Outstanding popular science.
A masterful update on how the brain operates.
At the beginning, neuroscientist Eagleman notes how DNA gets all the credit for being the basis of life but deserves only half. Every animal today possesses DNA identical to that of 30,000 years ago, and its behavior is also indistinguishable. A caveman with identical DNA might look like us, but their actions and thoughts would be utterly foreign. Credit goes to the human brain, entirely the creation of DNA at birth but unfinished. “For humans at birth,” writes the author, “the brain is remarkably unfinished, and interaction with the world is necessary to complete it.” Unlike an arm or stomach, the brain is a dynamic system, a general-purpose computing device that changes in response to experience. With this introduction, Eagleman is off and running. In the first of many delightful educational jolts, he notes that the mature brain contains regions with specific functions, but under magnification, its billions of nerve cells, which form trillions of connections, look the same. What’s happening? The brain does not think or hear or touch anything. “All it ever sees are electrochemical signals that stream in along different data cables,” writes the author, but it works brilliantly to extract patterns from this input. As we age, our brain figures out a set of rules, which the author lays out in his conclusion. At birth it possesses enormous flexibility because it must literally learn how to function. Children can learn several languages fluently, but after age 10, new languages come with an accent. If a child is kept in the dark and silence for several years after birth, they will never see or talk. Neurons compete as fiercely as they cooperate. If one area stops functioning, others take over. Thus, when the vision region falls silent from blindness or even a few hours in a blindfold, input from hearing or touch moves in. To fend off this intrusion during sleep, Eagleman theorizes, our vision area continues to operate by generating dreams.
Outstanding popular science.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-307-90749-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A beautifully written tribute to underappreciated emotions.
The author of Quiet turns her attention to sorrow and longing and how these emotions can be transformed into creativity and love.
Cain uses the term bittersweet to refer to a state of melancholy and specifically addresses individuals who have “a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world.” With great compassion, she explores causes for these emotions by candidly chronicling her personal experiences and those of others throughout history who have suffered loss, including Plato, Charles Darwin, C.S. Lewis, Leonard Cohen, and Maya Angelou. “As Angelou’s story suggests,” she writes, “many people respond to loss by healing in others the wounds that they themselves have suffered.” Cain argues persuasively that these emotions can be channeled into artistic pursuits such as music, writing, dancing, or cooking, and by tapping into them, we can transform “the way we parent, the way we lead, the way we love, and the way we die.” If we don’t transform our sorrows and longings of the past, she writes, we may inflict them on present relationships through abuse, domination, or neglect. Throughout, the author examines the concept of loss from various religious viewpoints, and she looks at the ways loss can affect individuals and how we can integrate it into our lives to our benefit. Cain contends that the romantic view of melancholy has “waxed and waned” over the years. Currently, a “tyranny of positivity” can often be found in the workplace, and the “social code” of keeping negative feelings hidden abounds. However, she points out the benefits that can come from opening up versus keeping everything inside. As a first step, she encourages us to examine our lives and ask ourselves what we are longing for, in a deep and meaningful way, and if we can turn that ache into a creative offering.
A beautifully written tribute to underappreciated emotions.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-451-49978-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A lively and up-to-date survey of the key ideas of astrophysics.
A history of astrophysics, focused on a short list of fundamental discoveries.
Vaudo’s revolutions are familiar to most amateur followers of science. In chronological order, they are Isaac Newton’s formulation of the law of gravity; Albert Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity; Big Bang theory; and antimatter. Each of these discoveries is put in historical context, with some biographical data on the scientists who made the discoveries. The book also gives credit to the other, sometimes less famous, figures who contributed—often significantly—to the discoveries. This is especially true of the Big Bang and antimatter, which emerged from the work of several theorists and researchers. We learn about their professional rivalries, such as Newton’s feuds with Robert Hooke. Readers will also appreciate the author’s serving up a wealth of details related to the scientists or their discoveries—the presence of a chunk of wood from Newton’s apple tree aboard the International Space Station, or the fact that the potassium in a banana may decay and create tiny amounts of antimatter. While it’s nearly impossible to discuss ideas such as the existence of more than three dimensions without a certain amount of math, Vaudo manages to keep the equations from overwhelming the text. A concluding chapter speculates on what the next major breakthrough is likely to be. Vaudo suggests that the questions posed by dark matter and dark energy—which apparently make up far more of the universe than “normal” matter and energy—will provide the material for the next revolution. Until those issues are worked out, the current book provides as good an overview of the state of the science as any reader could wish for.
A lively and up-to-date survey of the key ideas of astrophysics.Pub Date: April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781324089278
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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