Preliminary but striking investigations into the effects of music on everything from string theory to a baby’s cry, from documentarian Mannes.
One of the author’s main avenues of exploration is how music impacts the human body, and in turn how the human body impacts music. Much of that work seeks to understand the nature/nurture origins of the musical experience: Why is there music in the first place, and what evolutionary advantage does it serve? One possible answer is that singing helps attract a mate, but that implies that we must enjoy music on some basic level, which may be answered by the fact that listening to music releases hormones like dopamine and oxytocin. Mannes delivers the findings of scientists in an easy voice—this includes her forays into the thickets of music theory as well as brain structure and its response to music—and she is very clear when the material is conditional or the result of only one study. Many of the early findings are truly surprising: that we may be born with perfect pitch, but lose it if we do not cultivate it; that babies cry in musical intervals of 3rds, 4ths and 5ths; that someone took the time to fashion a flute out of a vulture bone 40,000 years ago; that Neanderthals, who had no spoken language, communicated by singing to one another. The author maintains reader interest by touching on plainly fascinating ideas, such as whether there are elements built into musical structure that elicit emotions and whether those emotions are instinctual or associative; the role of music in the healing arts; and the mystery of entrainment. Mannes also examines the idea of a music of the spheres. “Even the Earth has a hum. Every object has a natural frequency at which to vibrate,” she writes. “Even black holes sing.” A well-tempered introduction to music’s far-reaching influence on man, beast and cosmos.
Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1996-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
Though full of pauses, second glances, and head-scratches, this is a very welcome primer in logical thinking.
Logic helps people build bridges to understanding. But what if people don’t want those bridges? Aha, says this entertaining guide: There’s a meta-problem for you….
In our current landscape of the postfactual, the loudest bellower is king. Enter Cheng (Beyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics, 2017, etc.), the scientist in residence at the Art Institute of Chicago—now there’s a good idea—and possessor of a formidable, mathematically inclined mind. Though the author aims to teach math, science, and formal logic as she progresses, she really means to help readers construct better arguments, which may turn out to be a world-saving proposition. There is a built-in advantage to using logic, she writes, in that it provides a framework for discovering what is true, and “one of the main reasons to have a clear framework for accessing truth is to be able to agree about things.” The notion of agreement will come into play late in the book, when Cheng analyzes the best kinds of arguments, which allow us to understand another person’s point of view. Until that point, there are theorems, axioms, and proofs to go through, for mathematically based logic hinges on such things as the union of sets (the place where two circles meet in a Venn diagram) and the proper application of analogy to any particular problem. The author isn’t exactly playful, but she pitches a few paradoxes as she moves along—one of them being the fact that, since logic doesn’t actually correspond to what we know as the real world, we have to “forget the pesky details that prevent things from behaving logically.” In other words, we have to think abstractly, which poses plenty of other challenges.
Though full of pauses, second glances, and head-scratches, this is a very welcome primer in logical thinking.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5416-7248-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Artificial intelligence expert Hofstadter (Gîdel, Escher, Bach, not reviewed, etc.) challenges conventional computer simulations of reasoning. These simulations don't begin to match the richness and flexibility of human thought, Hofstadter says: They're either ``brute force'' performances that simply take advantage of the computer's speed in considering already established options or programs that provide limited information that leads to a foregone conclusion. As an alternative, Hofstadter and his students create computer programs that model anagrams and analogies (remember those SAT questions: ``A is to B as C is to ...''?) as examples of human thinking and creativity. They create programs that allow the computer to search and discover candidates for the missing terms chosen from a ``coderack'' (Hofstadter loves puns). They also allow for ``slippage''—deviation from strict rules, which is what Hofstadter means by ``fluid concepts'' (for example, what is the solution to ``ABC is to XYZ as ABD is to ...?). Reading Hofstadter gives clues to how people—and presumably his computer programs- -slip around these barriers to come up with answers that are described variously as ``happy,'' ``low temperature,'' or ``urged'' with certain ``pressures.'' Hofstadter's admittedly complex writing style also has a wonderful colloquialism: You can hear him talking to his students, in part to get his own thoughts straight in the process. Reading this compendium of articles on games he and his AI researchers have programmed leads to consideration of human thought processes. In contrast to the programs of others in the field, Hofstadter's games are modest, played within small ``domains.'' But they open up ideas on how perception and concept formation are linked in parallel processing tracks in the brain. For Hofstadter, the art of programming a computer is not an end in itself but a means to further understanding the mind at work. An excellent and updated review of a major trailblazer's spin on AI. (Library of Science dual main selection)
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-465-05154-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
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