The Three-Pound Enigma: The Human Brain and the Quest to Unlock Its Mysteries, by Shannon Moffett. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2006.

This overview of the current state of brain science is both entertaining and informative. Each chapter covers a particular facet of the sprawling field: neurosurgery, cognitive neuroscience, neuroethics (itself a multi-faceted field), sleep and dream studies, etc. Moffett, a medical student at Stanford, hung out with some of the top researchers and thinkers in neuroscience, which gives the book the feeling of a series of good conversations with curious minds (e.g., Christof Koch and Francis Crick on the search for the neural correlates of consciousness, John Gabrieli on memory, Daniel Dennett on the nature of consciousness). The book is also filled with interesting tidbits of information, like why you shouldn’t go into an fMRI machine if you’ve ever worked in a machine shop, how the video game Tetris was used to study dreaming and memory, and the story of how Francis Crick and his wife Odile met. I really enjoyed the feeling that I was getting to know some of the personalities behind the research I read about. And while some of the information was not new to me, I learned a surprising amount about how the brain works and how research on the brain proceeds.

The chapters are interspersed with a series of “interludes”, brief descriptions of the brain at various stages of life, starting at three weeks after conception and ending with death. These were probably the most educational for me, because my knowledge of brain anatomy, and in particular brain development, is far from complete. The one that stands out most in my mind described the chemistry of how synapses fire; it’s one of the longer interludes and took a little effort to follow. The payoff came at the end:

The significance of the foregoing, and the reason to have waded through it at all, is that—as Francis Crick pointed out—as far as we can tell, every thought (wondering what you’ll have for lunch or what you’ll wear tomorrow), every desire (for glory, for that hottie you see at the gym, for a peanut-butter sandwich), and every experience (of reading this book, for instance—of your hand on the page, the quality of the light you are reading by, the feeilng of your breathing) that you have or have ever had is nothing but the opening and closing of those ion channels and the release and uptake of those neurotransmitter molecules. One of the great philosophic questions forced upon us today is how that knowledge could or should change our concept of what it means to be human.

I have long believed that we have no immaterial souls, no consciousness beyond what arises out of the activity between our ears, so this is not exactly news to me, but somehow reading the detailed description of how it works at the level of the calcium and potassium channels really brought home to me how wonderful a thing it is that from such small chemical events such a rich variety of experiences can arise.

The interludes were integrated well into the rest of the content; the last one in particular, about brain death and the difficulties that sometimes arise in determining when it has occurred, fits in very neatly after a chapter on neuroethics. And overall I thought there was a good balance between the parts about brain anatomy and physiology, the discussions of what consciousness is and how we can learn about it, and the explorations of human behavior and experience. If you are squeamish and if, as I do, you read while you eat, be aware that the book opens with a description of an autopsy and the first chapter is about brain surgery. The brain surgery chapter in particular, interesting as it was, gave me a mild case of the heebie-jeebies; I really don’t like to think about how vulnerable the brain is and how many things can go wrong with it. Other than that minor caveat, I can say that reading this book was both pleasant and educational.

I began reading The Echo Maker, the latest novel by Richard Powers, with high hopes, but overall it was a disappointment. Powers is an intelligent writer of ambitious novels that link science and the humanities; I enjoyed Galatea 2.2, a moving story of artificial intelligence. The Gold Bug Variations is probably his best-known work, and although that has been recommended highly by friends I could never get further than a couple of chapters into it.

The subject matter of The Echo Makers is full of relevance for thinking-meat types: it tells the story of a young man who suffers from Capgras syndrome after a brain injury. Capgras sufferers believe that a relative or close friend has been replaced with a physically identical imposter. (It might happen as the result of some kind of disconnect between the amygdala and other brain circuits; the brain recognizes the physical appearance of the person, but the emotional resonance that gives the person his or her identity as a spouse or sibling or child is missing, and so the Capgras patient concludes that he or she must be a stand-in for the real thing.) In the case of the man in the book, Mark Schluter, it is his sister and his dog that he can’t recognize.

To explain his situation to himself, Mark devises a story about how his hometown and the people close to him have been either replaced with doubles or co-opted in the service of some shadowy government plot. Mark and his sister are the children of a dysfunctional pair of parents (both dead), and Karin in particular struggles to escape the past but winds up getting sucked back into old familiar destructive patterns of behavior. Partway through the novel she calls on a neuroscientist, Gerald Weber, who writes popular books (à  la Oliver Sacks) to see if he can help her brother. The book is set in Nebraska, and the stories of the humans are intertwined with those of the cranes who visit the area every year as part of their migration.

The theme of identity is well developed throughout the book, in particular the idea that it’s much more fragile than we usually imagine. I think it was in Timothy Ferris’s The Mind’s Sky: Human Intelligence in a Cosmic Context that I first ran across the idea that our brains process information and come to decisions to some degree outside of conscious awareness, and our sense of who we are is basically a story developed by the conscious mind to explain our perceptions of reality and the results of our subconscious processing of it. Basically the “I” is a figurehead, moved around by powers behind the throne but usually not aware of this fact.

Powers plays with this idea and other facets of identity, illustrating through his characters how we integrate our sense of our own identity and that of others over time, how we struggle sometimes to overcome or improve upon our sense of who we are, and how we cobble together our stories of ourselves as best we can. (As I read, I was reminded of a couple of lines from Galatea 2.2: “You make what you think might be a vase for the blooms you are carrying. You tell the stories you need to tell to keep the story tellable.”) Elements of the story also deal with how we incorporate unexpected disclosures about others into our mental image of who they are.

So the book covers themes that I love to explore, and Powers’s style is often beautiful. However, it’s also sometimes maddeningly elliptical, and sometimes ponderous and heavy-handed. He complicates his story with a mystery about what happened on the night of the accident that resulted in Mark’s brain injury, and I found the mystery to be more of an irritant or a distraction than an enhancement. The book seemed to me to drag in the middle, with some of the inner musing of the characters slowing down the story rather than being incorporated into it, and the revelations at the end don’t carry as much of a punch as they could.

In fact the whole thing was surprisingly unengaging emotionally, although I can’t quite put my finger on why. Partly it’s that I didn’t like or couldn’t empathize with some of the main characters. It was frustrating to watch Karin sabotage herself despite her good intentions, and Weber’s midlife crisis felt hollow and unreal to me. I think Powers did a decent job of depicting Weber’s marriage, itself a living thing with an identity made up to some degree of memory, habit, and jokes and phrases shared only by him and his wife. The trouble was that I didn’t like either of them all that well. I did feel a great deal of sympathy for Mark Schluter as he tried to make sense of the new world he found himself in after the accident, but other than that I found myself wanting to shake most of the other characters at one time or another.

I’m glad I read the book, out of curiosity if nothing else, but I can’t say I recommend it. However, I’ll follow this author’s work in the future, and I can highly recommend his earlier Galatea 2.2.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, by Carl Sagan. Penguin, 2006.

Carl Sagan’s death in December 1996 at the age of 62 silenced one of the more passionate voices ever to describe the beauty of the natural world and to promote scientific exploration. Luckily he is still making a posthumous contribution to the current discussion of science and religion. The recently published The varieties of scientific experience contains the text of a series of lectures he gave in Scotland in 1985, edited and updated by his widow, Ann Druyan. Sagan was invited to deliver the Gifford Lectures on the occasion of their centennial; the prestigious Gifford Lecture series covers the topic of “Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term”, and Sagan spoke about the relationship between religion and science. The title for the book comes from the title of William James’s series of Gifford Lectures in 1900-1902, The varieties of religious experience (James’s lectures were also published in a book that is still well known today).

The book consists of nine lectures and selected questions and answers from the Q&A periods at the end of each lecture. The topics are familiar to anyone who has read anything by Carl Sagan: the history of our understanding of the cosmos, comets, the search for extraterrerstial intelligence, the threat of nuclear winter. The presentation of each is shaped by the central question of what religion and science mean to us. I’ve read quite a bit of Sagan’s work, so many of the ideas presented were not new to me, but I still found myself wanting to jot down particularly well-worded or beautiful passages, and I also found myself laughing out loud from time to time at his wit. Reading the book amounted to spending a couple of hours in the company of one of the more curious, intelligent, and well-educated minds of our time, and it was a pleasure to do so.

One of the passages I noted was in the first lecture, “Nature and wonder: A reconnaissance of heaven”. He closes that lecture with the words:

If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing? Or would He prefer His votaries to admire the real universe in all its intricacy? I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship. My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, then our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand, if such a traditional god does not exist, then our curiosity and our intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival in an extremely dangerous time. In either case the enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it shoudl be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species.

He mentions the dangers we face several times in the course of the lectures, most particularly in the one about nuclear winter, entitled “Crimes against creation”. This was probably the most disheartening chapter in the book in a way. In the 22 years since Sagan first delivered these words, I don’t think we’ve progressed nearly as much as we should have in protecting the planet from our own follies and excesses. Nuclear weapons are still a threat, and we’re only now focusing on global warming and the attendant climate disruption. Sagan saw our times as being pivotal for the future of our species–the earth will still be here in years to come, but will we?

In the Q&A session after the last lecture, someone asked for advice about whether we as individuals can do anything about “the world situation”, or whether we just had to sit back and accept it as being out of our control. Sagan’s answer seems just as useful now as it was then: He suggests using “every democratic process” to affect government policy, and educating ourselves on issues of concern so that we can ask intelligent questions of government, spot contradictions in what our elected officials say to us, and avoid being bamboozled. Amen! In addition to being excellent advice for tackling the issues Sagan was focused on, this is also a great way to start tackling the immense problem of global warming (and for global warming there are actions that each of us can take right now to help reduce our impact on the environment; I’ll get up on the soapbox for a moment and refer you to the Union of Concerned Scientists global warming page).

The two lectures that touch most directly on questions of religion and science are “The god hypothesis”, which covers various arguments for and against the existence of a deity, and “The religious experience”, in which Sagan offers some thoughts on how religion might have evolved. These and the two talks about extraterrestrial intelligence (the search for it, and the folklore attached to UFO sightings and so forth) cover a lot of interesting psychological angles, and reveal some of the obstacles humans encounter when they seek the truth. The closing words of the final lecture sum it all up in a most inspiring fashion:

I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed. I think this search does not lead to a complacent satisfaction that we know the answer, not an arrogant sense that the answer is before us and we need do only one more experiment to find it out. It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us.

The Creative Brain: The Science of Genius, by Nancy Andreasen. Penguin, 2006.

Creativity is something of a mystery. Where do brilliant innovative ideas come from, and why? Nancy Andreasen’s book about creativity does a good job of nailing down some of the basic characteristics of creative people and the creative process, and making a first pass at describing some of the neuroscience behind this mysterious human capacity. Andreasen, a neuroscientist and MD with a PhD in English literature, is well-qualified to write about creativity and to try to integrate the worlds of neuroscience and the arts (i.e., to further the consilience of which E.O. Wilson wrote).

The first couple of chapters describe some of the early research into creativity (of which there isn’t a whole lot) and discuss the nature of creativity, the relationship between creativity and intelligence, and the difficulties of defining and measuring creativity. Ordinary creativity is the kind we all employ all the time, coming up with never-before-spoken sentences, for example, or designing and building things. People likely fall along a spectrum for that kind of creativity, as they do for intelligence, with a bell-curve distribution. Extraordinary creativity is a spike at the high end of the scale, the possession of relatively few geniuses like Shakespeare, Mozart, Michelangelo, and Einstein. The book is mainly about extraordinary creatvity, although the exercises at the end are aimed at developing the ordinary kind. Andreasen explores the nature of creativity by analyzing accounts that creative people (including Coleridge, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Stephen Spender, and Poincaré) have given describing how they work. I found these glimpses into creative minds fascinating. The personality profile of creative people was interesting too; it includes the following traits:

openness to experience, adventursomeness, rebelliousness, individualism, sensitivity, playfulenss, persistence, curiosity, and simplicity

Having examined what creativity feels like from the inside and looks like from the outside, Andreasen proceeds to discuss the brain areas involved in creative activity. Brain studies of creativity are a relatively new thing, so this is an exciting but little-explored area so far. She describes a a PET scan study she did that looked at the brains of experimental subjects who were “free associating”: not thinking of anything in particular but letting their minds wander (a crucial process that gives diverse thoughts and memories the chance to connect in possibly new and interesting ways). The association cortex, which integrates sensory input and links various brain areas, was most active during this state of free association, which indicates that it may play an important role in creative activity.

Folk wisdom holds that there’s a link between creative genius and mental instability (mood disorders and problems like alcoholism and drug abuse). I’m sure you can come up with a list just off the top of your head of tortured artists who drank themselves to death or committed suicide, but of course there have also been plenty of artists who didn’t suffer such dramatic problems. The scientific evidence for whether or not there really is a correlation is somewhat scanty, but what there is shows some consistent results. Andreasen has done a study of writers involved with the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and she cites her own results and those of two other studies, both relatively small but all showing a higher incidence of mood disorders in writers and artists. (The evidence for an association between schizophrenia and creativity, by contrast, is not as solid so far.)

It seems likely that more creative geniuses are born than have the chance to develop their talents. (The book is dedicated to “the lost geniuses of the past”.) What conditions are required for genius to flourish? Andreasen mentions a number of periods in history that are noted for being rich in innovative ideas in science, the arts, and technology, in particular Renaissance Florence. She uses the lives of Michelangelo Buonarroti and Leonardo da Vinci to illustrate the factors that she believes are necessary for genius to flower (e.g., a critical mass of creative people and the presence of mentors and patrons). These conditions are seen as allowing an innate talent to blossom; like so many things about humans, creativity is a result of nature as well as nurture. Whether creativity has a heritable component is not clear. It does seem to run in families, but creative families provide, in addition to shared genes, a favorable environment for nurturing creativity, so it’s hard to say what the mechanism is by which creativity is transmitted.

The book wraps up by discussing ways we can nurture our own ordinary creative abilities and make the most of them. The edition of the book I have says “Includes life-changing exercises for your brain” across the top of the front cover, which is a bit hyperbolic in my opinion. Marketing spin aside, the exercises (for adults and for children) all make sense to me as good mental hygiene. All in all, this was an engaging and informative book.