A well-written exploration of the mind-body connection.
A state-of-the-science survey of how our brains enable our bodies to do their work.
When we walk toward a wall, why don’t we smack into it? Because the body has an “intelligence” that enables us to do things like translate signals about distance, materiality, proprioception, and related matters that, writes Grafton (Chair, Neuroscience/Univ. of California, Santa Barbara), “are almost primordial in their simplicity” but that encompass the whole history of evolution, “stretching all the way back to the appearance of the most basic forms of locomotion in vertebrates.” The concept of “physical intelligence” is something that has tended to be studied only in its superlative sense, in the performance of top athletes or persons placed under the most extreme of environmental conditions. In everyday cases, the mental processes used for our actions “are, more than anything, different kinds of learning machines that the brain has available for acquiring and maintaining physically derived knowledge.” A climber and distance hiker, Grafton takes many of his examples from his own experiences outdoors under conditions that sometimes invite taking things for granted but that instead require constant vigilance, the mind connecting sensory information to appropriate responses—appropriate because, so often, doing the wrong thing can lead to disaster. All of this requires sophisticated neural circuitry that in turn yields a kind of “sixth sense” whose discovery has fueled debate among philosophers and brain scientists for decades: “How could a person consciously and willfully move while being utterly unaware of her own body’s movements?” Arriving at an answer deepens our understanding of this sixth sense of movement, which turns out to be more important than the other senses in getting us around in the world. It involves such complex mental processes as being able to “conceptualize dynamic force” and areas of the brain that range from the higher-reasoning cortex to the elemental cerebellum, which "keeps track of a massive list of comparatively minor adjustments or tweaks to each movement to make them work well under a variety of conditions.”
A well-written exploration of the mind-body connection.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4732-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all...
Science writer Ackerman (Ah-Choo!: The Uncommon Life of Your Common Cold, 2010, etc.) looks at the new science surrounding avian intelligence.
The takeaway: calling someone a birdbrain is a compliment. And in any event, as Ackerman observes early on, “intelligence is a slippery concept, even in our own species, tricky to define and tricky to measure.” Is a bird that uses a rock to break open a clamshell the mental equivalent of a tool-using primate? Perhaps that’s the wrong question, for birds are so unlike humans that “it’s difficult for us to fully appreciate their mental capabilities,” given that they’re really just small, feathered dinosaurs who inhabit a wholly different world from our once-arboreal and now terrestrial one. Crows and other corvids have gotten all the good publicity related to bird intelligence in recent years, but Ackerman, who does allow that some birds are brighter than others, points favorably to the much-despised pigeon as an animal that “can remember hundreds of different objects for long periods of time, discriminate between different painting styles, and figure out where it’s going, even when displaced from familiar territory by hundreds of miles.” Not bad for a critter best known for bespattering statues in public parks. Ackerman travels far afield to places such as Barbados and New Caledonia to study such matters as memory, communication, and decision-making, the last largely based on visual cues—though, as she notes, birds also draw ably on other senses, including smell, which in turn opens up insight onto “a weird evolutionary paradox that scientists have puzzled over for more than a decade”—a matter of the geometry of, yes, the bird brain.
Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all their diversity will want to read this one.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59420-521-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
A magnificent account of a central reality of our times, incorporating deep scientific expertise, broad political and social knowledge, and ethical insight, and Idled with beautifully written biographical sketches of the men and women who created nuclear physics. Rhodes describes in detail the great scientific achievements that led up to the invention of the atomic bomb. Everything of importance is examined, from the discovery of the atomic nucleus and of nuclear fission to the emergence of quantum physics, the invention of the mass-spectroscope and of the cyclotron, the creation of such man-made elements as plutonium and tritium, and implementation of the nuclear chain reaction in uranium. Even more important, Rhodes shows how these achievements were thrust into the arms of the state, which culminated in the unfolding of the nuclear arms race. Often brilliantly, he records the rise of fascism and of anti-Semitism, and the intensification of nationalist ambitions. He traces the outbreak of WW II, which provoked a hysterical rivalry among nations to devise the bomb. This book contains a grim description of Japanese resistance, and of the horrible psychological numbing that caused an unparalleled tolerance for human suffering and destruction. Rhodes depicts the Faustian scale of the Manhattan Project. His account of the dropping of the bomb itself, and of the awful firebombing that prepared its way, is unforgettable. Although Rhodes' gallery of names and events is sometimes dizzying, his scientific discussions often daunting, he has written a book of great drama and sweep. A superb accomplishment.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0684813785
Page Count: 932
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1986
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