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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.
Sounds similar to "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" a book written in the late 60s (or early 70s) on the a doctors experience with patients with various mental illnesses. Excellent read.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Reductionism is a limited approach to discovering the mind - it works when it works, but that's not always the case.
I am willing to make a bold prediction - the abtract world of mental processes will never be reduced to the physical matter from which they arise. It's a one-way street.
All aside, pretty much every single day since that story about the seemingly intelligent autonomous bots based upon the principles of ant paths, along with a couple of other similar observations I happened to find\read around that time, I've been inspired to write a piece of software that immitates intelligence (a 'chatbot' of sorts). But every time I think I should get started on it, I figure I'm not quite ready yet. My current ideas, which are already plentiful, may work ok in some situations I've thought up, but there's so many other possibilities I daren't even try to start yet.
I think whether my wallet agrees with me or not, I'm gonna have to go out and buy a book, and since this story is here, and the book sounds promising, it'll probably be this one - I've been plagued by thoughts about how the mind works far too much since that story.. damn Slashdot.
hanks, Danila. You may have just solved my little infatuation about the mind.
Finally, our most unique and advanced feature -- consciousness -- is explained.
Oh, really.
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.
Is the ability to be programmed the same as being conscious? So my computer in front of me here is conscious, because I can program it?
Tell me, can she explain why it is that we aren't all just unconscious zombies, doing exactly what we do?
What difference can it possibly make that I experience anything? Don't talk to me about processing- that can all happen equally well if I'm not staring at it.
A movie playing in a theater plays just as well and just the same whether anybody's sitting in it or not.
So, why are we here? Why are we in the theater, watching the show, rather than there just being a theater playing the story of the universe, but nobody's watching it?
Can her explanation of the machinery of the mind- can it answer that one?
(More to my immediate position: Why the hell am I watching a movie about people who argue that nobody's watching the movie? I want my money back!)
Carter explains the illusion of the free will and its evolutionary origins.
So,... Since when is Consciousness the same thing as free will?
I don't care about free will, I care about Consciousness. Experiencing.
While I respect the good doctor's understanding of mechanics, i'm still not understanding how this explains why we're having an experience at all.
You can explain processing mechanisms until you're blue in the face, it's still not going to convince me that there needs to be any anything out there at all- it could all run, exactly as you say, just as well in a program in a supercomputer in a dark closet somewhere, that nobody every saw or heard of.
The eagerness to say "Consciousness is Explained" when it really isn't- that's got to tell you something.
I mean, sure- maybe you have an explanation. But not a convincing one. I could say that blue fairies make people conscious, and my explanation would be: "Blue fairies are why you're conscious." but that doesn't really convince anyone.
Sadly, everyone seems caught up in the Scientists' version of the God of the Gaps: "We just need more complexity. Make it complex enough, and consciousness will just emerge." Yeah. There's a scientific exlpanation for you: "Consciousness just emerges." Just replace the word "emerge" with the word "magicly appear."
Remember, we're not interested in the behavior of machinery. We're interested in why there is an experience, any experience, period. By experience, we're not talking about neural encodings and other Neural Correlates of Consciousness. We're talking about the actual experience, itself.
Why do I care? I'd like a model of the world that includes me in it. I find it inconvenient to keep justifying a world that can account for every single last thing, except the mechanism I use to actually experience it. It's like being able to use a microscope, but not being able to talk about the microscope itself.
You believe in "Know Thyself?" I posit that understanding the motions of the neurons in your brain is only a hair closer to understanding yourself, than understanding the operation of the digits of your fingers, or the brake in your car.
To really know yourself, you have to go all the way.
If free will is an illusion, how can I go on believing that I am a better person than all those bad, evil, stupid people out there? I have made better choices in my life and therefore am more deserving of all the good things I have. Why, I might actually have to feel empathy for them instead of the smug superiority I feel now!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
To my knowledge (from studying quantum mechanics and discussing with philosophers) the "quantum brain idea" doesn't make much sense. Quantum mechanics has more or less proven to us that we cannot predict all events with certainty. Some are necessarily 'random.' However, we are inherently observers that are inside the universe, interacting with all other elements within it. Thus, it is as yet not known whether the fundamental physical laws are truly random or deterministic (both are compatible with quantum mechanics). But there is no scientific support for theories that quantum mechanics "explains" free will by superpositions of states and so forth. QM is a physical theory (i.e.: set of rules) like any other.
In either case, I don't see how free will really exists. Either our actions are entirely predictable (in principle) from a set of physical laws, or our actions are controlled by fundamentally random processes (which means our actions are not controlled by us!).
And, even if there is no free will: we cannot determine it either way.
That's the crux of it, IMHO. Regardless of what is occuring at the most fundamental level, it will always be that we cannot, in principle or in practice, make proper predictions about what others are going to do. Thus, for all intents and purposes, people do have free will. I, for one, accept that free will is an illusion, but that doesn't affect the way that I make choices in my day to day life. It doesn't invalidate the way societies are run (an accused who argues to the judge that he "had no choice but to comit those actions, since free will doesn't really exist" will hear a judge retort "well then I can't stop myself from sentencing you, can I?")
The main site has a bit of questionable material (not all bad, but not all good, either), but his criticism of Rita's work rings true to me.
First of all, he does tell you to feel free to take it with a grain of salt, but "to check it with an expert on brain anatomy or clinical neuroscience".
Secondly, what he says (for the most part) agrees with what I've learned in my research. I am no expert, but my research does involve reproducing cognitive and neurophysiological phenomena of the hippocampus (working on a Ph.D. in Computer Science), and much of my background reading agrees with what Yehouda is saying. Assuming that his quotes of Rita's are valid (I have not read her book), Rita is vastly exaggerating what we know about the brain.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
If you find material like this interesting, you'll also find Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the mysteries of the Human Mind and The Man who mistook his wife for a hat: And other clinical tales by V. S. Ramachandran and Oliver Sacks. I've read the first one and Amazon is shipping the second one to me. Ramachandran goes into detail about Phantom limbs and phantom pain, vision processing by the brain, and gleans information about the brain by examining patients who have different kinds of neurological disorders. He makes some really amazing and intuitive hypotheses and tries out some amazingly simple, yet brilliant experiments to figure how exactly certain parts of the brain work.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
Actually, there are lots of questions that science has never been able to answer. For example, and early challenge to Newton was that he assumed what we today might call "spooky action at a distance" in his theory of planetary motion- in other words, how could planets interact through gravity when they were not touching. Similarly, the "medium" through which EM waves (light) travel was never really explained. Finally, modern quantum theory has its own "spooky action at a distance", which Einstien among others was extremely critical of, that also was never really explained. What happened to these questions? Mostly, people decided to stop caring. How can one argue with such genius, I suppose. Or in other words, why worry about these questions when you can go to the moon. But the questions are still there. What is more, a lot of what we, or at least I, mean by the "mind" is arguably metaphysical, or at least purely subjective. Science can never say anything about either the metaphysical, or about the purely subjective. So when neurobiologists talk about explaining the "mind", they are not necessarily talking about the same concept of mind that you and I are intuitively mean when we talk about the mind. Whether we as a society will eventually decide that their concept of mind is good enough to replace our current one can't really be known at this time. I suppose that probably, most people won't ever really understand the difference well enough to make a judgement. We can look again to the example of physics- if you are not a physicist, your conception of position and momentum and time, and even force, are probably hopelessly naive, at least in the sense that if you tried to do a modern physics experiment, you would have no idea what the results would be.
But pseudoscience the original post is not. Simply criticizing reductionism doesn't mean you are a creationist. I congratulate you, though, of being suspicions of pseudoscience. There is a lot of it these days.
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.
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Coincidentally, today the journal PLoS Biology released an article, where researchers describe a neuronal model they've devised of certain aspects of consciousness.
Synopsis (for the layman): Assessing Consciousness: Of Vigilance and Distractedness
Research paper: Ongoing Spontaneous Activity Controls Access to Consciousness: A Neuronal Model for Inattentional Blindness
In general, Stanislas Dehaene (one of the paper's authors) has some very cool publications on neuroscience, consciousness, cognition, and so forth. You can find them here.
Here's a quote from the aforementioned synopsis:
Have you ever walked smack into a parking meter or tripped over something on the sidewalk? Embarrassing as such incidents may be, they're the product of normal brain function. The brain is continuously bombarded with sensory information about the environment but perceives just a fraction of these inputs. The rest--pertinent details or not--is filtered out. It's thought that consciousness emerges from the activity of multiple spontaneous neural processors that run in parallel and connect to a higher order cognitive network that mediates the conscious perception. But this higher order network has limited processing capacity. That means if you're distracted, your brain can't accommodate additional sensory information, like "there's a parking meter in front of you, look out!"
To understand how spontaneous brain processing interacts with higher order cognition, Stanislas Dehaene and Jean-Pierre Changeux modeled the dynamic properties of brain activity with computer simulations. Their simulations show that while spontaneous brain activity sometimes facilitates processing, more often it competes with external stimuli for access to consciousness. Intriguingly, the results of the computer simulations very closely match physiological and psychophysical experimental data and thus shed new light on how intrinsic brain activity modulates conscious perception.
With higher vigilance states, weaker external stimuli are able to ignite the global workspace. But paying attention to one thing narrows your perceptive capacity. Once ignited by one stimulus, the network cannot consciously process any others. Dehaene and Changeux propose that spontaneous activity--which operates within an "anatomically distinct set of workplace neurons"--offers an organism a measure of autonomy relative to the external world. While this decoupling of internal thought and external stimuli does have its disadvantages--like that pesky parking meter--it also provides the opportunity for introspection and creativity, which the authors argue is likely to "play a crucial role in the spontaneous generation of novel, flexible behavior."
Books like Rita Carter's are the junk-tabloids of brain studies. Our understanding of the brain is so small and limited...why these books keep coming out? Why do they push fragile disputed theories as "Consciousness Explained!" ?
If you want to learn about neuroscience in an easy-to-swallow format, read Oliver Sacks
* He's a practicing neurologist, with a deep knowledge of the subjects he covers (unlike Rita Carter, who's a clueless popularizer)
* He covers many of the same cases at Rita Carter with greater insight
* He doesn't throw around wild exaggerations, (it seems that Rita Carter is hoping her reader won't know any better).
Forget Rita Carter, go pick up Oliver Sacks's "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat".