Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)
It is strange to realize that you are past pop science in an area where you have no formal expertise. I knew most of the examples cited in the book and have even read the publications behind some of them. I guess you pick up a fair amount of neuroscience as a regular reader of
Less Wrong and
Overcoming Bias.
Jonah Lehrer's
pop neuroscience book looks at how the emotional and analytical parts of our brains succeed and fail.
Before this gets lost in discussion: it is an enjoyable read and good storytelling. It is good
writing. It goes presents potentially difficult material clearly and simply through a frame of stories. The stories and interesting and compelling. Many of my comments relate to the limitations of the science being explained and the presentation thereof, but it is clearly an excellent read.
Here is the deal: you should not read this unless you read all of it. The chapters are potentially misleading in isolation. They neither build on each other linearly nor create stand-alone pieces. Each takes an argument as far as it can in one direction, and the next chapter moderates that by veering in another direction.
While this makes for compelling chapters, it may undermine the learning objectives. This is not a precisely calibrated work that makes sure you get the most accurate impression of the science, with all its limitations and disclaimers. For many readers, that is a plus. If you are interested in the neuroscience itself, rather than simply reading for entertainment, it creates worries about whether you should accept the argument of this chapter wholeheartedly.
You also do not get a neat package at the end. The human brain is not a solved problem, and you will not get a "do A in situation X, B in situation Y" decision tree that will solve all your problems. The end result looks neater than it is, but or author acknowledges the messiness explicitly; there is something that looks like "do A..." with the proviso "and there are a lot of judgment calls in here and no bright lines, good luck folks!"
For example, Mr. Lehrer recommends using your analytical mind for simple choices like which vegetable peeler to buy, where you can add up the most important factor or two. For more complex choices, like buying furniture or a car, you will tend to start adding weight to things that do not matter much and will end up making a worse choice, so be guided by your intuition. But buying strawberry jam is too complex a choice for the analytical mind, so be intuitive there. Unless you don't really care about strawberry jam, in which case analytically pick on the measure or two that matters to you. Or if it is a complex but novel choice, where your intuition has not had much experience, go analytical, although you may need emotional motivation.
It's messy, but it sounds clear-cut at the end of each chapter.
My big disclaimer down, this is very well written. It is an entertaining and engaging read. It tells stories and uses them to organize the narrative. Each chapter has one major story and illustrates the research with smaller examples. There are many good stories about brains that are not working properly, because we can see what makes things work by taking out a piece and seeing what stops working. There are brain injuries that lead to permanent indecision and brain tumors that lead to unbridled lust.
Willpower is a quantifiable mental resource. Brain damage can take it away. There is no separate "
mind" that is independent. We can reproducibly change how people think, and it does not need to be as extreme as brain damage. Something as simple as asking someone to memorize seven numbers or think of his/her social security number has predictable effects. Be terrified of the meat-based computer on which you are a program.
Some of these cases dealing with the meat brain point out the limited applicability. One example looks at a shopping experiment and concludes that you can predict whether someone will pick an item or not based on mental activity in a pair of competing brain regions. The reasoning involved is more of rationalization for what your brain has decided pre-rationally. Well then, there is not much you can recommend for me if the thinking part comes
after the deciding part. (This assumes that the science in question has been done properly, actually predictively rather than
retrospectively creating a formula that "predicts" what already happened. Which also happens.)
Mr. Lehrer frequently contrasts neurology with economics, saying that we are not the rational
homo economicus, although the case he makes is closer to economics than he knows. He says that the shopping experiment shows that we are not making a rational benefit-cost analysis, but what he describes the emotional brain doing is just that. The two areas competing are roughly "ooh, shiny, I want that" and "oh, expensive, I want to keep my dollars." If the benefit is greater than the cost, you buy the shiny.
He also frequently contrasts reality with a Platonic ideal of rational thought, which is an easier case to win. The strongest part of this case is arguing for the value of intuition as subconscious calculation. You cannot calculate three-dimensional curved vectors in a second, but you can catch a ball. The hard part is done in bits of your brain that have specialized and stored the results of practice, so you go with what feels obviously right. You do not think of driving as a series of actions like pulling levers and pushing pedals; you just drive to the store, and your higher functions are free to watch for problems like that guy pulling out in front of you, which you may have started reacting to before you consciously noticed it because something felt wrong about how the truck was moving. There are entire sections of your brain attuned to "this is not how it usually goes." Those are of value.
Being familiar with the research our author is citing, I am not the best person to tell you if he is explaining it well. I already know what he is talking about. If he left out something important, I will be less affected, and I might wonder if I am just being picky. For example, I worried that he was spending too much time on the destructive case, tearing down existing theories of mind while I was already on his side about the lack of pure, Platonic reasoning in the human brain.
One aspect missing that I rule "not picky" is how brain scans mislead us. One problem with human cognition is that we are more likely to accept
anything if it is prefaced with "
brain scans show." Something about the colorful graphics and assurance of science makes people think the argument is better. This book gives us words instead of pretty pictures, which reduces the effect, but basing arguments on brain imaging will create more agreement than the arguments merit, all things being equal. Beyond that, the meaning of the research itself may be overstated. See, for example, a paper that demonstrated statistically significant results from performing a standard psychological test with brain scanning on
a dead fish. If your neurological research methods produce results with dead fish, you may need to refine your methods.
I feel odd having been harder on the scientific case here than in
Mary Roach's pop science book. In that case, she spent more time telling stories, less making a positive case. Indeed, the problem there was the lack of a case being built at all. Here, I am more worried about the summative argument being compelling but misleading. It is because he has more to critique that I can dig in.
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