Awareness may be mostly mystery, but Damasio shapes its hints and glimmerings into an imaginative, informed narrative.
Damasio (Director/Univ. of Southern California Brain and Creativity Inst.; Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, 2003, etc.) seeks to understand “the mystery of consciousness.”
“Consciousness is a state of mind in which there is knowledge of one’s own existence and of the existence of surroundings”—i.e., where the self introduces the property of subjectivity to the mix. The mind emerges as it composes patterns, “mapping” the world as it interacts with it, just as it maps its own processes. It will appropriate the sensory experiences and make them its own. “Ultimately consciousness allows us to perceive maps as images,” writes Damasio, “to manipulate those images, and to apply reasoning to them.” The author entertains the unconventional idea that mind processing begins at the brain-stem level, not in the cerebral cortex alone, and charts the interaction of the brain stem, the cerebral cortex and the thalamus, taking elementary mind processes through to imagination, reasoning and eventually language. He provides a well-rendered explanation for the role of consciousness in the natural selection of evolution by meeting an organism’s needs through orientation and organization. Along the way, Damasio confronts such slippery characters as feelings, emotions, the will to prevail, biological value and homeostasis, and he also looks carefully at neuroanatomical reference. Consciousness, in the author’s well-tempered and rangy explication, “resembles the execution of a symphony of Mahlerian proportions. But the marvel…is that the score and the conductor become reality only as life unfolds.” And its many players are responsible for everything from internal housekeeping to “placing the self in an evanescent here and now, between a thoroughly lived past and an anticipated future, perpetually buffeted between the spent yesterdays and the tomorrows that are nothing but possibilities.”
Awareness may be mostly mystery, but Damasio shapes its hints and glimmerings into an imaginative, informed narrative.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-37875-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Scientific literacy has become one of the catchwords of education—so why does a noted educator claim that universal scientific literacy is neither attainable nor desirable? Shamos, professor emeritus of Physics at New York University and former president of the National Science Teachers Association, traces the push for scientific literacy to a mistaken perception that America has a shortage of trained scientists and concern over declining science test scores. Granted, the difficulty of most scientific disciplines leads to a substantial dropout rate among the unmotivated at the high school and college levels. But while many students express a vague interest in science, there is no evidence that improving science instruction would increase the number of citizens competent to decide on public issues involving scientific questions, or slow the growth of antiscientific New Age philosophies and attacks on the ``elitism'' of science. And in fact, the supply of working scientists and science educators appears to be adequate to real demands; nationwide, fewer than 0.2% of job openings for high school science teachers go unfilled in a given year. Rather than force-feeding science to a population that fails to see its relevance, Shamos advocates a curriculum emphasizing a broad appreciation of the nature of the scientific enterprise for most students, solid training for the career-oriented, and an acceptance of the need for experts in resolving scientific issues that affect society as a whole. As for the perception that America's graduate schools are populated with foreign nationals who take their knowledge back home, he has a simple suggestion: Offer any student earning a Ph.D. in a scientific subject an automatic green card, thus insuring a steady supply of highly motivated new talent for the American scientific and technological marketplace. Shamos's style is dry and didactic, but his points are well reasoned and worth careful consideration.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8135-2196-3
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Rutgers Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
This biography of the astronomer for whom the space telescope is named offers a fascinating view of how the scientific elite lived in the period between the world wars. Born in Marshfield, Mo., in 1889, Hubble was an outstanding student and athlete at the University of Chicago and won a Rhodes scholarship. On his return home from Oxford, he made a perfunctory pass at the legal career his late father had urged upon him, but he soon committed himself to studying astronomy. His scientific career (briefly interrupted by WW I) went into full swing when he moved to Mt. Wilson observatory in California and was able to use the 100-inch telescope, then the finest in the world, to study the galaxies (which he insisted on calling ``nebulae''). He quickly became recognized as the preeminent astronomer of his time. A dedicated Anglophile after his Oxford years, he seized every opportunity to take his wife, Grace, on European junkets, much to the annoyance of his colleagues at Mt. Wilson. An egotistical snob, according to science biographer Christianson (History/Appalachian State Univ.; Writing Lives is the Devil, 1993) the aristocratic-looking Hubble seems to have cut off relations with his family after his move to California, preferring to hobnob with the likes of Einstein, Chaplin, and Aldous Huxley. He feuded with rival astronomers and had no interest in administrative work. Yet his contributions to astronomy are without peer: He established not only that our galaxy is but one of innumerable similar star systems filling the universe in every observable direction, but that these galaxies are receding from one another at speeds proportional to their distancesthe famous ``red shift.'' Only Hubble's death in 1953 prevented his receiving a Nobel Prize in Physicsthere being none in astronomy. A well-researched, well-informed, and revealing study of its complex, brilliant subject and his times, this is one of the most impressive scientific biographies of recent years.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-14660-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
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