The Believing Brain

The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies - How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them As Truths
© 2011 Michael Shermer
400 pages

The human brain is an incredible organ, capable of storing vast amounts of information and using that information creativity, to change the world and to fascinate itself.  It is also a belief-making engine. In The Believing Brain, psychologist and skeptic Michael Shermer examines the nature of belief and the biology which sustains it. He then applies lessons learned there to evaluate human beliefs in politics, religion,  and the paranormal.

Most readers will have heard the expression that there is a thin line between genius and insanity. The Believing Brain bears this out, because the same abilities of the brain that allow for creativity, insight, and wisdom can lead to conspiracies and schizophrenia.  Human intelligence is based on the ability of our brains to discern patterns:  to associate a noise or a smell in the wild with a looming predator, to interpret behavior as safe or hostile. Because the biological incentives for robust pattern-detection are great -- literally life and death  -- humans are extraordinarily good at it, to the point that we see things that aren't there, like human faces in Mars or in whorls in wood.  The same pattern-making ability that allowed early farmers to plan their labors by the seasons also led them to believing the position of the sun in the sky at the time of their birth meant good or ill.

Another key concept of the early book is the pervasive tendency for humans to believe there's a force behind the patterns -- an agent.  Early on Shermer addressees dualism, which in this context refers to a divide between the mind and the body.   Shermer's most recent publication, Heavens on Earth, rebukes (among other things) the transhumanist fantasy of downloading brains into computers and achieving life eternal.   The brain and our minds are inseparable, Shermer states; every aspect of our personalities has a physical cause within the cranium, and it's a little disconcerting to realize at first.  Just as we think of a ghost in the machine -- a discrete Mind controlling the body -- we tend to look for a purpose behind the connections we see, inventing conspiracies . We all experience this -- a stray thought that the universe is plotting against us when the traffic lights are all red during a trip made in haste.  Our brains continually invent stories to explain what happens; even if a person's nervous system is manipulated by outside lab equipment,  prompting them to suddenly stand up,  the subject will instantly invent a reason why he stood up -- "I wanted to get a Coke".

Shermer has previously examined beliefs like alien abductions, conspiracies, etc. in detail, using books like Why People Believe Weird Things. Here he dissects them again in brief, but chiefly as as an extension of the aforementioned discussion on patterns and agency.  Shermer believes that alien abductions and conspiracies have erupted in part to fill the vacuum created by secularization.  Societies were once bound together by religions which gave the cosmos and the beings within it meaning; now, many people are led to recreate that sense of meaning  by attaching themselves to causes which are part of a grand narrative of the world.

Crucial to understanding belief -- any belief -- is that emotions precede reason.   Whatever our pretensions, human beings are not rational creatures who approach a subject, collect facts, and then determine whether this or that policy is effective, or this suspicion is valid.   Instead, we lean in toward ideas; we attach ourselves to things that sound good, and then support them with facts.  A disciplined mind can then correct itself  -- but we're inherently believers.  The more emotionally active our brain is at the time of encountering an idea, the less likely we are to make a rational decision.

There's an enormous amount to process in a book like this, and it recommends itself to those with an interest in lucid thinking.

The Future of the Mind

The Future of the Mind: the Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind
© 2014 Michio Kaku
400 pages

In The Future of the Mind, physicist Michio Kaku talks with psychologists and neurologists like V.S. Ramachandran (Phantoms in the Brain, The Tell-Tale Brain) and Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate, The Language Instinct) to find out: what do we know about the brain, and how will we be using that in the future?    Although he's confessedly writing outside of his arena, Kaku  does his best to pass along current progress in neurology, which is beginning to understand how memories are stored, how the brain is networked, and is even attempting to manipulate the brain according to this fledgling knowledge.  Especially provoking is the idea that the two lobes of our brain are both semi-conscious, constantly jostling for attention,  The essential thing to realize about the brain, says Kaku, is that it runs on electromagnetism like thing else: we can thus contrive machines to gauge its activity and even interact with it. This is starting to be done on a small scale as scientists manipulate mice by stimulating certain parts of their brain with light or somesuch, triggering them to blink at will.  These machines can in a limited sense even "read" minds, or at least determine whether a person is thinking about another person, or an object, or music -- different areas of the brain light up depending.  But more technological-neurological interaction may one day allow stroke victims to once again interact with their environment, and to counter diseases like Alzheimers.  Kaku also includes wilder speculation like recording dreams and downloading memories, and as in his Physics of the Future includes a great many pop culture references -- using films like The Matrix and Surrogates.    Of course, a book on technology and intelligence can't very well miss robotics and artificial intelligence, so there's a good dose all around. I found this book much more interesting than Physics of the Future, in part because Kaku focused so much on toys, and here there's a great deal of emphasis on health.  It's very speculative in parts, but I found the science and the work in progress today to be utterly fascinating, especially appreciating the comments on artificial intelligence and robots.

The Shallows

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains
© 2010 Nicholas Carr
276 pages

How many tabs do you have open right now? Neil Postman thought we were undoing ourselves with a distracting and busy fusion of information and entertainment back in the mid-1980s when he penned several works on technology and society. As Nicholas Carr demonstrates in this curious blend of science and cultural criticism, Postman's fears hadn't begun to be realized  At least since the 1990s, people have referred to the Internet as an information superhighway, but the metaphor is no longer apt; it is inadequate to describe the tide of information that sweeps over us any time we visit a website, and the idea of that tide being directed in a way comparable to a highway is simply false. Websites today brim with energy; they are positively alive with interactive features and an abundance of links to other sections of the site. We do not even need to sit down in front of a desktop computer to be touched by all this activity; it reaches out and grabs at our attention through cellphones, tablets, and now sunshades. We can praise the internet for allowing access to so much information at once, but how are our brains responding to it?  Carr argues that while we view the rise of the internet as progressive, in an important way we are reverting.

He builds his argument in three stages; first, introducing readers to the ways that technology can alter our thinking. He uses the rise of print culture as his primary example, demonstrating how it allowed for the growth of a rich intellectual tradition. As we became readers, we became thinkers, spending long hour processing the dense amount of information in a given text, mulling over it in our minds -- considering implications and incorporating the ideas into our very minds. Neil Postman covered the cultural aspects of this, but Carr complements it with neurology, catching readers up to speed on neuroplasticity.Our brains never stop changing: throughout our lives, our actions inform our brains where to invest its limited resources; as we practice new skills, like music or using computers, we become better at them. The catch is that those mental resources are limited: as we grow in one area, we will tend to shrink in another. Brainspace dedicated to older skills that we no longer use shrinks. That is the essential problem Carr is concerned with: as we grow accustomed to dealing with the internet's wealth of bite-sized chunks of information, we're losing that deep-reading ability. That ability was an anomaly in human history; it allowed us to concentrate and digest fully a given set of information; now, we are regressing, losing that refined focus. In addition, we are growing ever more dependent on the internet to store information, to memorize for us. In regards to trivia, esoteric, or other information which we only need occasionally, this is a bonus; it allows our brain to concentrate on more important matters. But we stand in danger of  not being able to rely on ourselves to retain working knowledge; how many of us know our friends' phone numbers anymore?

Carr is not a pessimist with regards to the internet, but he does believe we may be losing something vital in our zeal to be ever-connected. He closes by advocating for a more moderate approach: by all means, let us use the internet's interconnectivity to our advantage, but at the same time he urges us to strive to focus on maintaining old skills of memory and reflection.

Carr definitely offers food for thought. Barring some world-changing disaster, the Internet is here to stay. I do not see the trend toward interconnectivity tapering off, let alone stopping. It will continue to change our lives, and as we use it, it will continue to shape our minds and behavior. We should be mindful of the dynamic which exists between us and our tool use, conscience that our brains are being rewired with every use. Ultimately individuals will have to determine how comfortable they are relating to that network. The Shallows is important to consider, though I would recommend Postman's works for the media-mind connection. There are numerous other works about the role of the internet in our lives which I personally intend on reading, like Sherry Turkel's Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, and Hamlet's Blackberry by William Powell.


Related:
Is Google Making Us Stupid?, Nicholas Carr
Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman
Technopoly, Neil Postman
The Shallows review at Technology Liberation Front

Incognito

Incognito: the Secret Lives of the Brain
© 2011 David Eagleman
304 pages

Carl Sagan once described astronomy as a 'profoundly humbling experience', for it allows us to appreciate how infinitesimally small Earth -- and ourselves --are in relation to the size of the Cosmos. David Eagleman sees neurology in very much the same way, and even uses Copernicus and Galileo as his models in introducing the study of the brain to lay readers. While those two astronomers unseated the heavens by helping people to realize Earth is not the center of the universe, neurology makes us realize we are not the center of ourselves. The conscience self is a very small part of an incredibly intricate and surprisingly autonomous brain.

The brain has always fascinated me. While those of us raised in the west are typically taught to take for granted that there is a separate, inviolable "I"-- a true Self, a soul -- residing in us, aspects of that "self", like our personality, have been proven to be tied to the ordinary grey matter of the brain and its millions of firing synapses. And from another angle -- that of philosophy or religion -- we seem to have not one Self, but multiple selves, each with its own ideas. Our brains produce thoughts completely without our input: are "we" really in control?  I'm reminded of a line from the Christian writer Paul: "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do."  But while Paul decided that he was a man possessed by sin, neurology can shed more light on the subject. Eagleman describes our brains as a 'team of rivals', an organ which has preserved several different evolutionary approaches to solving the same problem -- and while this allows us to be fundamentally creative creatures, it leads to self-conflict, self-conflict that requires that which we call consciousness. That small, minute portion of our brain can make important decisions, but it is rather like the CEO at the head of an international company -- a crucial, but overwhelmingly minor part. The vast majority of our body's and our brain's activity is completely concealed from us, and Eagleman's examples -- written for a lay audience - -should astonish those completely new to the subject.  I have a hearty appreciation for the subject matter (having read V.S. Ramachandran's Phantoms in the Brain), but found Incognito a fun reminder.

Incognito is open to all readers, though those who are more versed in the subject matter (readers of Ramachandran, Daniel Dennett, and Stephen Pinker, say) may find it a bit  light in content.

The Mind's Eye

The Mind's Eye
© 2010 Oliver Sacks
263 pages

Few things are more pertinent to the study of the human experience than the exploration of our minds, our brains -- just what are they capable of, and how thoroughly do they create our version of reality?  After reading V.S. Ramachandran's Phantoms in the Brain, I realized that reality as I see it is something like a computer-rendered experience,  one created by my brain. When the brain's abilities and qualities are changed, the rendered experience changes as a consequence.  In The Mind's Eye, Oliver Sacks examines cases of his which display people and their brains' ability to adjust to being diminished.  The cases recorded here vary greatly, detailing the accounts of people who have lost abilities we take for granted -- like recognizing faces and reading.

Though Sacks is a neurological doctor,  the brain is such a delicate organ that attempting to undo damage caused by strokes is largely impossible at our current technological level. Instead, he attempts to understand  what is causing  a given person's loss of perception and marvels at how resilient we can be.  In one initial case,  a stroke victim who lost her ability to read text and music learned to rely to memorize new material strictly by sound:  she even gained the ability to transpose music in her mind, then play it intuitively without having an outside reference like sheet music or notes. In another chapter, a man who lost his sight claimed that he could 'read' the landscape by listening to the rain beat upon it. Sacks does not specify as to why some faculties increase in the absence of others, but I would think I likely explanation is that of interference:  if the brain no longer has visual input to contend with,  we can pay more attention to auditory stimuli.  I'd also wager that the increased capacity for memory is a function of necessity: how impressive would we moderns find the memory of people who lived before writing and who depended on oral tradition for the transmission of grand mythological stories?

Some of the case studies involve other neurologists, and Sacks is no exception: he includes his own experiences in the chapter on face blindness, and records his visual distortions during a bout with cancer in his eye. He includes journal entries from his hospital trips and pictures in which he attempted to convey how his central vision was making the world appear to them.  Though not, strictly speaking, a science text, Sack's approach is considerably closer to Ramachandran's than Gary Small's. Reading it impressed me all the more the idea that reality is not something we view through the windows of our senses -- but something constructed from within our brainpans. This was a fascinating look inside, and I'm eager to read more of Sacks. Though The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is of most interest, An Anthropologist on Mars also sounds fun.

Related:

• Phantoms in the Brain, V.S. Ramachandran
• Oliver Sacks' Official Website