Living With a Wild God (Barbara Ehrenreich)

The author as a mature woman, veteran of marriages and illnesses and careers, looks back at a quest she began at age 14 to understand the real nature of the universe. Raised as a staunch atheist, she wondered what the purpose of life and the universe could have beyond reproduction and death. Was there some ineffable, inexpressible Other that gave the world its real nature? For most of her life, Ehrenreich has been subject to what can only be called mystical experiences, in which language and human labels are leached away, leaving only pure sensations and a strong sense of Presence. This book is her attempt to describe her experiences as accurately as she can and to determine what they might mean. My professional background and my scientific inclinations lead me to something like this: brain circuitry developed for the purpose of recognizing and predicting the behavior of the intelligent social creatures we lived with (other people) sometimes overshoots, leading to pariedolia and, in the case of temporal-lobe epilepsy, a strong sense of oneness with the divine. Ehrenreich dismisses these explanations too glibly, I believe, lumping them in the category of "mental illness." I will grant her that no evidence disproves the existence of Others that are invisible to any rational scientific investigation and can't even be approached in a rational linguistic frame, but I don't accept that she has provided any actual evidence in favor of its existence either. No matter--the book is a fascinating look at the really big questions, and will provoke anyone to think deeply about them.

Echopraxia (Peter Watts)

I admired Watts's earlier Blindsight for its intelligence, its mind-blowing ideas, and its frequent reference to ideas that are square in the center of my own professional areas of interest. Echopraxia is more of the same, and even more so. It takes place in the same universe as the earlier book, focusing on what's going on back home while Humanity's heroes are engaging in a deeply mysterious first Contact. The main character, a biologist of the old school who eschews most forms of direct brain augmentation, gets caught up in an increasingly challenging set of circumstances as he fights to save himself and humanity from vampires, scientific mystics, military zombies, and alien slime mold. It's not clear whether or not he is successful. I admire the brilliance of his thinking and world-building. I love that I know about little bits of psychological research he tosses out. I was impressed with how he gave one character a unique voice, a sense of rapid delivery and impatience, simply by leaving out commas. Still, I can't say that I loved either book, and I'm afraid that it's because I'm not smart enough to read Peter Watts. I had the constant feeling that I didn't quite know what's actually happening, and kept going in the belief that it would become clear eventually, but it never did. If you loved Blindsight and you're smart enough to follow down the rabbit hole, you will probably love this one as well.

Blindsight (Peter Watts)

This is a deeply complex, challenging book that touches on topics that are important to me professionally: the blindsight of the title, for one thing, and also saccadic blindness, Cotard syndrome, and the nature and value of consciousness itself. It wraps this up in a first-contact novel like none other. The story starts when millions of tiny sensors drop into our atmosphere all over the world and immediately burn up, presumably after sending information to some alien ship. Humanity throws together several waves of manned and unmanned probes to try to reach the aliens and learn about them, hoping to open a dialogue at best, to defend ourselves at words. The story follows a ship containing a linguist with four different identities, a marine with neural connections to armies of mechanized grunts, a biologist whose normal senses have been replaced with a whole array of sensors, and a synthesist whose job is to translate what experts learn into terms ordinary folks can understand, under the command of a vampire. Seriously. It all makes sense. The aliens are more completely alien than anything I've ever seen before, and they apparently think of us the same way. The story doesn't have a happy ending, not only because of what aliens may do to us, but because of what we are doing to ourselves. I read this long ago and remember thinking that I need to read it again so I can get more out of it the second time, because it is so dense. Now seemed like the right time, as I want to read his next book, set in the same universe: Echopraxia.

The Mind's Eye (Oliver Sacks)

Sacks is famous for his insightful case studies of people dealing with neurological challenges, and this volume maintains that tradition. Here he focuses on issue related to visual imagery: the ability, or lack of ability, to see things one's imagination, the "mind's eye." The stories he tells range from people with no ability to imagine visual stimuli at all, to the blind man whose visual imagination is so strong he relied on it to climb up on his roof by himself to repair it. Along the way we met a woman who can see shapes and colors perfectly well but can't use that information to recognize what she is looking at and learned about Sacks's own journey as he progressively lost vision in one eye to cancer. As always, Sacks focuses more on each individual's experience, how the challenges affect each one as a person in daily life, than on brain circuitry or the firing of neural impulses. I enjoyed this collection quite a lot.

Apprentices of Wonder (William Allman)

I really enjoyed this exploration of the connectionist/neural network approach to cognitive psychology, showing how the field was getting started. It does a great job of explaining how the connectionist view differs from the traditional computer analogy for mental processing, and describes the excitement and the wariness practitioners felt. The only problem is that the book is more than 20 years old (published in 1990), so it can't describe how the promises and perils have played out as the viewpoint matured. Otherwise, it's a good way for someone just exploring the field to get a picture of what these ideas are all about.

Consciousness (Susan Blakmore)

This textbook goes into all the theories and controversies relating to the questions of consciousness. When I look at a sunset, what creates the experience of the colors? Who is the one doing the experiencing? What does it mean to experience these colors, as opposed to just registering and labeling them?  There are way more questions than answers on this amazingly complex issue. It's fun to think about, but it kind of makes my head hurt. And what does that mean, exactly? I certainly think about these questions differently than I did before!

Shadows Bright as Glass (Amy Ellis Nutt)

This fascinating book describes in detail the experiences of Jon Sarkin, who suffered a massive stroke that tore him loose from his former self and shattered his experience of time and space. He found peace and his way of connecting back to life through art, as he began  doodling compulsively and it expanded  into a national career as an artist. Woven into Sarkin's story is much information about the history of neuroscience and the search for the nature of consciousness and identity. This book is much more accurate and well-researched than the Taylor book I read recently, though not without its own errors. The author repeatedly conflates information seen by the left eye with information in the left visual field, for example, and reports straight-faced that "Some scientists have suggested that there are more synapses in the human brain than there are atomic particles in the universe (p. 24)." Any scientist who suggested this does not deserve to be reported in a serious work of nonfiction. Overall, though, I found the story compelling, and my only real complaint is that there are no pictures of Sarkin's art, aside from the cover.

My Stroke of Insight (Jill Bolte Taylor)

Though the story of Dr. Taylor, neuroanatomist, experiencing a stroke is fascinating, and the story of her recovery moving and inspiring, I was ultimately disappointed in this book. The beginning held all the fascination, but the second half, where she shared the deeper, more meaningful lessons from her experience, left me cold, and I wound up skimming through, in a hurry to be done. She would say that this is a sign that I am too dominated by my linear, logical left hemisphere, and I would roll my eyes. Though a neuroanatomist and scientist, she seems to have completely bought the new-age mysticism about the brain at a level I would not accept from one of my Intro Psych students. She attributes part of her recovery to constantly thanking her body's cells for all their hard work, and believes that "this induces some sort of vibration within my body that promotes a healing environment." She attributes all manner of positive energy and feeling to the right hemisphere, saying that when others offer anger she chooses whether to "reflect your anger and engage in argument (left brain) or be empathetic and approach you with a compassionate heart (right brain)." This ignores research showing that the right hemisphere handles more negative emotions and the left handles the positive ones! Even the compelling, moment-by-moment description of the morning of the stroke is suspect; they were reconstructed a year after the event with the help of a therapist, and she doesn't doubt them at all because "Thanks to the skills of our right mind, we are capable of remembering isolated moments with uncanny clarity and accuracy." She knows nothing about the fallibility of flashbulb memories. Quite a let-down.

The Birth of the Mind (Gary Marcus)

Subtitled "How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexity of Human Thought." A fascinating description of the current science linking genes to psychology. Working from molecules up, the author describes how the brain, and therefore the mind, is specified in our DNA. It's not hardwired, but flexibly prewired, through general recipes and autonomously functioning agents. It makes the whole system awe-inspiring!