Mapping the Mind

danila (Danila Medvedev) writes "'Gnothi seauton' was the precept inscribed in gold letter upon the temple of the Oracle of Delphi. The authorship of this famous maxim was ascribed to every great Greek philosopher, from Pythagoras to Socrates. According to Juvenal, this precept descended from heaven. It is immensely strange, then, that most people, including you, my dear reader, never really make the effort to 'know thyself.' The number of misconceptions, superstitions and myths that we spread about ourselves is indeed astonishing. Fortunately for you, someone else has already taken the time to understand you and present the results in entertaining, easily digestible, but at the same time scientifically rigorous format. Let me introduce Mapping the Mind by Rita Carter, an illustrated user manual to the software that runs inside our skulls -- the human mind." Read on for the rest of Medvedev's review. Mapping the Mind author Rita Carter, Christopher Frith pages 224 publisher University of California Press rating 10 reviewer Danila Medvedev ISBN 0520224612 summary Extensive illustrations drawing on the lastest in brain imaging techniques, along with expert text, makes this book especially imformative and a wonderful companion to other titles in neuroscience.

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.

Comments

I do know myself

[suso]

As a matter of fact, I used to have a sweatshirt that said "Know Thyself" with a picture of Socrates on it. That was in high school. People read it and told me that was gay. Then I tried wearing it in college once about 4 years later. People read it and told me it was a cool shirt. Go figure.

Mapping the average mind

[Anonymous Coward]

Input -> /dev/null
/dev/random -> Output

I read the first edition

[farmhick]

It was called Dianetics. ;^)

Coming soon on /.

[janek78]

Google launches a new service the "Google map of your mind"! Find out what you are really thinking, zoom in on areas of interest, let your friends know where they stand in your mind! Only on Google, coming soon (beta).

Also useful reading

[Hentai]

Why we Lie, by David Livingston Smith

The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris

Easy!

[Renraku]

Mapping the mind is easy. Just find neuron #1.

If you liked that...

[mike260]

...the 2003 Reith lecture was also rather good.

not suprising..

[ShaniaTwain]

they were just being juvenal.

Re:not suprising..

[nacturation]

Gee thanks I couldn't possibly have "gotten" that oh-so-confusing joke without someone explaining it in every minute detail.

Oh sure... you may have gotten the reference, but not all of us are gay enough to have studied philosophy.

Not exactly a Treatise

[killercoder]

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

Can't help but wonder...

[ReverendLoki]

It's like ignoring the EULAs and looking at the source code for your mind for the first time.

So, just what sort of licensing scheme would the average mind have anyways?

Slightly Misleading

[mr.newt]

The review leaves one with the impression that this Rita Carter person explains more in this book than scientists actually know. Let me save everyone the suspense and say that no, she doesn't.

For instance, "explaining Alzheimer's" is an extremely misleading statement. She might explain what we currently know about Alzheimer's, but that is sadly little.

I'm not saying the book is no good (how should I know?), just that the review is a little misleading.

Re:Slightly Misleading

[selectspec]

from a book review on Amazon:

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.

Re:Slightly Misleading

[kebes]

Okay, I'll bite and respond to the quoted review...

They might tell you _that_ I'm thinking, but not _what_ I'm thinking.

Very true. We have a long way to go before statements like "a brain scan reveals our thoughts" will be valid.

Thoughts, moods, and memories--unlike bones--are not physical, empirical quantities.

They are not physical, that's for sure... but to claim that they are neither empirical nor measurable is not valid. Scientists can come up with an operational definition of any particular thought or emotion, and track empirical correlations with other measureables (like other emotions, states of mind, blood levels of chemicals, brain scan data, etc.). This operational definition of, say, "love" can be chosen so that it closely maps to what most people call "love." Whether or not the chosen definition (and resulting empirical data) actually captures "love" properly is a philosophical question, not a scientific one. Each person is entitled to their own philosophy, but such conjecture is not provable.

a brain scan will not, however, tell you the nature or content of those thoughts and feelings

This is true today. Brain scans today are not able to exactly discern what thought a person is thinking. However, that doesn't mean that some sufficiently advanced combination of brain scanning techniques couldn't discern (with reasonable accuracy, say 95%) what emotion or thought a person was thinking. I'm not saying that such a technology will be invented, but at present from the scientific data available it seems plausible that this may well be done one day. More importantly, nothing has ruled out the possibility yet. The review-poster is falling into falacies of assuming that the internal state of a person's mind is unknowable in principle, just because today, in practice, we can't do this. In any case, most experts on the subject do feel that it is possible, in principle, to map a person's brain activity and make accurate guesses as to what thoughts they are thinking.

To simply reduce conscious experience to brain activity is to completely obliterate it: thoughts and feelings are reduced to electricity and neurochemicals;

This is an empassionated appeal to "the human spirit," but is utterly devoid of any persuasive argument.

what remains is a flat and faded one-dimensional cosmos

If something is "flat" it is usually two-dimensional, not one-dimensional. In any case, if something is one-dimensional, then it is redundant at best (and wrong at worst) to label it as "flat"... (sorry, I couldn't resist)

Scientific materialism is ... always self-contradictory.

The review-poster comits the falacy of generalizing. Because a single book overstates the state-of-the-art in brain scanning, suddenly all of scientific materialism is a wasted effort? Sounds more like someone using any available argument to push a philosophical agenda.

Maybe there are some subtleties I'm not getting here, but by and large this review sounds like an unsubstantiated bash of scientific reasoning, rather than a critical review of what brain imaging can tell us about human thought.

Something's wrong here...

[SmokeHalo]

Fortunately for you, someone else has already taken the time to understand you and present the results in entertaining, easily digestible, but at the same time scientifically rigorous format.
How perfect for those of us who need instant results in this fast-food, breakneck-pace world. Who needs years of introspection and self-enlightenment when you can read about it on the train to work?

Mistaking his wife for a hat

[jayhawk88]

Bob: Hey Fred, how are you?
Fred: Terrible Bob; I hate my wife, but I don't know how to break it off with her.
Bob: Well, I had an uncle once who used to get rid of girlfriends he was tired of by acting insane.
Fred: Really? And that worked?
Bob: Oh, sure. He'd start pretending like he was hearing voices, or thought he was Prince Albert, stuff like that. Eventually the gals just got fed up and left him.
Fred: I don't know...How could this work on my wife? We've been married 10 years!
Bob: Well, just go for something really crazy. Pretend that you think she's a hat or something like that.
Fred: Say, great idea! I'll start tonight!
Bob: Just remember, gotta stick with it, no matter what!

Re:Man who mistook his wife for a hat

[spacecowboy420]

"The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat"

I think my girlfriend has the same "problem", except she thinks my face is a bicycle seat. I really don't consider it a negative though :-)

If you REALLY want to know yourself,...

[LionKimbro]

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.

Two small requests ...

[Luscious868]

1) Map the female mind first

2) Ladies, before your relationship gets too serious, give your man a compimentary copy instead of expecting him to know what your thinking (and more importantly, feeling) all of the time

It would save us all a lot of time and trouble. Most guys are easy to figure out: sex, money, power, position, and a good time. The exact order depends on the person, and there may be a few other factors thrown in the mix and one or two on the list that I gave that may not be much of a factor, but that's basically it. Almost anything your typical guy will say or do can be explained by that list, with minor modifications based on his personality and personal traits.

You women, on the other hand. Many of you are impossible to figure out. We could use a little help.

The main site has some crackpottery...

[benhocking]

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.

Re:Man who mistook his wife for a hat

[OECD]

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.