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Mapping the Mind
Rita Carter is a British medical writer. She was twice awarded the Medical Journalists' Association prize for outstanding contribution to medical journalism. The book gives a comprehensive description of our knowledge about the brain (as of 1998, when the book was written). It covers popular topics, such as the causes for optical illusions, the nature of the Mona Lisa's smile, the differences between the left and the right brain, between males and females, the mechanisms of drug addictions. It also delves into less popular subjects, such as the need for rationalization, the mechanisms of speech and reading, the "programmability" of patients with a lobotomy, the causes of face-blindness and many others. In fact, after finishing the book I can hardly name any aspect of the mind that the book didn't tell me about.
Throughout the book, Carter's descriptions invariably remain strict, rigorous and factual. The book doesn't make any empty claims about our minds, nor does it delve into controversies perpetrated by the uninformed. Everything written is always based on pure hard science, with references aplenty.
This doesn't prevent the book from being easy to read and immensely entertaining. Imagine the weirdness of thousands of clinical histories condensed into 330 pages for our education. The simplest way to understand the function of some part of the brain is to find a person in whom it is damaged. Here you have it all: A man who believed that copulating with the pavement was normal; the famous man who mistook his wife for a hat; Vladimir Nabokov and his account of synaesthesia; people with Fregoli's syndrome (who constantly mistake strangers for people they know, even though they realize they look totally different); chickens excited by Pink Floyd's "The Final Cut"; Nadean Cool, her false memories of baby-eating Satanic cults and her 120 different personalities, including a duck; and people with anosognosia, who refuse to realize their illnesses, such as blindness or paralysis. And what's even better, you will be able to find explanations for your own quirks and deficiencies. There are bugs in every program; your mind is no exception. It is an amazing feeling to be able to realize how your mind works, what makes you tick, what constitutes "you" -- why you feel, think and act the way you do.
The book is a treat for the eyes: the huge number of helpful, pretty illustrations makes it both easier to comprehend it and more pleasant to read. The numerous diagrams and brain scans illustrate every subject, showing which areas become more active when you have depression, which areas cause OCD (caudate), what causes eating disorders (faults in hypothalamus), the pathways activated during face recognition, etc. This helps dispel the illusion of our brain being an incomprehensible black box, letting you get a grip on the physical basis for thoughts. It's like ignoring the EULAs and looking at the source code for your mind for the first time.
The book consists of eight chapters. It begins with an introduction to the brain structure in "The Emerging Landscape," starting with an overview of the misconceptions of phrenology, and ending with a short comment by a neurophysiologist Horace Barlow, who explains the usefulness of a reductionist approach as a first step to studying the brain. The section covers all brain modules, the neural pathways and explains the evolution of the brain.
After we are through the basics, our journey around the brain starts. First, in the "The Great Divide," Carter explains the roles of the left and the right hemispheres and the corpus calossum -- the connection between them. Among other things Carter explains the alien hand phenomena, describes experiments that demonstrate that people whose corpus calossum have been severed exhibit two separate personalities, and touches the puzzle of left-handedness.
After that, we delve deep into the brain, into its more primitive part, the limbic system, which is responsible for our emotions. Then we are shown the nature of perceptions and how they achieve their meanings. After that the author breaks from the confines of the brain and explains the social nature of humans, and how language enables most of our social interactions.
Then Carter describes the nature of our memories. She explains amnesia and Alzheimer's disease, explains the amount of memory we have, and where different memories (such as procedural memory, fearful experiences, or normal memories) are stored. She describes H.M., a patient with most of the hippocampus and amygdala removed. His mind had no continuity at all; H.M. lost the ability to form most types of new memories, but he could form procedural memories and could learn some new music to play on the piano. Another man, after having a minor stroke in the middle of a family dinner, suddenly found that he didn't remember where he was, and no longer recognized the people at the table. He didn't do anything, though, and later told the doctor: "I felt quite happy being with them even though I didn't know who they were," and "they seemed rather an agreeable lot." We are shown why false memories are the norm, rather than an anomaly.
Finally, our most unique and advanced feature -- consciousness -- is explained. Carter describes the "working memory" model developed by Alan Baddeley, where images and speech-based information is held for short time in a cache-like space, while the "central executive" part co-ordinates the information processing. She demonstrates how complex programs can be easily triggered in patients with lobotomy. French neurologist Francois L'Hermitte once invited two of his patients, a man and a woman, to his home. He ushered the man into a bedroom without explanation. In the middle of the day the man saw the ready-to-use bed and immediately undressed, preparing to go to sleep. When a woman was let in and saw the rumpled bed, she immediately started to make it. Carter explains the illusion of the free will and its evolutionary origins.
She ends the book with the optimistic conclusion: "I believe one thing is already clear: there is no ghost in this place, no monsters in the depths, no lands ruled by dragons. What today's mind voyagers are discovering is instead a biological system of awe-inspiring complexity. There is no need for us to satisfy our sense of wonder by conjuring phantoms -- the world within our heads is more marvelous than anything we can dream up."
What does this book leaves the reader afterwards? It left me with the insatiable desire to immediately read it again, this time with a notebook and a pencil at hand, so that I do not miss a single fact, a single lesson, a single bit of truth about who I am. To me the book was perfect -- a unique combination of scientific rigor and entertaining writing. Each amusing medical account was always accompanied with a detailed explanation of the physiological basis for it and a handy illustration. It was complete, well-structured and accessible.
I think it was the best book (fiction or non-fiction) that I read in the past year. The only other book that approached it was another take on the nature of the mind - the amusing Permutation City by Greg Egan, which takes the technologically feasible idea of mind uploading and pushes it to its limits, exploring the philosophical and mathematical consequences along the way.
You can browse the book at Google Print. Please do so and then read it in full. Learning about yourself should be the top thing on your agenda, if you consider yourself an intelligent creature. And for a computer scientist or a programmer there can hardly be a more interesting subject than the most complex software application, written over the millions of years, an amalgamation of legacy features, sloppy code, perfectly optimized routines, special cases and the ever-harmful neural goto operators. "Gnothi seauton," and have fun doing it.
You can purchase Mapping the Mind from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews. To see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Why we Lie, by David Livingston Smith
The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
...the 2003 Reith lecture was also rather good.
Rita has certainly done a thorough job of covering the issue.
If you want to know why she is wrong read this link..........a chapter by chapter (blow by blow if you will) listing of faults in her research and reasoning.
http://human-brain.org/mapping.html
Unfortunately, like the vast majority of modern psychology and neuroscience texts, this book suffers from the gravest of metaphysical mistakes--namely the egregiously reductionistic approach known variously as scientific materialism, positivism, physicalism, scientism, and material monism. The first line of the book summary says it all: "Today a brain scan reveals our thoughts, moods, and memories as clearly as an X-ray reveals our bones. We can actually observe a person's brain registering a joke or experiencing a painful memory." The fallacy in the first sentence should be obvious. There is absolutely no empirical device that reveals the specific content of thoughts, moods, or memories. No EEG, EOG, EMG, PET, CAT, or MRI will tell you what I'm thinking or feeling. They might tell you _that_ I'm thinking, but not _what_ I'm thinking. No empirical procedure can determine whether I'm thinking about picking up litter on Earth Day or planning a local bank heist. Thoughts, moods, and memories are _not_ revealed by a brain scan as clearly as an X-ray reveals bones. They aren't revealed at all! Thoughts, moods, and memories--unlike bones--are not physical, empirical quantities. They don't have simple location in the physical worldspace. What a brain scan detects, rather, is the objective _correlate_ of a subjective experience. A brain scan will show you what parts of the brain are involved in the experience of thinking and feeling; a brain scan will not, however, tell you the nature or content of those thoughts and feelings. What a brain scan reveals is electrochemical activity in a physical organ, not anything remotely resembling "thoughts" or "moods." To simply reduce conscious experience to brain activity is to completely obliterate it: thoughts and feelings are reduced to electricity and neurochemicals; quality is reduced to quantity; interior is reduced to exterior; subject is reduced to object; depth is reduced to surface; the heads side of the coin is reduced to the tails side; and what remains is a flat and faded one-dimensional cosmos, wherein mathematics and logic, spirituality and philosophy, art, morals, truth, and beauty are all reduced to physics and empiricism without remainder. The resultant world is, as Whitehead put it, "a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly." Scientific materialism is, therefore, the insane position of saying that empirical reality alone is the "true reality" (even though there is no empirical basis for such an assertion), and it is always self-contradictory. Carter's book expresses this viewpoint, and says, in effect, that all conscious experience is ultimately reducible to nothing but systems of biochemical activity within the physical brain and body. But if that is actually true, and that statement itself is a product of conscious experience, then it is self-denying, simply because it claims to be "true" at a level where truth and falsehood have no existence (there are no "true" biochemicals versus "false" biochemicals; there are simply biochemicals). Thus, the existence of the very idea of scientific materialism proves that scientific materialism is fundamentally incorrect.
Someone you trust is one of us.
"they were just being juvenal."
Oh please mod the parent up. There is the obvious pun on "juvenile", but the user also probably meant the stereotype of philosophers in some of Juvenal's Satires: philosophers = gay.
That's actually somewhat amusing, now that it's pretty clear that whatever priestess was on duty there at any given time was probably stoned out of her mind on hallucinogenic gases rising out of rock fissures.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
My copy of this book is littered with margin notes of exactly the type at the linked site.
Her lack of rigor was was a major disappointment.
It will be the last book authored by Rita Carter that I will ever read.
SteveM
I highly recommend the book "How The Mind Works" by Steven Pinker. It does an awesome job at explaining the workings of the human mind. He treats the mind as software that was written by evolution. Unlike the book "Mapping The Mind", it doesn't really get into the physical details of the brain at all. After you read the book I guarantee that you'll have a much larger appreciation for the amazing tasks that our mind performs. Truly remarkable book. It's the only non-fiction science book that I felt like reading cover-to-cover in one sitting, and the only non-fiction science book that I'm considering reading a second time.
I hardly think that Consciousness can ever be explained as many would like to believe by reducing our brains to "computers". Where our brains are simply computers manipulating input and generating a specific output according to a set of rules - programs if you will.
A great argument for this is that of John Searle, called the Chinese room argument. Rather than type out the whole argument I will cut and past from this site: http://www.iep.utm.edu/c/chineser.htm
The Chinese room argument - John Searle's (1980a) thought experiment and associated (1984) derivation - is one of the best known and widely credited counters to claims of artificial intelligence (AI), i.e., to claims that computers do or at least can (someday might) think. According to Searle's original presentation, the argument is based on two truths: brains cause minds, and syntax doesn't suffice for semantics. Its target, Searle dubs "strong AI": "according to strong AI," according to Searle, "the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind, rather the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand and have other cognitive states" (1980a, p. 417). Searle contrasts "strong AI" to "weak AI". According to weak AI, according to Searle, computers just simulate thought, their seeming understanding isn't real (just as-if) understanding, their seeming calculation as-if calculation, etc.; nevertheless, computer simulation is useful for studying the mind (as for studying the weather and other things).
Against "strong AI," Searle (1980a) asks you to imagine yourself a monolingual English speaker "locked in a room, and given a large batch of Chinese writing" plus "a second batch of Chinese script" and "a set of rules" in English "for correlating the second batch with the first batch." The rules "correlate one set of formal symbols with another set of formal symbols"; "formal" (or "syntactic") meaning you "can identify the symbols entirely by their shapes." A third batch of Chinese symbols and more instructions in English enable you "to correlate elements of this third batch with elements of the first two batches" and instruct you, thereby, "to give back certain sorts of Chinese symbols with certain sorts of shapes in response." Those giving you the symbols "call the first batch 'a script' [a data structure with natural language processing applications], "they call the second batch 'a story', and they call the third batch 'questions'; the symbols you give back "they call . . . 'answers to the questions'"; "the set of rules in English . . . they call 'the program'": you yourself know none of this. Nevertheless, you "get so good at following the instructions" that "from the point of view of someone outside the room" your responses are "absolutely indistinguishable from those of Chinese speakers." Just by looking at your answers, nobody can tell you "don't speak a word of Chinese." Producing answers "by manipulating uninterpreted formal symbols," it seems "[a]s far as the Chinese is concerned," you "simply behave like a computer"; specifically, like a computer running Schank and Abelson's (1977) "Script Applier Mechanism" story understanding program (SAM), which Searle's takes for his example. But in imagining himself to be the person in the room, Searle thinks it's "quite obvious . . . I do not understand a word of the Chinese stories. I have inputs and outputs that are indistinguishable from those of the native Chinese speaker, and I can have any formal program you like, but I still understand nothing." "For the same reasons," Searle concludes, "Schank's computer understands nothing of any stories" since "the computer has nothing more than I have in the case where I understand nothing" (1980a, p. 418). Furthermore, since in the thought experiment "nothing . . . depends on the details of Schank's programs," the same "would apply to any [computer] simulation" of any "human mental phenomenon" (1980a, p. 417); that's all it would be, simulation. Cont
Gerald Edelman, nobel laureate, and author of a series of books on human consciousness, is the only author I've read who has openly stated he has defined consciousness. His book Bright Air, Brilliant Fire is a summary of his previous findings. Antonio Domasio has studied consciousness for decades. His earlier work Descartes' Error : Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain is a good jumping off point, especially as he starts off with a recounting of the case of Phineas Gage, a patient whose case was key to studies of the brain by way of studying brain injuries. Damasio's other book, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness should be of interest to those studying AI, as the book takes a close look at the issue of emotion/feeling in decision making. It takes note of interesting cases where damage to areas of the brain leave patients able to reason clearly but unable to arrive at decisions as their emotional centres are impaired.Calvin Williams is worth a read, recently he published A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond which makes for a quick, easy read and an intro to his ideas. Generally the best and the brightest still view consciousness as an enigma but much has been accomplished in unraveling the mystery. Perhaps the most telling point is that neuroscience has taken the lead and the philosphers now follow in their footsteps.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Actually the book touches on this problem as well. For example "A brain scanning study of forty-one convicted murderers (thirty-nine men and two women) found that the majority showed reduced frontal lobe activity, which, as we shall see in Chapter Eight, may severely compromise a person's ability to control their impulses." Another example is the case of Julie (covered in more details in The Mind Machine by Colin Blakemore), a woman who has developed regular panic attacks and one day in such a state knifed another woman through the heart. She was studied by a neurosurgeon, who located the part of the brain that was causing the panic attacks. He then burnt it out and Julie's rages disappeared.
:)
A wonderful book, it really has it all.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Sounds similar to "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat"
No, it's not. The "Hat" book is an ad hoc collection of interesting cases (but you're right: it is a good read!) The book under review is supposed to be a coherent potted summary of the current state of knowledge illustrated by cases.
"The good reader is a rarer swan than the good writer."
Sounds similar to "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" a book written in the late 60s (or early 70s)
Do you mean The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks? That was mid-eighties. Great book, and it does cover some of the same ground as this one.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
I had a similar experience quite a while back. My advice is both to do a lot of background research, and get your hands dirty playing around with AI as well. There's so much out there in neurobiology, theories about the brain, and actual artificial intelligence that one might easily become burned out in theory. Additionally it gives a good chance to make stronger correlations between biological theory and their application to AI. Of course easier said than done. Especially too since so often subjects shift and move in different tangents. Since that initial spark, in my case watching aibos playing soccer, I've found myself getting into such unexpected topics as psychology, sociology, and even religious history.
If you're interested in a good book on working with AI, I'd like to recommend one that I finally splurged on a couple days ago. I won't really have a chance to sit down with it, but a brief skim and the source code on the authors website indicate it's one of the best books on AI I've been able to find yet. Artificial Intelligence A Modern Approach by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig. It's $90, but you can find a low price edition printed in India for around $20 at half.com.
Another couple which really fueled my enthusiasm early on are by Steve Grand. Creation: Life and How to Make It, and Growing Up With Lucy. While they're pretty short of practical application there's a ton of, to me at least, interesting theory. In the context of this discussion, he quite often devotes a chapter or two to human neurology as he considers how to go about any particular aspect of his AI or robot design.
And I hear you about the wallet pain! It seems like every book I read makes me want to buy at least two more.
Everything will be taken away from you.
Actually in the matrix it was "temet nosce" ... why they used latin instead of the greek is beyond me. I may have misspelled it but you get the idea...
An excellent complementary reading would be On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins, the founder of Palm, Handspring, and most recently, Numenta. It specifically explores the workings of intelligence and memory. (Don't let the rather uninspired title deter you. It was actually a very fascinating read, and very easy to understand -- full of metaphors and examples.)
I haven't read "Mapping the Mind," but it sounds like an equally good read.
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