would that world look like and how would we be safe? It is to this scary future that Mr. Hamilton turns in this, his second instalment in his Greg Mandel Series. His conclusions are chilling.

In a near-future Britain making a slow and painful recovery from political extremism and economic oblivion, life is hot, sweaty and difficult. Rampant Climate Change has banished the temperate British Isles to the history books, replacing this pleasant memory with a tropical reality beset by frequent monsoons which lash england with vengeful savagery. Perhaps the UK might have prepared for such disastrous weather by educating its citizens and implementing public works projects to help mitigate the damage. But instead of preparing for the inevitable, the country has spent the last ten critical years clenched in the authoritarian fist of the Peoples Socialist Party (PSP) whose ruinous collectivist policies have allowed England's infrastructure to decay to nearly pre-20th-century levels. Yes, the PSP has been defeated and political freedoms have since been restored, but the balance of power is tenuous and total chaos is beating at the door.

Through this socioeconomic maelstrom navigates Britain's best economic hope. Event Horizon is one of the world's most preeminent corporations. Focusing on bleeding edge technologies that hope to repair a battered Earth while eventually sending humanity to the stars, it is helmed by Julia Evans, the young but brilliant granddaughter of its now postmortal founder. Beautiful but deeply isolated, Julia must fend off rapacious attacks from both external and internal enemies while steering her grandfather's pride and joy through the tempestuous waters of the 21st century. It's no wonder then that when Britain's leading physicist, and Event-Horizon collaborator, is found grotesquely murdered in his own highly secure home, she's worried enough to summon Greg Mandel out of retirement to solve a most gruesome case, a case with chilling implications for the future of both humanity and the world it has ruined.

In almost every way, A Quantum Murder is an improvement on the novel that gave it life. Energized by a scalpel-sharp mystery, it is embittered the cynicism of Cyberpunk, sweetened with a splash of salacious sex and finished with a cast of interesting characters to create a heady concoction worthy of a techno-thriller. Like with Mindstar Rising, Greg Mandel is the novel's strongest presence. The military veteran turned hardman detective has just started to learn how to be happy in semi-retirement when his empathic abilities once again return him to the frontlines of a war dominated by unscrupulous humans and powerful corporate interests. It is a tangle a genius would struggle to unknot. Mandel's legendary intuition will have to suffice.

For all of the mystery's brilliance and Mandel's brutish charm, problems remain. Though the PSP is thankfully confined to a secondary role, it still occasionally makes its inane presence known. See my review of Mindstar Rising for a more in-depth critique of this somewhat bizarre conceit. More troubling is the extent to which Mr. Hamilton reduces Julia Evans to a lonely, obsessive whiner. Ambitious and clever in the trilogy's opening act, she is here reduced to a collection of unflattering, girlish cliches. It may well be that the author is using her to depict how a young woman might cope with possessing absolute power. If so, it is not believably done. Julia is maturer in the first novel than she is here and she had no less power then than she has now. It seems likely then that Mr. Hamilton was simply stumped as to how to deploy the character here. Whatever the cause, her third of the novel falls resoundingly flat.

Notwithstanding its flaws, A Quantum Murder is catalyzed by a top-shelf mystery from which Mr. Hamilton only occasionally diverts. Slimmer, meaner and sleeker... Excellent entertainment. (4/5 Stars)

Who Am I And If So How Many by Richard David Precht

From The Week of January 30, 2012

Ever since humans evolved into self-awareness, they have been searching for the universal truths that underpin both their environment and their souls. For we are sparks of life within an all-but-eternal experiment. And there is nothing grander than to try to best understand that experiment and our place within it before we die and pass on the torch of discovery to those who will succeed us. After all, the answers to such cosmic questions are too enormous to be found in a single lifetime. If they are to be solved, it will be by those who stood on the shoulders of the countless generations that preceded them. But just how will we arrive at those answers? What avenues of inquiry must we pursue? And while we're pursuing them, how should we live our lives? How can we be moral creatures? These are the musings that bring together Mr. Precht's treatise on philosophy and the human brain. It is an interesting if unoriginal journey.

From Mirror Neurons to Phineas Gage, from the morality of eating animals to the practice of euthanasia, Who Am I And If So How Many is Mr. Precht's journey through the dangerous and contentious jungles of philosophy and neurology. Without choosing sides in this increasingly quarrelsome battle between disciplines that attempt to explain the inexplicable, the author gives his readers a crash course in the history of philosophy while bringing them up to speed on the milestone discoveries of neurology. Along the way, he introduces us to the key figures of both fields, giants of thought and science who have done as much to shape our world as the generals and the politicians who so dominate our history books. In this, he creates a compelling portrait of the uneasy marriage between these two such disparate fields and the extent to which they will continue to be linked for decades and generations to come.

Who Am I And If So How Many is a swift and fascinating read. Mr. Precht is a charming guide through the thorny undergrowth that so defines the scientific ground over which philosophy and neurology are currently fighting. More over, he stays commendably neutral in the questions he raises, professorially extending to his readers the data they will need to draw their own conclusions about the mind and the brain. However, while Mr. Precht manages to educate and entertain in equal measure, I found myself frustrated by a total absence of original thought or research.

The author pays extensive homage to the historical giants upon whose shoulders he stands, but he does so without taking advantage of their discoveries and advancing the arguments further with his own contributions. Perhaps he does this elsewhere, in the classroom or in his other writings, but the piece certainly called out for Mr. Precht to supplement his account with his own conjectures. He is perfectly willing to do so on personal matters. But charming though his anecdotes are, his readers are surely eager for something from the author with more depth than personal reminiscences.

This is a delightful jaunt. Mr. Precht would be a fascinating man with whom to spend an evening, ruminating on the nature of man and his soul over a bottle of quality wine. But it seems to me that he conflated neutrality in the war between philosophy and neurology with neutrality on the pressing questions of the day, leaving others to venture their own opinions while reducing his own to witty bromides. A worthy but slightly annoying read. (3/5 Stars)

The Science of Evil by Simon Baron Cohen

From The Week of August 28, 2011

There can be little doubt that the need to know is one of man's most influential virtues. It has driven him to harness fire, fashion weapons, cultivate the land and found civilizations. But as much as this desire to understand has spurred humanity onto new heights and new achievements, its benefits are not enjoyed without costs. After all, the same need to know that ignites curiosity also drives man to find answers to more troublesome questions. Why do good people die young? Why are the righteous defeated by the ignorant? Why are we here? Unsurprisingly, answers to these philosophical queries have not been forthcoming, prompting man to sketch out his own explanations.

Evil. There is evil at work in the world, an evil that strengthens the arms of the ignorant, an evil that causes the good to die young. Evil accounts for all the inequities, all the unfairness. Evil is what infects the hearts and minds and turns them to wicked purposes.

This narrative is as old as human culture, but now, thanks to the rigors of modern science, evil, like so many other boogyman before it, is yielding. It is being brought under the inquisitive light of reason, forced to identify itself as man's inability to empathize with his fellows. After all, if man has no empathy for his neighbors, he cannot imagine the pain of harming them. And if he cannot imagine the pain of harming them, then there is nothing to stop him from harming them. And if there's nothing to stop him from harming them, then he will harm them, and for no reason anyone else can see. This, to his fellows, is evil, violence made inexplicable by an inability to imagine life without empathy. This is, at least, Mr. Baron-Cohen's premise and he argues it logically and effectively.

The Science of Evil is a swift and systematic attempt to classify and understand those among us who lack empathy. After laying out the numerous regions of the brain responsible for empathy, Mr. Baron-Cohen, a professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, transitions from a scientific explanation of empathy -- feeling discomfort at another's pain -- into an attempt to classify those devoid of empathy.

To this end, Mr. Baron-Cohen's research leads him to divide our subjects into two major groups, Zero Positives and Zero Negatives. The zero represents the amount of empathy the subject displays while the designation of Positive or Negative denotes the bent of the subject's personality. For instance, a Zero Positive might be a harmless Autistic, someone with a mind beset by the beauty and the safety of the world's mathematical constructs. Zero Negative, meanwhile, could be any of a number of antisocial personality types ranging from the psychopathic (P), to the narcissistic (N), to the borderline (B). Such personalities are capable of great harm, ruthlessly deploying weapons of violence and manipulation in order to mercilessly achieve their own ends.

Though brief, The Science of Evil is a fascinating and educational examination of Zero-Empathy personalities and the harm they are capable of. But unlike the prior generations of so-called experts who would have dismissed these humans as misfits, Mr. Baron-Cohen has shed some light on how Zero Empathy comes about and how it can be avoided. In doing so, he does not only enlighten his readers on the role empathy plays in gluing together human society, he helps us to understand that there is no such thing as evil; there is merely that which we do not understand. To call this evil is to allow ourselves to shelter in our prejudices, to dismiss the unknown as unworthy of our exploration. Such narrowmindedness only begets ignorance and that we must not accept. (3/5 Stars)

In Pursuit of Silence by George Prochnik

From The Week of July 31, 2011

From noisy neighbors to construction crews, from power washers to leafblowers, noise is an ever-present thunder in urban environments. If you're not living next to a highway, train-tracks, or a busy intersection, you're under a highly trafficked flight path to the local airport, forced to endure the repetitious din of hundreds of planes coming and going on a daily basis. For most of urban history, the growl of modern machines was tolerable, confined to roads and airways and the occasional lawnmowing on a Saturday afternoon. But since the advent of affordable power tools, escape into quiet is now impossible and no neighborhood is free of daily double-digit decibel ratings. Silence is golden. but more importantly, it's disappearing.

In Pursuit of Silence is an investigation into the rise of urban noise and the impact it has on humans and nature, physiologically and psychologically. After spending a million years evolving in a much quieter environment, human beings now find themselves bombarded by auditory stimulation they are ill-prepared for. This has lead some scientists to posit that noise pollution not only disrupts complex thinking, it may be a root cause of autism, literally re-wiring the infantile brain which is defenseless against the thunder that begins the moment the baby is born.

From birds who have their mating calls drowned out by passing cars to the horn and engine-filled clamor of New York City streets, Mr. Prochnik points out that the world is not only getting noisier, there's been only a token effort to keep the growing din in check. Noise pollution has historically been avoidable, but with the rapid rise of Earth's human population, finding silence is getting harder and harder. And yet, whenever society adjusts to a new phenomenon, subcultures are spawned to welcome and service those who find the new developments disturbing. From Buddhist temples to Japanese xen gardens, Mr. Prochnik profiles these sacred spaces, describing the physical and psychological responses to the total absence of noise.

But while spaces are being developed to shelter noise-avoiders, noise-revellers have staked out their own ground. Mr. Prochnik spends time, here, with Boom Car aficionados, men and women who gut their cars in an effort to pack so much stereo equipment inside their hollowed-out shells that the power of the sound produced literally distorts the air in and around the car, packing a punch capable of shattering windshields.

Mr. Prochnik has done justice to an under-discussed and overlooked externality of modern society. In highlighting the ways in which noise changes our world, he's brought attention to an issue that ought to be legislated and controlled. Millions of people spend a premium on their homes to live in nice, peaceful neighborhoods that have been graffitied by suburban noise. One should not have to go to a Japanese xen garden for silence. One should be able to walk out of ones own front door to locate peace and quiet. Now that science is beginning to detail the impact of noise, perhaps something will be done to curb the thunder and restore some semblance of peace to our world.

This is a thoughtful read. And though Mr. Prochnik makes his own feelings felt on this issue, he is much less inflammatory than I am on this subject and that is to his credit. (4/5 Stars)

The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer

From The Week of June 12, 2011

We all believe in something. To believe in nothing is to endure a painfully grim existence in which it is impossible to experience love, loyalty, fidelity, or trust. So we believe to survive, to organize ourselves into communities, to share our lives with our partners and to grasp the truths of the world around us. But somewhere along the way, belief went too far. It became a crutch,fantasies to fall back on when science systematically dispelled the world of gods and magic and replaced it with a world of inescapable knowns. We've cured diseases and sent astronauts to the moon; we've spread democracy to the world and harnessed the power of the sun; we've built 200-story skyscrapers and journeyed into the depths of oceans. And still three quarters of us believe in gods. Three quarters of us believe in an after life. Three quarters of us believe in things never seen, never felt, never proven. How is such a thing possible?

Mr. Shermer, a professional skeptic and a professor of the history of science, has assembled here the major conceits that burden believers the world over, gods and ghosts, aliens and conspiracies. For the most part, he relies on neurology to provide scientific explanations for these irrationalities, arguing that what he calls patternicity, or the brain's desire to find patterns in the world around it, is the origin for many of our myths. The brain is, in the end, an extraordinarily advanced tool for pattern recognition. After all, rapidly distinguishing harmless rocks and lovely trees from poisonous snakes and deadly panthers was necessary for our survival, causing evolution to favor those humans who were the quickest to read and react and to cast aside those too slow to avoid the deadly sting, the lethal bite. But while this capacity for patternicity served humans in good stead in the wild, it harms us in the modern world, for it prompts us to ascribe meaning and significance to every worldly mystery. And given that humans are designed to survive, not to think scientifically, these conclusions often rest on supernatural foundations, foundations that are re-enforced by mental constructs like confirmation bias and selective memory which aid humans in believing in what they cannot see.

While much of The Believing Brain is a scientific exploration of belief, Mr. Shermer acknowledges that science cannot explain every earthly phenomenon. Here, he falls back on philosophy, arguing that the onus is on the believer to prove that the supernatural does exist. The onus is not on the non-believer to prove it does not exist. One cannot prove a negative. For some, this is a weak attempt on Mr. Shermer's part to excuse away the inability of science to solve for every unexplained mystery. For others, this is only logical, an attempt on the part of a non-believer to compel believers to justify their beliefs, to subject them to scientific rigor. For Mr. Shermer himself, it appears to be enough to simply state his case and have his readers decide where to stand.

In the hands of a less sensitive author, this would be a polemic, a heartless attack on the illogical beliefs of billions. But Mr. Shermer is better than that. Unlike atheists of the contentious ilk of Richard Dawkins, he does not seem driven by the need to be right. He is impelled by a more noble goal, the search for truth, whatever its shape. Perhaps this sensitivity to others emanates from his own time as a devout believer. Whatever its source, it provides a gentle reasonableness to a contentious argument. Mr. Shermer is interested in dialogue, not conquest, making this a useful read for believers and non-believers alike.

We all depend on conceits, lies we tell ourselves to get us through the day. But though these lies may be useful, their utility does not change the fact that they are lies. If the search for truth, in life and in our world, is the noblest of goals, and I think most of us can agree on this, than that revealing light must be shined on all our beliefs, no matter how sacred. For it is only when we subject these conceits to scientific scrutiny that we can begin to sift out reality from fiction.

A fascinating piece. It relies too heavily on current theories drawn from scientific experimentation to build a completely convincing case for why we believe, but that does not appear to be Mr. Shermer's objective. His goal is to present the data and to extrapolate conclusions from that data. It is for the reader to decide what, ultimately, to believe. (4/5 Stars)

Kluge by Gary Marcus

Humans have, in less than ten-thousand years, transformed themselves from sparse bands of hunter-gatherers, who committed the whole of their short lives to just surviving in a hostile world, into a global civilization of seven billion souls that has conquered its rivals, its environment and many of its own weaknesses in an unstoppable surge towards a coherent understanding of ourselves and the universe. Everything we use we've invented, adapted. Nothing was given to us. But Mr. Marcus has no time for these inconvenient truths. To hear him tell our tale, we're nothing more than the accretion of evolution's mistakes.

The human mind, Mr. Marcus argues in Kluge is an assemblage of systems cobbled together to defend us from existential threats that no longer plague us. From our contextual memories, to our anxious emotions, to our self-centered worldviews, the reader is escorted on a tour of the mind's major processes. First, plausible explanations are provided for how memory, emotion and reasoning evolved then Mr. Marcus, a research psychologist, suggests how our minds could have functioned had they evolved differently. One example of this is his comparison of computer memory with human memory. The former is comprised of a series of logically numbered addresses, each of which contain discrete and knowable bits of information. The latter, meanwhile, is a hodgepodge of experiences which do not appear to be stored in any logical way.

Kluge makes a number of disturbing assumptions which undermine its argument. While it's true that the human mind has spent infinitely more time adapting to an ape's world of predatory threats than it has adapting to our world of human civilization, and while this may burden us with certain unnecessary weaknesses, this completely misses the point. The primary virtue of humanity is its ability to adapt to anything. Poor recall, emotional fragility, and defective reasoning are not failures of the mind, they are failures of instruction. Our civilization has not yet figured out the ideal way to teach its youngest, its clean slates, how to think, how to be emotionally stable, how to remember. We haven't come close to maximally wiring the human mind, training up its strengths and minimizing its weaknesses. What's more, it's far from clear that we are capable of handling all of the improvements Mr. Marcus so casually yearns for. Certainly, Jill Price would argue that Mr. Marcus' Postal Code memory is a quick way to drive oneself insane. More over, Mr. Marcus failed to convince me that his Postal Code memory would not deprive the human mind of the experience-based insight and intuition we rely upon to make progress in our world. Nowhere in these 210 pages does Mr. Marcus seriously consider the possible, negative consequences of his improvements. He just assumes evolution built the human mind up from the scraps it had to hand, not considering that it may have bestowed the human mind with all it could handle. He may be right, but his failure to consider any alternative explanations, much less to explore the consequences of his improvements, makes Kluge not much more than one man's gnashing over human imperfection. That's novel.

This is engaging and provocative work, but its over-eagerness to point out how the human brain could be improved leads it to breezy and shallow conclusions. (2/5 Stars)

Infinite Reality by Jim Blascovich And Jeremy Bailenson

From The Week of April 24, 2011

If we make it to the year 2100 without blowing ourselves to pieces, we'll look back on the first two decades of the 21st century as the formative period for one of the most life-altering revolutions in human interaction. Virtual reality... It's been the holy grail for scientists, theorists and authors of science fiction. And though we're not there yet, Infinite Reality describes where we've been and imagines where we're going with a clarity and an enthusiasm that makes the mainstreaming of this technology seem right around the corner.

Mr. Blascovich and Mr. Bailenson, researchers of virtual technology and the human mind for UCSB and Stanford respectively, divide their chronicle of all things virtual into three major sections: the history, the science underpinning it, and where it's headed in the near future. Discussion of the field's history is dominated by various experiments designed to test out how to play with the human brain's perception of the external world. The sscientific component preoccupies itself with ruminations on both the technical difficulties in rendering a three-dimensional, virtual world and how it will interface with the proscriptions of the brain. Finally, and most engagingly, the authors point to games like Second Life as examples of the baby steps towards virtual reality before imagining how true VR will change everything from how we meet friends and romantic partners to how we school our kids. It is a world that promises to leave very little of what we know, of what's familiar, untouched.

Infinite Reality is a provocative piece of predictive non-fiction which is strongest when it focuses on what's to come, picturing the ways in which it will transform our world. The historical and scientific components of the work both suffer in comparison. Virtual reality simply isn't an old enough field to have much of a history and the technical challenges of building absorbing worlds and convincing the brain they are real have yet to be ironed out. It's one thing to run controlled experiments in a lab; it's entirely another to scale this technology up for commercialized use. Nonetheless, the authors are convincing when they suggest that this revolution isn't far off which, for traditionalists, must be a scary thought indeed. (3/5 Stars)

The Watchman's Rattle by Rebecca D. Costa

From The Week of March 13, 2011

We live in exceptional times. Girded by the technological revolution, we're braced for a series of advancements that promise to transform our world. But times of great change are also times of great risk. And so, while there have never been more people focusing their erudite minds on the outstanding problems of science and technology, our societies have surely never been more preoccupied by mind-less distractions. Many seek to profit from these imperfections. We have doctors pedaling proscriptions for happiness, politicians touting back to basics ideologies, and companies promoting products that promise- to cure all our ills. And then there are the alarmist historians who get a kick out of researching fallen civilizations, deriving a list of blunders that may have contributed to their downfalls, and then using these conclusions to, first, scare the crap out of everyone by pointing out the ways in which our civilization is charting a similar decline and, then, offering a miraculous solution to extricate ourselves from this mess of ours. Ms. Costa may be more respectable than most who profit from this particularly repugnant beat-up, but that doesn't make her any more right.

The Watchman's Rattle mixes historical conjectures and largely unsubstantiated science to cook up half-baked theories about why humans struggle to cope with problems bigger than themselves. From a cultural obsession with economics to the rise of oppositional politics, Ms. Costa researches the origins of some of humanity's most important weaknesses. Some of her investigations bear interesting fruit, like her theory that the human mind has not evolved to cope with problems on a societal scale, choosing, as a result, to ignore them. But while such theories are interesting and engaging, Ms. Costa over-inflates the importance of these weaknesses by arguing that they threaten to bring down the whole of human civilization. Why? Because she believes these same weaknesses lead to the fall of prior civilizations, including the Roman and the Mayan. Even if she's right, and it's not at all clear that she is, this rather conveniently ignores the lightyears of knowledge and experience that exists between our civilization and all of the previous civilizations combined.

Ultimately, Ms. Costa has teased out those less enviable aspects of our characters, as people and as societies, blown them up to mammoth proportions and used the fear generated from these to sell the idea that the only thing standing between us and doom is human insight. She devotes the latter half of her book to an investigation of insight, what it is, how it works, and how we can train our brains to utilize it. Along the way, she sites fascinating examples of how leaps of insight have saved lives and changed how we view the world.

Perhaps Ms. Costa is right. Perhaps our civilization is sliding towards extinction and that, because of the magnitude of the problems facing us, our poorly adapted minds refuse to grapple with these existential questions. I know this much. I'd believe her a lot more if she didn't have an interest in magnifying problems in order to pedal her own solutions. No, we and the world we've made aren't perfect, but somehow we manage to live, love and be productive on a daily basis without detonating ourselves and our civilizations in. So maybe, just maybe, we actually know what we're doing. Maybe we're headed towards better things and not grimmer ones. It's always darkest before the dawn...

There are virtues here; some of Ms. Costa's ideas on insight are thought-provoking, but the everything's falling apart setup, followed by the I have your solutions right here for you soft-sell is both disappointing and frustrating. (2/5 Stars)

The Self Comes To Mind by Antonio Damasio

From The Week of January 30, 2011

Unless we unlock the secrets to immortality, we will all likely be dead before humanity learns the fundamental truths of the how, the why, and the where of human consciousness. Thanks to brilliant minds like that possessed by Dr. Damasio, we have pieces to the puzzle, but these pieces are only theories that have yet to be proven. How can they be proven? We barely have the tools to measure consciousness, let alone divine its origins. Yet there's a virtue to theorizing. It stimulates debate, insight and inquiry. It may be that The Self Comes To Mind will succeed at doing all three.

Dr. Damasio, a professor of Neuroscience at USC, has been, for 30 years, studying the human brain in an attempt to extract its secrets. Here, he lays out his model of consciousness, arguing that it is the product of three, major systems which hierarchically build on one another to create a self-aware, functioning human being who can think, feel, remember and adapt. The Protoself is a largely subconscious awareness of the body, a map which allows the brain to regulate heart, kidney, lungs, among other vital systems. Core Consciousness builds on the Protoself by plugging in a sense of being, that is the awareness of self as distinct from ones environment, coupled with an awareness of desires and needs that motivate us. Finally, Extended Consciousness takes this understanding of the physical self and envelopes it in an autobiographical self, a self that is capable of remembering and, therefore, learning from experience. This self allows us to create communities, tools, societies, all of the elements that comprise human culture.

This is a clean and coherent explanation of selfhood and Dr. Damasio backs it up with a wealth of evidence drawn from years of experimentation and investigation. He includes, here, some of these experiments, enlightening the reader on the long journey to his theory of the human mind which he seems to have grasped on a level that I never will. And so even if I disagreed with him, It'd be pointless for me to be critical of his methodology or his conclusions. However, I can critique the book which I found both fascinating and challenging. Dr. Damasio is at his best when he descends from the Olympian heights of his understanding of neurology to engage the reader in a discussion of the fundamentals of both his theory and what we know of the brain. Consequently, he's at his worst when he falls back on the technical details that no one without a degree in Neurology will understand. I'm left enlightened, but feeling like I'm watching Van Gogh put together a masterpiece that I can only follow on a level less profound than the one on which he understands and operates. (3/5 Stars)

Babylon Babies by Maurice G. Dantec

From The Week of October 03, 2010

There's a kind of genius in science fiction. No other genre depends more upon the ability of its authors to speculate on the future's social, technological and scientific trends. Consequently, it is a genre which often produces both works of wonderful imagination and works of staggering miscalculation. Though Babylon Babies has an intriguing premise, it has more in common with the latter camp than the former.

The year is 2013 and the world is about to change. Marie, a young woman, recently liberated from a genetic experiment conducted in Siberia, carries inside her the next evolution of humanity. Marie, who is a schizophrenic, needs to hook up with allies expecting her in Montreal, Canada, but she can't reach them on her own. Enter Hugo Toorop, a war-scarred antihero whose mercenary talents were honed in the Balkan wars. Toorop agrees to shepherd Marie to Montreal, but along the way he learns far more about her, and the future, than is safe to know. In a world of gangsters, government agencies and information dealers, Toorop is tasked to keep Marie alive until her destiny is complete. But is he willing to exist in a world where her promise is made reality?

Mr. Dantec is clearly a deep thinker. His speculation on the nature of human consciousness and intelligence and their relationships with schizophrenia is fascinating and disturbing. This, coupled with musings on the consequences of genetic manipulation and the nature of the next great leap forward in science, provide the story a solid, Sci-Fi platform. Meanwhile, Toorop and Marie are fully realized characters shouldering weighty burdens. Not only have they each suffered a dark past, they have a vital role to play in giving birth to the next evolution of humanity, Marie to give it life and Toorop to decide if it is worthy of coming into existence. Together, premise and protagonists ought to be enough to actualize this story, but dislocated subplots, inconsequential digressions, and too much damn weirdness clog up what ought to be a quality tale. Of the 520 odd pages, at least half is nonessential padding which, rather than add to the story, only succeeds in diminishing its impact. Promisingly incisive, but profoundly flawed. (2/5 Stars)

The Next Fifty Years by John Brockman

From The Week of October 03, 2010

Unless someone has secretly built a time machine by which they can experience the future, no living person can possibly have a clear picture of what life will be like in 50 years. Futurists have made valiant attempts, and I'm sure corporations have launched investigations into the question as a means of anticipating business trends, but in a world evolving this quickly, in a world populated by more experts in more fields than ever before, life in 2050 is simply too vast, shaped by too many variables, for any one person to grasp. Okay, so, screw it. Let's all go home, right? Not so fast. Maybe one mind isn't up to the challenge, but what about many minds, each with specialized expertise?

While the accuracy of their predictions won't be known for some time, the experts assembled here, from environmentalists, to health care professionals, to technologists, do not let uncertainty stop them from opining, in a series of fascinating and entertaining essays, on the future of human life. Will we have robot companions? What diseases will we have eliminated? Will we considerably extend our lifespans? What sort of physics will have been uncovered? All these queries and more are attacked by some of the sharpest scientific minds we have and their answers will at times surprise and terrify. The world they collectively describe may not be a world you wish to live in, but it is a world we will have adjusted to, a world of our own creation. If nothing else is certain, we can know this much. It will be a world that will look nothing like the world of now.

The highlights here are numerous, but my favorite essay is by Judith Rich Harris who composes her entry in the form of a letter from 2050 to us in the present. It's a surprisingly effective device which is filled in with a convincing narrative. Lowlights include essays on philosophy and psychology which, while interesting, come across as far too abstract to edify, but then this has always been the curse of such mental sciences. They must necessarily deal in a world of theories and models which cannot be put to mathematical tests. A good balance between the technical and the superficial and, as such, is a wonderful, edifying read. Bring on 2050! (3/5 Stars)

My Stroke Of Insight by Jill Taylor

From The Week of September 05, 2010

While there is a whiff of self-congratulatory praise about this deeply personal memoir, Dr. Taylor, an American neurologist, has assembled a most remarkable account of a terrifying event.

On the morning of December 10th, 1996, Dr. Taylor woke up, intending to go to work at Harvard. But no sooner was she out of bed and into her morning routine then she began to notice abnormal sensations in her head and extremities. Not until much later would she realize that blood was already pooling on the left hemisphere of her brain, the gory discharge of an aneurysm she was in the midst of suffering. Dr. Taylor, realizing that something was deeply wrong, attempted to summon help, but in that brief time, she had already lost the capacity to understand phone numbers, just one of the innumerable brain functions impaired and then destroyed as a consequence of her stroke. Despite her best efforts, it was hours until she could finally summon help, hours before she was in the hospital and receiving treatment from doctors she must have known, seen, talked to, been friends with. What follows from that fateful day is a gripping description of Dr. Taylor's eight-year recovery from a morning's worth of damage, a stroke which crippled her capacity to perform basic mathematics, to place her memories in chronological order, to logic out her surroundings. She was left with her right brain, her creative brain, now irrepressibly dominant. And the experiences she relates from this state of pure emotion is both terrifying and enviable.

Dr. Taylor has not simply reconstructed, here, her life's most pivotal event, she walks the reader through the anatomy of her stroke, from the sensations to the deficits, sparing nothing as she endeavors to make us understand even a fraction of not only her ordeal but her long and difficult rehabilitation. It's remarkable to read a neurologist's thoughts about her own stroke, to have what are otherwise fairly dry details personalized in the profoundist way. Yes, there's some self-aggrandizement here, but when one has achieved as much as Dr. Taylor has, when one has worked this hard to return from such crippling deficits, a little self-indulgence is understandable. To my knowledge, a unique tale. (3/5 Stars)

The Secret Language Of Dolphins by Patricia St. John

From The Week of July 11, 2010

Though it's clear that Ms. St. John is something of a flake, sprinkling this memoir with vague hints of a troubled past, her love of animals and her passion for helping autistic children elevate her above the self-centeredness of her narrative and grant her somewhat spectacular claims, in The Secret Language Of Dolphins, a legitimacy they would have otherwise lacked.

After searching high and low for her true self and finding it nowhere, Ms. St. John seems at something of an impasse in her life. Then, a transformative encounter with a dolphin changes the trajectory of her life and sets her on course to make a difference in the lives of the disabled. Though her efforts are often frustrated by the vagaries of interspecies communication, Ms. St. John believes that, through trial and error, she has made an emotional and an intellectual connection with several dolphins, all of whom, according to her account, seem capable of both understanding and interacting with her on a coherent, logical level. In fact, Ms. St. John documents several instances in which the dolphins seem far more attuned to the emotions of the humans around her than even Ms. St. John seems to be. This startling revelation is never once shied away from. On the contrary, Ms. St. John embraces the intuitiveness of dolphins, finding that their particular acuity translates quite well to humans with autism, many of whom come away from their experiences with the dolphins moved in ways their parents find startlingly atypical. Ms. St. John claims, in this way, that, accorded the proper respect, dolphins can be healers of human damage. After all, she is a non-autistic example of their powers.

Though an uncomfortable cloud of mysticism hovers over this story of personal redemption through dolphins, I could not help but feel heartened by the peace Ms. St. John takes from these remarkable creatures. Her loving descriptions of them and their habits do not fail to delight. And though there's room for skepticism concerning her unscientific claims of their capacity to heal, the dolphins' interaction with the autistic adolescence of Ms. St. John's acquaintance stir up hope that, someday, there will be a remedy for a condition which must be difficult to live with. Yes, Ms. St. John is too often the star of her own show, but that does not doom an inspiring effort from a woman who transcends the selfish desire to heal herself to unselfishly embrace those around her who need help. And, in doing so, she seems to have done more good than harm which is more than can be said of many other humans on this planet. I have a feeling that this is just one of many methods to alternative healing which will be championed in the years to come. (3/5 Stars)

The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge

From The Week of May 16, 2010

sparked by Dr. Firlic's notion of what the future will hold for the human brain, I set about looking for a more concrete treatise on Neuroplasticity, a revolutionary development in neurology, the controversial nature of which has delayed its mainstream acceptance until recently. Dr. Doidge, a Canadian psychiatrist and medical researcher, whose scorn for the neuroplastic doubters simmers within his text, considers Neuroplasticity not just an important tool in the human brain's toolbox, but perhaps the single most important driver in our success as a species.

Neuroplasticity is, in brief, the human brain's capacity to cope with damage. If a part of the brain is compromised beyond its ability to function, the tasks which have been historically handled by that part of the brain are relocated to another part of the brain healthy enough to execute those tasks. Though the precise mechanisms of how it accomplishes this are still being debated, countless experiments have proven that this is exactly what is happening. Simply put, Neuroplasticity explains how, for example, stroke victim's are able to re-learn how to walk and or talk. It explains how we recover at all from any injury to the brain. Neuroplasticity also goes some way to explaining why the blind, the deaf, etc., often report a heightening in their other senses. When a sense is lost, the region of the brain that processes those sensory signals ceases to have a function for there's no input to handle. The brain seems to recognize this and slowly, over time, re-wires that unused brain center as an auxiliary processor for another active sense. In other words, the blind may hear better because what was once their visual cortex has been re-wired to serve as a second auditory cortex, thereby increasing the total amount of the brain tasked to handle auditory signals.

Though Neuroplasticity is the main drive of Dr. Doidge's exciting book, Neuroplasticity itself can't be completely understood without an explanation of how the human brain learns. And this is the second major focus of The Brain That Changes Itself, a description of what Dr. Doidge calls neural mapping. From infancy, whenever we perform an action,a code is laid down in our brains; think computer program. If an organism had to re-learn how to perform an action every time it tried to do it, that organism would be dead within days. So survival is intrinsically linked to reacting quicker than the thing trying to prey upon you. The brain's way of learning how best to react is to remember how an action was performed, store that action as code, and use that code as a shortcut whenever that action is performed in the future. Try to walk for the first time and you have no idea what to do. Too many muscles have to move, too many commands have to be sent and organized, that coordination is impossible. But if our brains hold shortcuts for actions like taking a step, or groups of actions like running, then, over time, our performance improves because every time we perform the action, we strengthen the neural map, the shortcut, which has reduced a complex action to a reflex.

Dr. Doidge has penned a complex story, but one which is as fascinating as it is dense. The descriptions of the experiments proving Neuroplasticity are lively and engrossing, as are the cases which neurosurgeons are attempting to figure out ways to aid Neuroplasticity in the severely disabled. This is well-rounded and gripping discussion of Neuroscience, a must read for anyone even remotely curious about how we learn. (4/5 Stars)

Another Day In The Frontal Lobe by Katrina Firlik

From The Week of May 16, 2010

Dr. Firlik, an American neurosurgeon, has compiled, here, an interesting blend of genres. Part memoir, part neurosurgery 101, and part odyssey through the human brain, Another Day In The Frontal Lobe could easily be three separate novels, and yet her composite functions surprisingly well.

Though television shows like Gray's Anatomy have gone some way to illuminating the lives of neurosurgeon's, it's difficult to trust a scripted drama when it is not compelled to be truthful. Dr. Firlik's account of the long years of schooling and how socially isolating they can be is poignant. The hospital becomes such a center of focus that it's difficult to build a life outside ones career and ones colleagues. Even so, Dr. Firlik seems well-aware of what she has gained in the bargain, highly specialized knowledge that allows her to perform extraordinary feats of medicine which, even half a century ago, would have been unthinkable. And this is the second stage of her novel, describing in detail the trials and tribulations of the operating room: its composition, its tools, and its personnel. She mixes in enough of her casework to create a tasteful recipe of human interest and solid science which keeps the reader engaged long enough to transition into the part of her work that shines brightest.

I imagine the human brain will be an object of fascination for many decades to come as it stubbornly refuses to relinquish its many secrets. And such, there is plenty of room for speculation concerning its workings and its most vital systems. Dr. Firlik discusses in this final, successful section the current events of neurology, from the exciting concept of neuroplasticity to Dr. Firlik's fascination with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation which has been put forward as a possible solution to any number of neurological problems. Her thrilling conclusion, a rumination on the future of Neuroscience and the improvements in the human brain that we may be able to induce as soon as 20 years from now, left me more than a little giddy, for what this will mean for humanity, and jealous, of Dr. Firlik. For she has clearly chosen a life path which has placed her at the heart of a profession rapidly evolving, a profession which will have a great deal of influence upon the shape of the 21st century.

A bit too scattered at times, but it gains momentum as it proceeds to an excellent conclusion. (3/5 Stars)

The Woman Who Can't Forget by Jill Price

From The Week of May 09, 2010

Ninety-nine percent of us have, from time to time, lamented our faulty memories. We misremember facts, misplace our possessions, and forget entire events, all things that hurt us and our relationships with others. Memory can even so thoroughly convince us of the truth of a thing that we must be presented with irrefutable proof before we will admit we were wrong. But what if we were capable of improving memory? What if we could ensure that nothing we experienced was ever forgotten? Wouldn't we leap at that opportunity, to experience, with perfect clarity, life's highlights? We might, but Ms. Price would not recommend it.

Jill Price has a remarkable oddity in her brain, a malformation which has supercharged her capacity to save and access Autobiographical Memory, a type of human memory which helps to put life's experiences in something like a chronological and sortable order. If you were asked to remember important events which happened to you in 2001, or to recall the restaurant at which you celebrated your birthday in 1998, or to remember where it was that you last wore your black jeans, you would be using Autobiographical Memory to find an answer. Customarily, memories, or access to them, fade with time, a fact most of us find annoying, but Ms. Price's case provokes another theory. Perhaps memories fade with time because they must in order for us to remain sane.

Ms. Price can remember every experience that has happened to her since her childhood. She can remember the discord of every fight, the sting of every disappointment, the hurt of every social wound. She can remember them in such vivid detail that she re-experiences the emotions attached to those memories each time she recalls them. Ms. Price's condition is extraordinarily rare and perhaps this is why we idealize perfect recall, because we dream only of its advantages, settling arguments, performing better on tests, killing at dinner parties, and not its aforementioned disadvantages which would surely cripple most of us who endured such unfiltered life.

Perhaps memories fade with time because memories are inextricably linked with emotion. It matters not if emotion is imbedded in the memories themselves, or the process of recalling the memories triggers the emotion. Everything from elation to agony is there, an unhealed wound. And if, on a daily basis, we were forced to endure our life's highs and lows, in perfect clarity mind, would we not go a little bit insane? Thought of this way, the evanescence of memory may be a self-defense mechanism, protection against re-experiencing trauma that would handicap us. Could Ms. Price be disabled, not blessed? It's an odd way of looking at such a remarkable gift, but Ms. Price's enthralling description of her battles with her own memory, as she tries to carve out a life for herself that is something like emotionally stable, convinces that it does hamper more than it thrills, that it hurts more than it helps, and that we shouldn't be so quick to ask for what we can't possibly understand.

This Is quality work with a compelling premise and a well-argued conclusion. (4/5 Stars)