The science of autism is a story of real people (Books - In a Different Key by John Donvan & Caren Zucker)

Ruth had stopped doubting herself the morning she saw Joe do a jigsaw puzzle upside down.  For some time, she had been nagged by a feeling that he was not like her other children in some crucial way.  Six months earlier, Joe had stopped speaking, even though, up to that point, he had seemed to be developing normally...

And then there were these puzzles.  He was working on one just then, a map of the United States whose parts were sprawled, like him, all over the kitchen floor and through the doorway into the living room.  He was getting it done: New Hampshire met Maine, and New Mexico snapped in next to Arizona.  But he was getting it done fast, almost too fast, Ruth felt, for a two-year-old.  On a hunch, she knelt down to Joe's level and pulled the map apart, scattering the pieces. She also, deliberately, turned each piece upside down, so that only the gray-brown backing was showing.  Then she watched what Joe did with them

He seemed not even to notice.  Pausing only for a moment, Joe peered into the pile of pieces, then reached for two of them.  They were a match.  He immediately snapped them together, backside-up, between his knees on the floor.  It was his new starting point.  From there he kept going, building, in lifeless monochrome, out of fifty pieces, a picture of nothing. 

What John Donvan's and Caren Zucker's In a Different Key: The Story of Autism (Crown Publishers, 2016) is especially good at, is conveying a picture of autism historically, scientifically, and socially, by telling the stories of the people involved.  One in 68 children have a diagnosis, so it's hard to live in today's America without hearing about autism.  Understood as a lifelong neurodevelopmental disorder, it is diagnosed based on impairments in communication, especially social relatedness, and a restricted repertoire of activity and interests. The dysfunctions it results in manifest themselves in different persons as impaired eye contact, failure to develop peer relationships, an absence of or delay in developing communicative speech, an inability to conceive of other people's mental states or emotions, lack of spontaneous imaginative play, inflexible adherence to routines which are disruptive to daily functioning, and persistent preoccupation with part of objects rather than their conventional uses, symptoms which must be present prior to three years-of-age to be diagnostically relevant and which often are noticed suddenly, after a period of apparently typical development.

3-D tour through brain space for Brain Awareness Week

I talked to curious students about the Brain at BiobBase yesterday and took a really amazing tour through a 3-D brain in a planetarium...no, really.  Check out my Brain Awareness Week blog by clicking here and scrolling down.

Improvisation in the Sciences - improvisations on a panel discussion for Brain Awareness Week 2015)

This originally appeared here but I now post it below.

When I heard that the opening event of Brain Awareness Week this year was on the theme of improvisation and involved arts and science, I knew that I wanted to be the one to report on it.  I decided to do this blog as an improvisation; that is what follows.

Improvisation 1

I am riding the subway on my way to Improvisation in the Sciences at Columbia. It’s the first event of Brain Awareness Week and involves musicians and scientists. Given the theme, and since I am both an artist and neuroscientist, I decided to improvise this blog, a little experiment. I’m feeling a bit nervous, like I’m performing myself. Before I left my apartment, I sat down to play a sonata on the piano, I thought it would get me in the mood but I was interrupted by a phone call letting me know that the subways were delayed. I ran out of the house. Having stopped the sonata in the middle, the strains are repeating unresolved in my mind’s ear. I am anticipating music on the program, but it probably won’t be this kind of music.

Ted at TED-Ed - on the brain, naturally.

I recently co-created a neuroscience lesson for TED-Ed.  It just went live.  Check us out!

Distinguishing between data & interpretation in popular science can help the public learn to think about the evidence (Books - The Organized Mind by Daniel J. Levitin)

Nowadays, the outcome of every scientific study is expected to be instantly useable by the public.  News media demands ready-made dietary and medical advice, politicians and business people demand data to shore up the opinions they already hold, many funders want only outcomes that will translate to curing disease now.  As nice as it would be to cure on demand, that would be as likely as making a hits of every Broadway tryout.  Scientific "hits" are the product of fortuitous accident and incremental accumulation of knowledge, which usually includes more rejected possibilities than confirmed ones.

Pop-neuroscience satisfies this expectation with books falling somewhere between science and self-help.  Daniel J. Levitin's The Organized Mind (Dutton, 2014) creatively hews to this formula. I thank Dutton, a Penguin imprint, for my copy.  Of course the popularity of science, is not all bad.  It is wonderful to have the ear of non-scientists and encouraging that interest requires that the public enter the discussion somewhere.  But books that realistically convey how experimental outcomes find their way into the fund of general knowledge are in short supply.  The wider the dissemination of half-baked knowledge, the more discerning the eager-to-consume non-scientist must become.  In this age in which everything from raw experimental data and top notch interpretation to crackpot appropriation of small study outcomes and outright lies are easily available on line, and look superficially the same, the scientist has a responsibility to help the public develop a critical eye.

Keeper of the cabinet of human curiosities (Books - Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks)

Now nearly 80, neurologist, writer, and keeper of the cabinet of human curiosities - Oliver Sacks - has written his 12th book.  This one is on activations of the perceptual systems that are produced by internal rather than external stimulation or Hallucinations (Knopf, 2012).  They run the gamut.  You can smell them, hear them, see them, and feel them.  They can have their origin in disease processes, chemicals, injury to the nervous system, or sensory deprivation.  They can take the form of geometric patterns, religious conviction, snatches of music, or little people (Lilliputian hallucinations).  I too have seen a patient with this last form of hallucination.  Her's were holding their heads in their hands (detached from their necks), but it didn't seem to cramp their style any.  I think that the term is probably my favorite in neurology.

I have always admired Sacks's writing about his patients because I feel that I am reading about people rather than cases.  I am a great admirer of Sacks's early books like An Anthropologist on Mars and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, both are less continuous narratives than Hallucinations or Sacks's recent Musicophilia and The Mind's Eye.  Rather than thematic in nature, these earlier books are simply collections of essays on human beings whose strange neurologic cases make them fascinating, but who otherwise have little or no relation to each other.  I found some of the material included in Hallucinations had to stretch to be subsumed under the book's theme.  While I found most of the material interesting, an episodically constructed book might have been a more natural and satisfying form.

On more than one occasion in this book (and his last, The Mind's Eye) Sacks becomes his own subject. In this case, he writes frankly of his experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs, a piece that appeared in The New Yorker last year, and of a serious hiking accident during which Sacks says that a voice commanded him to keep going. 

I am always impressed by the historical sources Sacks cites.  They immediately make me want to visit the library.  Jackson's original papers on epilepsy and aphasias, are cited in Hallucinations.  Perhaps this is not as enticing to the average lay-reader, but for a neuroscientist, these are the golden oldies. Jacksonian seizures were named for John Hughlings Jackson.

Hallucinations makes colorfully clear that the mechanisms in the brain that eventuate patients' perceptions in the absence of external stimulation can be diverse.  The light patterns that are experienced in the aura prior to migraine might be thought of as electrical disturbances like a wave passing across the visual parts of the brain.  Whereas the hallucinations reported around near death experiences such as a floating above one's own body may occur due to stimulation of the right angular gyrus, one of several brain regions implicated in a circuit that according to Sacks mediates body image and vestibular sensations.  The vision of a dark tunnel with light at the end may be the result of decreased circulation to the retina, which narrows the visual fields.

The most remarkable of the cases Sacks writes of in Hallucinations was that of an 86-year-old English man who already had glaucoma and macular generation, but when a stroke compromises his right occipital lobe he loses vision completely in his left visual field.  What is most interesting is that he is not aware of his loss

...his brain appears to fill in the missing parts.  Interestingly, though, his visual hallucination/filling in always seem to be context-sensitive or consistent.  In other words, if he is walking in a rural setting, he can be aware of bushes and trees or distant building in his left visual field, which when he turns to engage his right side, he discovers are not really there.  The hallucination do, however, seem to be filled in seamlessly with his ordinary vision.  If he is at his kitchen bench, he "sees" the entire bench, even to the extent of perceiving a certain bowl or plate within the left side of his vision - but which on turning disappear, because they were never really there.  Yet he definitely sees a whole bench, with no clear separation between parts composed of hallucination and true perception.

The human brain is a remarkable country and it is always enjoyable to travel there with Oliver Sacks as your guide.

The allure of the counterintuitive - is it good or bad for science?

There is a good critique on how the popular press hypes social science research in The American Scholar: The Allure of the Counterintuitive by Jessica Love.  Well worth a look.  I very much agree with her point that the press gives very little space to studies which are

incremental, for work that shores up and teases apart, for work that complicates, for work on the boundary conditions...

But Love seems to feel that the appeal of the counterintuitive is damaging to science because people will be so entrained to hype that they will not support studying brain processes that appear to be obvious.  However,  I would argue that interest in counterintuitive conclusions is an opportunity to argue for why we study the brain, its behaviors, and its less visible processes (like the electrical and chemical signalling whose outcome are our cognitive functions) in the first place.  Even though our minds are are own, we do not have conscious access to all its processes.  This is an opportunity to explain just that, and in the case of neuroscience conclusions are even less obvious.   Although our minds 'think' our neurons do not.  We do not know before studying brain processes which hypotheses will confirm our common sense notions and which will not. So, while I get a little tired of "hey wow" science and do not like inaccurate popular press interpretations of studies, the allure of the counterintuitive offers an opportunity to better explain critical thinking and experimental processes if it is used well.

Hat tip: The Dish

Aesthetics transforms vision and the mind, which transforms aesthetics... (Books - The Age of Insight By Eric Kandel)

There has been a bevy of books examining wider aspects of culture as they intersect with brain science written by scientists in the past year:  Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist by Christof Koch, The Age of Insight by Eric R. Kandel, Who's In Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain by Michael S. Gazzaniga, and Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.  They are written by senior neuroscientists and written for the general public I wrote about the Gazzaniga here, I will write on Koch in the coming weeks, and I have yet to finish the Kahneman, but I just completed Eric Kandel's The Age of Insight (Random House, 2012). 

The eminent Nobel-Prize winning neuroscientist satisfyingly brings together modernist art, the Viennese Secession to be precise, the study of the unconscious mind emerging during the same period, and what the development of neurobiology and cognitive psychology can contribute to our understanding of human-ness.  His self proclaimed aim is to bring together science and art, his mechanism is to address what we know about how the brain accomplishes visual perception, creativity, and feeling.  The result is a fluidly written account, fueled by a lifetime in neuroscience and a passion for painting, particularly portraiture.    

Michael Gazzaniga, Father of Neuroscience, Speaks on Brain Science and Free Will

I covered neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga's talk on the brain and free will at Cooper Union for Capital New York, hence the resounding silence here. Check out my piece at the link below.

“Probably 99.999 percent of what goes on in the brain is automatic and unconscious. I have no idea what my next sentence will be, and sometimes I sound like it,” Gazzaniga began in his unassuming way. “We think the other stuff, the ‘me,’ the ‘self,’—we think that’s really important. We think there is somebody in charge—somebody pulling the levers.”

In promoting the book Who’s In Charge, Gazzaniga has learned that this is a subject on which everyone has an opinion.

Can we have free will, if the brain's actions are automatic? A scholar makes the case | Capital New York

Probing the experience of seeing (Books - The Mind's Eye by Oliver Sacks)

I have always enjoyed Oliver Sacks's vivid, humane portraits. He is a doctor/author who has always managed to write about people instead of cases and in none of his books is that better exemplified than in The Mind's Eye, in which Sacks's experience of his own eye tumor is the subject of one of the pieces.

Each chapter in this latest collection focuses on a person whose visual system is somehow compromised or enhanced. I say visual system rather than eye because most of what we experience as 'seeing' is accomplished by the central nervous system. The retina, which is the curved screen upon which our lens focuses the light entering our eye, and that forms the back wall of our eye, is actually part of the CNS. It's like a little piece of brain that hangs by a stalk (the optic nerve). The characters of The Mind's Eye include a pianist who loses the ability to read music, a mystery writer who looses the ability to read words (but not to write them), and several people who are selectively blind for faces but not necessarily for other classes of objects. There is a chapter devoted to stereoscopy, or how the brain combines the images from our two two-dimensional retinas to create an illusion of three-dimensional space. In this case, a woman with life-long strabismus, who could not see in three dimensions because she viewed the world through one eye at a time, gains the ability to see in 3-D. I found this section particularly charming, not so much for the case study but because of the fact that Dr. Sacks, having developed an interest in stereoscopes in his childhood, built himself several:

So when, at the age of ten, I developed a passion for photography, I wanted, of course, to make my own pairs of stereo photos. This was easy to do, by moving the camera horizontally about two-and-a-half inches between exposures, mimicking the distance between the two eyes. (I did not yet have a double-lens stereo camera, which would take simultaneous stereo pairs).

After reading how Wheatstone explored stereoscopic effects by exaggerating or reversing the disparity between the two images, I began experimenting with this, too. I started taking pictures with greater and greater separations between them, and then I made a hyperstereoscope, using a cardboard tube about a yard long with four little mirrors. With this, I could turn myself, in effect, into a creature with eyes a yard apart. I could look through the hyperstereoscope at a very distant object, like the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral, which normally appeared as a flat semicircle on the horizon, and see it in its full rotundity, projecting towards me.

We were able to have fun before television and the internet! Sacks's memoir, Uncle Tungsten, is full of such examples of himself or members of his family pursuing their curiosity about the world's flora, fauna, and physical phenomena, through active research. I delight in the fact that Sacks was a member of the New York Stereoscopic Society prior to his own eye troubles (not to mention the American Fern Society and the New York Mineralogical Club, both mentioned in his bio). The fact that Sacks pursues his curiosities so avidly, whether about people or phenomena, is reflected in the way he listens to and relates the stories of his patients.

Through his case histories, Sacks also writes on how the brain evolved the skill of reading if it wasn't "designed to" do so, how our eyes take in surfaces and the boundaries between them but the brain constructs"objects" from them, the von Helmholz and Young theories of color vision, and how the brain is able to fill in holes in the visual field - both those naturally occurring in our blind spot (the place where the optic nerve exits from the retina) - and those created by injury or illness. Sacks's description of his own loss of vision is particularly evocative. He communicates through it not only how the brain constructs what we perceive from the cues the eyes collect, but also how the limits of the eye produce a different experience for the brain. When Sacks loses the peripheral visual field of one of his eyes to a tumor, he not only cannot see that portion of space, he seems to lose his awareness that it exists at all.

Kate and I finished our walk and headed back to my office. I walked ahead and got inot the elevator - but Kate had vanished. I presumed she was talking to the doorman or checking the mail, and waited for her to catch up. Then a voice to my right - her voice - said, " What are we waiting for?" I was dumbfounded - not just that I had failed to see her to my right, but that I had even failed to imagine her being there, because "there" did not exist for me.

The last chapter, which lends its title to the book, was most interesting to me. Mental imagery is a particular interest of mine. Sacks writes of neural plasticity (the reassignment of new functions to neural real estate). For example the reallocation of parts of the visual cortex to either hearing or touch for those who are blind. Or the science-fiction like work of neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita , who takes advantage of such flexibility by connecting the output of a video camera, point-by-point to a grid on one of the most sensitive part of the human body - the tongue. Such a device enables blind people to walk across a room avoiding obstacles, to catch a ball rolled toward them, and make other such perceptual judgments not previously afforded them. Are these people "seeing," Sacks asks? Whether exploring case studies, the evolution of neuroscience, or more recent avances, Sacks's writing is probing, accessible, and humane in The Mind's Eye.

Complex worlds, simple means (Books - Complex Worlds from Simpler Nervous Systems & To the End of the Land by David Grossman)

Given that classes have started up and the books I'm reading are all on the large side, I haven't finished anything this week, but I noted a common theme in the reading that is consuming my interest.

Frederick Prete, Ph.D. has edited Complex Worlds from Simpler Nervous Systems (MIT Press, 2004), a collection of the writings of scientists who study how creatures with much smaller nervous systems than our own perform what we think of as complex cognitive functions. The Portia spider, for example, whose brain is literally the size of a pin, can filter out extraneous sensory information from among the plentiful array of moving and still things that are the surrounding forest, to focus in on a single speck that is its prey. Over the course of 20 minutes, although its prey is quite close, Portia can plot a detour so that it will not be caught stalking it. The nervous systems of insects were, until the 1970s, thought of as no more than basic reflex machines. Yet this process could be seen as involving planning, decision making, and delayed gratification - processes we would more commonly associate with vertebrates. Another chapter explores how honeybees can apply abstract properties to novel circumstances. Neuroscientist Michael Land writes:

My favorite example of sensory simplification is the technique that fiddler crabs use to distinguish predators (requiring escape) from conspecifics (which can be fought, mated, or ignored). Instead of identifying predators (usually birds) from their form (beak, legs, etc.), all the fiddler crab has to ask is "Does this moving object intersect the horizon?" Since a line joining the crab's eye to the horizon is at crab height, anything above this is bigger than the crab, and so is probably bad news. Anything below the line is, at least, not life threatening. Simple though this is, it does require the crab to keep its elongated eye accurately aligned with the horizon, and for this it uses both visual and statocyst [invertebrate balance organs] reflexes.

Nature has evolved many ways for creatures to accomplish complex behaviors that are not dependent on the combinatory possibilities afforded our species with its billions of neurons. While that volume of cells allows us infinitely more options for interrupting and modify processes, I doubt that spiders become neurotic. This book offers a fascinating collection of such examples written at a high level of detail (so you have to really want to dive in) but at a moderate level of technicality (i.e., its not as complex as a scientific journal article). The prose is accessible, at times even entertaining.

David Grossman's To The End Of The Land has me utterly absorbed. It is a book of great human depth written with an astonishingly simple structure, a small number of central characters, and a single action propels the whole complex creation. There's that parallel I was speaking of. Three teenage patients meet while ill in the hospital during the 1967 war in Israel - one woman: Ora, and two men Ilan (good looking and ordinary), and Avram (a person of magnetic and dazzling originality). Ilan and Ora marry, having two sons - Adam and Ofer. This creates two overlapping triangles, both with Ora at their apex and two men at their base (two her lovers, and two her sons).

The present time frame of the narrative is another war for which Ora's son Ofer volunteers to extend his compulsory military service rather that go on a hiking trip with Ora in the Galilee. Ora, fearing his death, comandeers Avram, from whom she has been estranged, to go on the hike with her as a way to escape the news reports and the long wait to find out if Ofer survives. The single action of the novel, embodied in the hike, is a desperate act of memory during which Ora uses interior as well as exterior narrative to prolong Ofer's life. Grossman's narrative is intimate in that come to know the very souls of Ora and Avram, and epic in its sweep across the decades that have encompassed Ora's and Avram's lives and the geographical space that is Israel. It is work of deep human feeling; long, but not longer than the action of the story seems to require, and confidently paced so that I have no desire to leave, only to know more.

Case study of a prodigious memory (Books - The Mind of a Mnemonist by A. R. Luria)

Russian neuropsychologist A. R. Luria's books might be considered the prototype for Oliver Sacks's. Sacks is a neurologist rather than a neuropsychologist, but both saw patients with atypical brains (whether the person was born that way or injured) and both sought to understand the consequences of those differences not only upon their cognitive processes - reasoning, perception, memory - but upon the whole make up of the human being. Luria is the author of several classic books in the field, the most notable of which are two slim case studies of men with unusual minds - The Man with a Shattered World and The Mind of a Mnemonist. The former is a portrait of a man with a gun shot wound to the brain sustained in 1943 and who can, as a result, only experience the world in fragments (click the title to link to my write-up of it). The latter, concerns S., a man whose synesthesia provides such stark and indelible experiences of objects and events that he appeared to remember a limitless amount of information.

Synesthesia is a condition experienced by approximately 1 in 200 people, in which one sensory experience (say, seeing the letters of the alphabet) consistently evokes another sensory experience whose source is not in the external environment, but in the person's mind. For example, a person may see each letter of the alphabet in a distinct color, even though the ink on the page is black, or each musical note heard on the scale might be accompanied by a particular taste. Generally these relationships are consistent, that is, 'a' will always appear light blue and 'b' brick red. For a long time, scientists doubted the veracity of these reports, thinking that the synesthetes simply had strong imaginations and only felt as though they saw blue, or perhaps they were people with a psychological makeup such that they wanted attention for having an unusual skill, but it has since been shown that this experience has all the verisimilitude of a perception of an external stimulus, despite the fact that the synesthete's brain is producing the accompanying experience. V. S. Ramachandran explains how this was tested in his book A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness. 

The Mnemonist's memory was prodigious.

Experiments indicated that he had no difficulty reproducing any lengthy series of words whatever, even though these had originally been presented to him a week, a month, a year, or even many years earlier. In fact, some of these experiments designed to test his retention were performed (without his being given any warning) fifteen or sixteen years after the session in which he had originally recalled the words.

Not only that, he could produced them backwards.

I recognize a words not only by the images it evokes but by a while complex of feelings that image arouses.

However, what S. failed to encode was the associations among the elements of his memory traces  - the glue that gives what we remember its meaning. So the very techniques that gave S. his prodigious memory compromised his ability to capture the gist of of what he was remembering. In fact, S. often struck those he met as disorganized and not terribly bright, as impressive as were his memory talents. Indeed, the multiple sensations called up by his synesthesia were an impediment to his everyday functioning.

When I ride in a trolley I can feel the clanging it makes in my teeth. So one time I went to buy some ice cream, thinking I'd sit there and eat it and not have this clanging. I walked over to the vendor and asked her what kind of ice cream she had. "Fruit ice cream," she said. But she answered in such a tone that a whole pile of coals, of black cinders, came bursting out of her mouth, and I couldn't bring myself to buy any ice cream after she'd answered that way...

People in my field, particularly in its inception, often learned about normal brain function from atypical brains. Although the writing is a bit repetitive, Luria's portrait is a brief, vivid, and humane introduction to neuropsychological case studies for anyone interested in an introduction.

Watching out for common sense (Books - The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, ed. Richard Dawkins- "One Self" by Nicholas Humphrey)

I continue to dip into Richard Dawkins's impressive and diverse collection of science writing, The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, this time stopping to admire Nicholas Humphrey's essay on the self-organization of 'self.' How does the unity of our many selves create consciousness of a single self without direction, this essay asks? Humphrey meditates on the movements of his baby son and an analogy he makes of the tuning up of the separate instrumental players of an orchestra and their ability to play as one without a conductor. Dawkins admires Humphrey's ability to spot the important questions, particularly when, as he says, "they are camouflaged against a background of common sense," and that highlights one of the roles that great thinkers play. Common sense can be useful to every-day thinking, but not necessarily to the role of shifting paradigms in the science of consciousness. Scientific process must not be lured by the quick conveniences that our minds favor. Nothing may be taken for granted. And yet, Humphrey has the talent to couch his uncommon thinking in accessible prose so that the uncommon thought seems for the reader almost familiar.

Here are some of my other posts on The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing: 1, 2, 3.

Serious cardplaying and how we make up our damn minds! (Books - How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer & The Cardturner by Louis Sachar)

The two books I just finished share a theme. Both address the mechanisms and consequences of decision making and both use card playing as an example, but one is fiction and the other non-fiction.

Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide begins with the premise that the age-old preference for rationality over emotionality does not always lead to better decision-making. He introduces the roots of this notion with a 101 of Western thought - Plato, Ovid, Descartes, Thomas Jefferson, Immanuel Kant, and finally Sigmund Freud covered in about three pages, all leading up to:

The simple idea connecting Plato's philosophy to cognitive psychology is the privileging of reason over emotion. It's easy to understand why this vision has endured for so long. It raises Homo sapiens above every other animal: the human mind is a rational computer, a peerless processor of information. Yet it also helps explain away our flaws: because each of us is still part animal, the faculty of reason is forced to compete with primitive emotions... This theory of human nature comes with a corollary: if our feelings keep us from making rational decisions, then surely we'd be better off without any feelings at all. Plato, for example, couldn't help but imagine a utopia in which reason determined everything. Such a mythical society - a republic of pure reason - has been dreamed of by philosophers ever since.

But this classical theory is founded upon a crucial mistake. For too long, people have disparaged the emotional brain, blaming our feelings for all of our mistakes. The truth is far more interesting... If it weren't for our emotions, reason wouldn't exist at all.

Actually, we're all animal. Lehrer's book goes on to illustrate the value of the "emotional brain" over its alter-ego the "rational brain" with effective anecdotes, which first build a case for its superiority and then concede that effective decision making depends, in fact, upon the type and context of the decision and that really both are useful. Lehrer's writing strength is an apparent ease and fluidity that gives his work accessibility. Each chapter begins with an illustrative story that is unthreateningly situated in a non-scientific genre: aviation, football, poker, directing television, battlefield maneuvers, politics. This device almost becomes gimmicky but it is effective. Lehrer skirts defining what rational thought or emotion are - he assumes that if we all use the terms that we know what we mean. Often, the data he cites situates a brain process in a particular region of the brain and supports this with fMRI data. "Twinges of feeling" originate in the amygdala, the orbitofrontal cortex coordinates this visceral data into the stream of more rational measurements and out pops a decision - or something like that. He offers a brief summary of the evolutionary development of the human brain which, unlike our phylogenetic predecessors, does not merely rely on "instinct" but allows us to organize cognition, give symbolic expression to abstract thoughts and emotions, accumulate knowledge to invent novel solutions, and to think about our feelings and our thoughts giving us distinct advantages as well as liabilities:

This is why a cheap calculator can do arithmetic better than a professional mathematician, why a mainframe computer can beat a grand master at chess, and why we so often confuse causation with correlation. When it comes to the new parts of the brain, evolution just hasn't had time to work out the kinks.

It's also what gives us by-products like rumination and neuroticism but, hey, there's a cost for everything.  Evolution is a process without a planned end product, so its results don't exist without "kinks." However, one could say that our ability to prioritize data is superior to that of the computer. We calculate more slowly but we have the capacity to tell the important from the unimportant. We work on different scales and solve different problems, is all. Sometimes Lehrer's story telling can make things a bit mushy. For instance, in an example from baseball he offers the reader a batter unconsciously interpreting anticipatory clues from minute details he perceives in how the pitcher grips the ball, the angle of the wrist - these are then somehow "seamlessly converted" into a feeling about the pitch. He does not say how or by what structures. Do these feelings precede the prediction or are they the prediction? And by feelings does he mean the emotion that he has written about, or an unconscious calculation (which strikes me, rather, as rational thought).

Lehrer offers a good chapter on the role of the neurotransmitter dopamine in making predictions by pitting what has been learned about nature to what is being observed. He focuses to largely good effect on the anterior cingulate cortex and its role in error detection - a vital ingredient in our brain's ability to predict - offering clearly explained examples from a variety of scientific literature including not only anatomy but physiology, chemistry, and artificial intelligence, keeping the examples focused and the writing chatty. He connects these concretely to the role of practice in learning and both the behavioral and the neural necessity of experiencing the "unpleasant symptoms of being wrong" so that our brains can revise their model. This would seem to belie the fashionable over-reliance on constantly shoring up self-esteem at any cost in the name of learning.

Lehrer also offers a chapter on the disadvantages of "relying upon our dopamine neurons" (a physiological oversimplification) and how this makes us vulnerable to seeing patterns in nature even when they don't exist, producing our belief in fallacies like winning streaks.  He presents equally engaging examples from the worlds of basketball, gameshows, and economics and some of the classic work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. But Lehrer offers a frustrating example of loss aversion on the stock market which I believe he gets exactly wrong. His description of the neuroeconomics is fine, he just confuses probabilities calculated about the stock market in general with the likelihood of particular results for individual investors. It all very well to talk about the irrationality of investing in bonds because they give lower yields than stocks, but those probabilities are calculated over time for the entire market. Individual investors however purchase their investments on given days and must sell them on given days to achieve the benefits of their yield. Bonds may yield half of what stocks do in theory but in practice if you are retiring or must sell some of your shares to purchase a house or pay a large bill, you are stuck with the yield on that day. The reason to diversify ones portfolio is because the invidual's interaction with the market is actual not theoretical. If the stock market automatically yielded 8% for every investor regardless of timing and the bond market automatically yielded 4%, the brokers and advisers would be out of business!

Once covering the advantages and disadvantages of emotion, Lehrer goes on to do the same for rational thought, owning that one great use of rational thought is as a regulator of emotion:

How do we regulate our emotions? The answer is surprisingly simple: by thinking about them.

The prefrontal cortex allows each of us to contemplate his or her own mind, a talent psychologists call metacognition...The prefrontal cortex can deliberately choose to ignore the emotional brain.

This chapter offers some knuckle whitening writing from Lehrer as he describes the events in the cockpit during the famous Flight 232 as an example of the successful regulation of emotion by rational thought. However, there are times we evidently think too much.  Another chapter is devoted to that subject (after a detour into the application of all of these processes on making moral decisions). Finally, Lehrer reconciles the dual realms in a couple of chapters which employ examples from the world of professional poker and offers us some practical advice of how we may apply the knowledge we have gained. How We Decide is an eminently readable, almost breezy book that benefits from Lehrer's wide interests and effectively communicated enthusiasm for all things brainy, even if it sometimes suffers from some oversimplification or some conflation of neurophysiology with behavior. It dips into the hard science as necessary but should not unduly stress out the lay reader. While less dazzling than Lehrer's debut book Proust was a Neuroscientist, it tells a good story, hitting many of the key points of the psychology of making decisions, communicating all the while how this is a story about us.


Ironically, although The Cardturner is a work of fiction, it is less effective storytelling. The book is the latest effort of Louis Sachar who wrote the wildly popular Holes. While it leaves no doubt for Sachar's love of bridge, it doesn't leave me with any burning desire to go out and learn the game. About one-third of this novel is devoted to descriptions or bridge terms, bridge strategies, and bridge games, a fact which Sachar's narrator - the teenage Alton - apologizes for continually. He conveniently offers a little symbol where these passages begin and end so that one can skip over them and simply read the boxed summary at the end. This could potentially make for a very short read. Tolstoy might have thought of this technique and saved us all a whole lot of time. If Sachar knew he was writing a book on a subject no reader would be interested in, why did he bother? If he conversely believed that the story, his cleverly written narrative voice, or his believable enough teenage characters would interest us enough to be tricked into reading about bridge and discover that - hey this isn't so bad - why doesn't he allow one of those things to do the job? But he does neither. The narrative becomes a thinly veiled expression of his insecurity that we will find bridge either boring or inscrutable - and consequently I did. The story of teenage romantic confusion and coming into ones own is enjoyable enough. Alton's parents are in bad financial straits and they want him to befriend his very wealthy uncle so they are assured of an inheritance. Alton becomes the cardturner for his uncle, an avid bridge player, who has lost his sight. It has a convincingly writtten teenage first-person narrator, some dumb jokes about the Nixon era (one character's psychiatrist is named Dr. Ellsworth - get it?), a couple of well drawn characters - particularly in the rich uncle Lester Trapp, one or two suspenseful sequences, lightening-fast writing, and a lot of bridge. It will no doubt entertain some young adult readers and perhaps even make them curious about the game and, if so, Sachar will have achieved his goal. I was mildly entertained for a couple of hours but I was never wowed.

Man as hyperbole (Books: How we Decide by Jonah Lehrer & The Road to Xanadu by Simon Callow)

I find myself with so much reading and writing for work (and such a desire to be out and moving when I'm not working) that I'm getting through fewer books this summer than I am used to. The two I'm devoting the most attention to right now are Jonah Lehrer's latest - How We Decide - which, as its title indicates, discusses the mechanisms of decision making at the neural and psychological levels. It's very readable and he employs lots of accessible examples, staying on the light side of the science. I'll do a post on the whole thing when I have finished it but I became a fan of Jonah's with his first book Proust Was a Neuroscientist and I remain one as I read this.

The second is a two-volume biography of Orson Welles by actor/writer/director Simon Callow which I received from friend Sheila about a year ago (and I'm just getting to it now?!). You may remember Callow as the Reverend Bebe in the fantastic Merchant/Ivory adaptation of E. M. Forster's A Room With a View (and if you don't, watch the film again because it is well worth it). I have just begun the first volume of the Welles bio - The Road to Xanadu - and Callow is about as erudite and enthusiastic a biographer as one could hope for. I especially like his opening insights.

If you try to probe, I'll lie to you. Seventy-five percent of what I say in interviews is false. I'm like a hen protecting her eggs. I cannot talk. I must protect my work. Introspection is bad for me. I'm a medium, not an orator. Like certain oriental and christian mystics, I think the 'self' is a kind of enemy. My work is what enables me to come out of myself. I like what I do, not what I am...Do you know the best service anyone could render to art? Destroy all biographies. Only art can explain the life of a man - and not the contrary. (Orson Welles to Jean Clay, 1962)

Aint' that the truth. If only more artists felt this way. Now the performing arts seems to have become synonymous with personal confession and careers are sustained via industries of image-building. Although Welles was no exception to this in practice, only in theory.

Hitherto, the only credible representations of him have been those offered by John Houseman in Run-through and Michaeal Mac Liammoir in All About Hecuba and Put Money in they Purse. Both men engaged deeply with Welles and were beguiled and frustrated by him in equal measure. Their distinctly different views of him, though highly personal, are based on close observation and intense engagement, and written with precision and insight; both men were denounced by Welles, their witness called into question. I was lucky enough to know them personally and what they told me about Welles has been the starting point for my book, which is thus simultaneously a synthesis and a deconstruction.

Not bad credentials for one great artist becoming the biographer of another.

And Callow's explanation for why newspapers were such an important source for his book:

He publically constructed himself from the earliest age - my first press clipping is headed ACTOR, POET, CARTOONIST - AND ONLY TEN - in a medium that he courted and denounced in equal measure; and the press returned the compliment. Together they concluded a sort of Faustian pact wherein Welles was meteorically advanced by sensation -hungry newspapers, to whom he pandered shamelessly, until at the height of his fame he fell foul of them; saddled with a preposterous reputation and a personality drawn by him and coloured by them, he found himself unemployable, his work overshadowed by his everexapanding Self. Even his body became legendary, out of control; whatever his soul consisted of protected from the world by wadding. Locked in a personal relationship as complex and curious as that of Lear and his fool, Welles and the newspapers needed and abominated each other in a co-dependency that only his death dissolved. It is no coincidence that his most famous work is the apotheosis of the newspaper film.

Holy moly - Faust and Lear in one paragraph. This promises to be a thorough if hyperbolic journey and I think I'm going to love every crowded page of it.

Battle of the brains...

I haven't actually read Nicholas Carr's new book yet - The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, but as far as I have heard in two interviews with the author, the book is an expansion on his 2008 article Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Magazine - The Atlantic? It explores the impact of recent information technology on our intellects. The reviews I have read stress that the book is non-polemic and balanced argument but that hasn't stopped others from getting their knickers twisted in a knot. Steven Pinker offered a short, worthwhile counter-argument in this week's New York Times. Yes, the brain has and will continue to evolve in relation to the media in which it is steeped. We certainly cannot stop that process. Is Carr just in mourning for the change he fears because his business is narrative? Is he Chicken Little or does he have a valid point? Brains are admittedly diverse in their ability to concentrate broadly versus deeply. That would be true with or without the internet. Most people are in the middle of the curve. At each extreme end of that continuum is a cognitive style that is the hallmark of a diagnosable condition - Attention Deficit Disorder is characterized by (among other things) an inability to sustain attention on one point for an extended period of time. On the other end are Autistic Spectrum Disorders which are characterized by (among other things) a cognitive style that gets involved more deeply in details than the gist of things, and those on the spectrum generally have a harder time shifting from one point of concentration to another. Each of those cognitive styles has its assets and liabilities. Your technology-addled brain is here reading my blog, but this is a bookish blog and therefore you probably also manage to concentrate on a fair bit of full-length narrative, so have you read Carr's book? Will you? Personal feelings are not study data but what do you think?

Dolphins are shallow

You may have heard that dolphins are the most intelligent species in the animal kingdom (aside from us brilliant creatures). They may be cute when balancing balls on their noses, but that theory has been seriously debunked. I am so disillusioned!

Via The Loom, thanks Carl.

Reading with recycled neurons (Books - Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene)

Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene is a readable account of how the reading brain works, as well as how it doesn't.  Given the fact that printed text is a relatively recent human invention and, given the time scale of evolution, the brain could not have evolved specialized structures for reading per se but rather has adapted structures that evolved for more general visual purposes and applied them to this specialized task which combines seeing and recognizing objects and the reception of the abstract thoughts of another person. The form of letters have little to do with the meaning they ultimately communicate. As a result it has become the work of seven to ten of our earlier years to learn rote the relationship between our culture's symbols representing the units of sound (phonemes).  These are combined into (words) from which we generate continuous phrases and sentences which accomplish the transfer of information and point of view. This is done at a minimum with some coherence, if not also some beauty, and the composer of those same units of meaning doesn't even have to be around to explain himself. It might seem roundabout that printed text has to take a two step journey from sound to meaning rather than going straight to meaning, but this is what allows language to communicate abstract thought:

I suspect that any radical reform whose aim would be to ensure a clear, one-to-one transcription of English speech would be bound to fail, because the role of spelling is not just to provide a faithful transcription of speech sounds. Voltaire was mistaken when he stated, elegantly but erroneously, that "writing is the painting of the voice: the more it bears a resemblance, the better." A written text is not a high-fidelity recording. Its goal is not to reproduce speech as we pronounce it, but rather to code it at a level abstract enough to allow the reader to quickly retrieve its meaning.

The brain accomplishes this remarkable feat, Dehaene tells us (without even being there), via two pathways that operate simultaneously when reading is fluent. One path transfers the letter-string to it sound content (and the motor requirements of our making that sound with our vocal apparatus) prior to its meaning, and the other that goes for the identity of the word first and then the sound. A great number of pages in the book is spent on discussing the fruits of Dehaene and his colleague Laurent Cohen's labors identifying the left hemisphere's visual word-form area, a region of the brain whose purpose seems to be to be the visual analysis of the symbols that make up letters and words irrespective of their superficial differences. That is to say we can read word, WORD, or even WoRd equally easily and can tell the difference between ANGER and RANGE. You can see the visual word-form area in the picture representing the relative activity of regions of Dehaene's reading brain below, its the area right above his ear. There are other areas that accomplish the conversion of printed text into units of sound, still others that agree on the meaning of the assembly given not only its form but its context.
The typical right-handed person's brain has developed most of its key language processing areas in the left hemisphere (left handers are less reliable in this regard). This is true whether the personn reads from left to right or right to left and whether they read an alphabet whose symbols map to units of sound (as in these roman letters you are reading right now) or comprise pictures of whole words (as in logographic alphabets like Chinese). Dehaene, in fact, explores the evolution of different writing systems from pictoral markers in depth as he builds his case for how the human brain evolved the skill of reading, a section of the book I very much enjoyed.

Much of this case centers on the brain's ability to adapt cortex to multiple functions, something he calls neuronal recycling.

We would not be able to read if our visual system did not spontaneously implement operations close to those indispensable for word recognition, and if it were not endowed with a small dose of plasticity that allows it to learn new shapes. During schooling, a part of this system rewires itself into a reasonably good device for invariant letter and word recognition.

According to this view, our cortex is not a blank slate or a wax tablet that faithfully records any cultural invention, however arbitrary. Neither is it an inflexible organ that has somehow, over the course of evolution, dedicated a "module" to reading. A better metaphor would be to liken our visual cortex to a Lego construction set, with which a child can build the standard model shown on the box, but also tinker with a variety of other inventions.

My hypothesis disagrees with the "no constraints" approach so common in the social sciences, according to which the human brain is capable of absorbing any form of culture. The truth is that nature and culture entertain much more intricate relations. Our genome, which is the product of millions of years of evolutionary history, specifies a constrained, if partially modifiable cerebral architecture that imposes severe limits on what we can learn. New cultural inventions can only be acquired insofar as they fit the constraints of our brain architecture.

In the book's final chapter, Dehaene discusses cortical plasticity - a neuroscientific idea that is relatively recent and much in vogue.  It is the ability of brain's neuron's to adapt their function from one purpose to another - for example, when a blind person's visual cortex cells become able to decode sensation of the fingertips to braille letters.  Dehaene makes a case for the necessity of cortical plasticity in inventing cultural forms like number systems and the arts. It's one of those fun bits of reaching for the stars that a researcher has to save for when they write a book rather than a journal article. His voice comes off a little stuffy at times, but his theory is intricate - composed of many interleaving units - so his writing must be systematic in driving home each concept and then attaching is to its predecessor. His model for how the brain accomplishes reading, I must emphasize, is one of several, but he does acknowledge alternate viewpoints along the way. The lay reader may not find this book as accessible as Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid, but it goes into more depth and synthesizes a lot of information into a coherent narrative arc. His diction is clear and the reading experience fluid and even entertaining. Dehaene's work is at the cutting edge of our understanding about the relationship between language and the brain so I found it a pleasure to get the story from one of its sources.

If you in or around NYC on Thursday March 13 at 6pm, join me for a film about dyslexia called THE BIG PICTURE: RETHINKING DYSLEXIA.  Click here for information.

Killing giants, myth busting and other valiant deeds (Books - The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing & Reading in the Brain)

I just came across two excerpts in Richard Dawkins's collection of science writing that reminded me what gives me pleasure about reading science. One is geneticist J. B. S. Haldane's "On Being the Right Size" and the other, Zoologist Mark Ridley's "On Being the Right Sized Mates" from his 1983 book The Explanation of Organic Diversity. Haldane's essay muses on how the physical structure of animals evolved to the "right" size for their makeup. As an example he uses the giants from the books of his childhood,

These monsters were not only ten times as high as Christian, but ten times as wide and ten times as thick, so that their total weight was a thousand times his, or about eighty to ninety tons. Unfortunately the cross-sections of their bones were only a hundred times those of Christian, so that every square inch of giant bones had to support ten times the weight borne by a square inch of human bone. As the human thigh-bone breaks under about ten times the human weight, Pope and Pagan would have broken their thighs every times they took a step. This was doubtless why they were sitting down in the picture I remember. But it lessens one's respect for Christian and Jack the Giant Killer.

I love the fact that Haldane uses his childhood memory of Pilgrim's Progress to communicate to his reader what he is thinking about the physiological evolution of animal life. The best teaching occurs, I think, when the teacher themselves can get back to what initially ignited their own interest about their subject and communicate from that vantage point. Haldane then goes on a musing spree which covers the structure of members of the animal kingdom ranging from insects to giraffes. How an insect's structure allows it to fall without danger, but if it gets wet it is likely to drown. Tall animals require a certain strength pump and vessels for the circulatory system that convey blood to their extremities, however, this puts them at risk for high blood pressure or problems associated with vascular weakness. How do wings permit flight? How do different respiratory structures - those that have evolved with gills and those with lungs - accomplish the oxygenation of blood? And given these diverse means, what are the upper limits of the size of the animal that possesses them? Haldane not only informs us of the vagaries of the natural world we are a part of, he communicates the verve with which he observes that world, and with witty prose drives the reader forward. It is little wonder that he inspired Mark Ridley's observation that species have evolved to favor homogamy, that is, like mates with like. What I enjoyed about this brief essay is Ridley's debunking of the well-entrenched myth that in human affairs of the heart, opposites attract.

'it is a trite proverb that tall men marry little women...a man of genius marries a fool,' a habit which Murray explained as 'the effort of nature to preserve the typical medium of the race.' The same thought was expressed by the vast intellect of Jeeves, to explain the otherwise mysterious attractions of Bertie for all those female enthusiasts of Kant and Schopenhauer. The source of this proverbial belief is not certainly known; but one possibility can be ruled out. It did not originate in observation: humans mate homogamously (or perhaps randomly) for both stature and intelligence.

Myth-busting is not just a darn good time - especially when indulged in with such gusto - but doubting our assumptions is vital to the continued development of our knowledge. This is also another of many instances in Dawkins's juicy compendium in which learning something new is married to lucid, entertaining writing. The danger of this volume, however, is its tendency to bloat the TBR list. I've made it a rule to only jot down my desired titles at this point, and not engage in any impulse buying. We'll see how long that holds! Here are my other posts related to The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing 1, 2.

I have also begun Stanislas Dehaene's recent book Reading in the Brain and, speaking of gills, it is packed to them with information about how the brain accomplishes the act you are performing right now - reading. An accessible and engagingly written volume. I tore through the first 60 pages. More on that soon.

Big Thinking

I was introduced today to the website Big Think. On it I discovered, among many treasures, this interview with philosopher Daniel Dennett discussing the Mechanics of Studying Consciousness. The excerpt is not interesting because of any earth shattering content Dennett reveals about the nature of consciousness but rather for what he reveals about his thought process. You know how obsessed I am with creative process. Here Dennett discusses how to put one's mind to solving a problem and stay focused on the work of that problem, rather than on the many things that can waylay us: its scope, the wonder of our subject, or that this part I am working on isn't really the subject I mean to address.

The website offers video interviews with all sorts of influential thinkers and doers - chefs, economists, politicians, writers, choreographers, neuroscientists, musicians... you name it. I enjoyed Oliver Sacks and historian David McCullough is particularly good on the value of history and our founding fathers.