I once asserted, “No, I did not leave that cabinet door open!” even as I stood before the open cabinet in a house where I had been the only occupant, the only cabinet-opening suspect, until the accuser arrived. Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American is a mystery with only one suspect, but it still works. I still maintain my innocence in the face of that cabinet-opening accusation!
In the interest of being correct, skepticism of any new claims is always warranted. Skepticism is what drives scientists into great piles of data until the results convince them one way or another.
Someday, some sort of scan, whatever succeeds fMRI, will have the spatial and temporal resolution required to watch individual axons and astrocytes in real people in real time. Meanwhile, we are a picture within a picture studying a picture that’s out of focus.
10.4 SO HERE WE ARE
Your continued experience of this existence comes from the eighty to one hundred billion neurons in your head exchanging spikes of electrical energy. That seems to be it.
The neural cell body transmits a signal down an axon. The axon connects to thousands of dendrites, mostly those of other neurons, but it can also generate feedback to its own source. Groups of neurons process the data collected by our senses and feed their results up to other groups of neurons at ever-higher levels of abstraction, processors we’ve developed by virtue of our elastic, plastic, trainable brains. Each processor is like a recipe or an algorithm; they take signals in, modify them, and spit new things out. Neuroscience can’t tell us yet how many distinct algorithms we can train, but rest assured that you’re capable of training more than you’re going to need in this life-time—which is another way of saying that you won’t live up to your potential, but it’s okay. All your gray and white matter combines into webs of networks and, from those, well, here you are, looking good.
Since this is the last chapter, I feel compelled to say something deeply profound. To make it look even deeper, I put it in a table.
SOMETHING DEEPLY PROFOUND
“The continued flow of signals among neurons in your brain provides your experience of existence.”
Table 2: Something deeply profound.
We’ve only been people gossiping, complaining, and laughing together for something like 250,000 years, not even fifteen thousand generations. We started out staring at the Moon and the stars. Eclipses scared the crap out of us. We feel love and awe, happiness and contentment, certainty and doubt, fear and surprise, anger and grief, boredom, engagement, and distraction—the truth is, we’re packed with feelings. Are we sensitive? Yes, we can safely say that humans are sensitive. So we write poetry, make art, perform music, and dance. Everything we do is a dance of some form or another. We have family, friends, colleagues, and associates—we travel in tribes.
But I’m left with some questions.
How the hell did we go from fearing eclipses to postulating multiple universes? How did we go from telling stories around camp-fires to watching blockbuster movies and playing video games in virtual reality? How did we decide that tribes were so great that we should invent politics, economies, and militaries?
Which I guess boils down to one question: Why do we make things so damn complicated? I have an idea. Let’s relax and put on some tunes. Get yourself a beer and, while you’re up, grab one for me too.
11
BIBLIOGRAPHY
IN POPULAR SCIENCE WRITTEN FOR A LAY audience, like you and me, I don’t like footnotes. When they’re useful, they destroy narrative flow by forcing us to jump back and forth across the entire text to get to their nuggets of wisdom. If the nugget is so wise, then it should be built into the text. When they’re not useful, just dangling citations, then why bother? Citations play important roles in refereed journal articles. In this book, whenever we hit a topic that wasn’t all that well established, like Allan Snyder’s idea of how to induce the savant phenomenon, or was someone’s invention, like V. S. Ramachandran’s rules of neuroaesthetics, I told you who the source was.
In any case, here’s a list of books for you to check out that cover different aspects of what we’ve done here in greater detail. Most of them are written by practicing professional neuroscientists. I’ve marked my top-five, all-time favorite neuroscience books but listed them in alphabetical order.
11.1 RECOMMENDED RELATED READING
1.Robert Burton, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not, St. Martin’s Press, 2008.
One of my top-five, all-time favorite neuroscience books. Written in a curious, authentic tone by a neurologist, Bob guides us through the question of how we come to believe what we know.
2.Robert Burton, A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves, St. Martin’s Press, 2013. In this one, Bob works through the holes in the data and warns us about what is and isn’t on solid scientific ground.
3.Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Broadway Books, 2012.
Cain includes lots of studies of how people operate individually and in groups. There’s plenty of good stuff here, but she cherry-picks studies that support her argument that introverts kick extroverts’ asses—as an introvert, I applaud this—and quotes studies with highly uncertain evidence that can mislead people who’ve never studied statistics.
4.Rita Carter, Mapping the Mind, University of California Press, updated edition, 2010.
One of my top-five, all-time favorite neuroscience books. Rita Carter is a medical journalist and her books are big, colorful, and wonderfully illustrated works that describe every gyri and sulci. She does her level best to identify processing centers in every instance where the field has provided evidence. If you want to know the anatomical details, this is the book for you.
5.Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow, Basic Books, 1997.
6.Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Penguin Books, 1994; and Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, Vintage Books, 2010.
Dr. Damasio did the pioneering research on the emotion-reason connection.
7.Stanislaus Dehaene, The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics, Oxford University Press, 2011.
Dehaene makes the case that quantitative understanding is like a sense. If you’re a teacher and want to understand why mathematics is difficult for so many people and figure out better ways to teach it, read this book.
I particularly enjoyed the studies he referenced on how birds and animals (other than humans) count and estimate quantities.
8.Paul Ekman, Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life, second edition, Holt Paperbacks, 2007.
9.Gerald M. Edelman, Wider Than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness, Yale University Press, 2005.
This is a little rough going, but if you have a background in science, reading this book is like sitting at the knee of a genius as he struggles with the questions that drive him.
10.Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who’s in Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain, HarperCollins, 2011.
Dr. Gazzaniga has done a great deal of work studying the complementary and collaborative functions of the left and right hemispheres and has written a pleasant, heartfelt, and readable book.
11.Steven Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, W.W. Norton, 1981.
12.Jeff Hawkins, On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines, St. Martin’s
Press, 2004.
Great food for thought about plasticity and how the brain develops algorithms and adapts to situations, all oriented toward the physical source of intelligence.
13.Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, Basic Books, 2007. This has lots of great stuff about nonlinearity, chaos, and feedback loops.
14.Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, Scribner, 2001.
15.Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight: Th
e Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, Random House, 2012.
One of my top-five, all-time favorite neuroscience books. I love this book! One of those rare cases when it’s worth paying extra to get the hardcover version. Big, beautifully formatted, with tons of color pictures, and Dr. Kandel, Nobel laureate for his pioneering work in memory, writes in kind of an innocent, curious voice— he even includes a picture of his wife as an example of beauty.
This book had a huge influence on how I approached the subject. I learned a great deal about value and empathy and the neural interactions of creators and beholders from The Age of Insight.
16.Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011.
Written by an economics Nobel laureate, this is an in-depth discussion of unconscious bottom-up processors and conscious top-down processors. Rather than use a metaphor, the way I did with unconscious thoughts boiling or percolating up into top-down consciousness, he simply calls them system 1 and system 2.
17.Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, MIT Press, 2012.
One of my top-five, all-time favorite neuroscience books because of his forthcoming, personal writing style, or because he’s a physicist and I speak his language, or maybe because we agreed on the topic of free will, so I was primed to love it.
This book was a key source for the idea that consciousness could be a spectrum rather than a complexity threshold effect and how integrated information theory might be able to calculate the degree of consciousness of a system.
18.Matthew D. Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains are Wired to Connect, Crown Publishers, 2013.
Lieberman has a different view of human interaction than most researchers. For example, he expresses a lot of doubt about the existence of mirror neurons and offers less conventional ideas on topics like autism and theory of mind, and he is a proponent of mentalizing.
19.Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press, 2009.
20.Isaac Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 1687; in English, Principia, 1728.
21.Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, W.W. Norton, 1997.
22.V. S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human, W.W. Norton, 2011.
Definitely one of my top-five, all-time favorite neuroscience books. He covers his rules of neuroaesthetics, the main topic of our chapter 8. While he tends to leap a bit before looking, that is, he doesn’t quite require a preponderance of evidence before accepting a discovery, his ideas are wonderful, and he writes with curiosity and bemusement.
23.Sebastian Seung, Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.
24.David Shenk, The Genius in All of Us: New Insights into Genetics, Talent, and IQ, Anchor Books, 2010.
25.Mark Turner, The Origin of Ideas: Blending, Creativity, and the Human Spark, Oxford University Press, 2014.
11.2 OTHER STUFF THAT SHOWED UP HERE
26.Douglas Adams, A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Pan Books, 1979.
27.Chuck Berry, Johnny B. Goode, Chess Studios, 1958.
28.Elvis Costello and Paul McCartney, “Veronica,” from the album Spike, Warner Brothers, 1989.
29.Richard Feynman, Robert Leighton, and Matthew Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Addison-Wesley, 1963.
30.Graham Greene, The Quiet American, William Heinemann, 1958.
31.Allen Ginsburg, Howl and Other Poems, City Lights Books, 1955.
32.Nick Hornby, High Fidelity, Riverhead, 1996.
33.Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Viking Press, 1957.
34.Tony Magee, So You Want to Start a Brewery?: The Lagunitas Story, Chicago Review Press, 2014; Lagunitas IPA, a twelve gang of twelves, Lagunitas Brewery, 2016; Lagunitas Dogtown Pale Ale, 12 oz. bottle, Lagunitas Brewery, 2016.
35.Monty Python, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Handmade Films, 1979.
36.Poison, “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” from the album Open Up and Say…Ahhhl Capitol, 1988.
37.Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo’s Dream, Spectra, 2009.
38.Shunryu Suzuki, Beginner’s Mind, Shambhala Publications, 2006.
39.Mark Twain, Following the Equator, American Publishing, 1897.
FROM THE AUTHOR
Thank you for reading The Left Brain Speaks, the Right Brain Laughs. Thank you even more for buying it.
Before thanking everyone who helped make this book possible, I’d like to apologize for any wisecracks that might have offended you. If you crack enough wise, you’re doomed to drop some boners, but I certainly don’t intend offense. I’d also like to apologize for those instances when I’ve mistaken universal human traits with traits engendered by different cultures. Cultural errors are experimental biases that, in this field, have a sick legacy of providing the rationale for evil behavior.
You might have noticed the seemingly random way that I chose between “she” and “he” when referring to generic individuals. Let me confirm that I did indeed let a random number generator make the choice whenever one of these pronouns was needed.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Now, in alphabetical order, here are the people who tried to help me correct my misunderstandings about neuroscience, music, art, history, biology, information theory, and chaos by combing through early drafts of the manuscript: Steve Allen, Bill Bonnet, Joshua Gibson, Brad Henderson, Robert Kennedy, and Lee Sawyer. The list of neuroscientists who provided answers and education is too long to list, even if I’d kept track well enough for it to be inclusive. The bibliography includes texts for laypeople that cover everything that showed up here.
I’d also like to thank legendary publisher Brenda Knight. One day in 2012, Brenda asked me about my second novel, The Sensory Deception, which I’d just finished. After describing the neuroscience basis for the “sensory saturation” virtual reality technology my characters develop to convert people into environmentalists, she said, “Hey, why don’t you write a neuroscience book for me?” I said, “Huh?” And she said, “Sure, you’re a scientist and a writer, it’d be awesome!” So I did and I enjoyed every second of it.
I’d also like to thank everyone at both the Berkeley and Jersey City versions of Viva Editions for creating the beautiful work that you hold in your hands and for tolerating me, especially Josephine Mellon, who combed through this draft with you in mind and warmth and affection in her heart.
And, of course, thanks to Karen, Professor Buckley, and Dear Abby because nothing happens without the support of your mate and your dogs.
NOTE TO YOU
It says on my business card that I’m a scientist, technologist, and novelist. So let me confess my personal reasons for writing this book: As a technologist, I’m acutely aware that the innovation necessary to solve big problems occurs when we take a concept from one field and apply it to another and I wanted to know how that works. As a novelist, I set out to understand the best techniques for developing characters and plots that engage readers, to really put them into my stories. As a veteran scientist, I wanted to understand the art of science; why we pursue elegant descriptions and why we study what we study. I hope that this book has helped you understand your innovative engine and that you can now squeeze out a bit more creative horsepower than you could before.
Books are capsules of thought and reading one is akin to reading the author’s mind. It’s an intimate experience that ought to breed familiarity. To that end, it’s only fair that you share your thoughts with me. Please send me a note: [email protected].
My website is www.ransomstephens.com. It has links to my science articles and to my other books. My first novel, The God Patent (47North, 2010), is set in the culture war between science and religion, the story of a laid-off engineer who gets caught between science and religion in a battle over the origin of the universe and the existence of the soul; plus, you’ll get an easy-to-swallow dose of quantum
physics. The Sensory Deception (47North, 2013) is about three scientists and a venture capitalist who set out to save the environment by putting people in the minds of endangered animals; you’ll get a ride in Moby Dick’s head as well as a tour of Silicon Valley tech development and a visit with Somali pirates. My next two novels, The 99% Solution (coming in 2017) and Too Rich to Die (probably 2018) are thought provoking and funny international inter-dimensional thrill rides.
Should it ever be relevant, and I hope it will be, I prefer beer to wine, tea to coffee, hard rock to jazz, and I find solace in yelling obscenities at Oakland Raiders home games. See you in the Black Hole.
Ransom Stephens, Ph.D.
Petaluma, California, March 2016
The Left Brain Speaks, the Right Brain Laughs Page 24