Incognito

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Incognito started out strong as a generalist's introduction to recent advances in the study of cognition. The author's enthusiasm for his subject was contagious, and he wrote with a great balance between explaining the subject and illustrating points with interesting case studies. Near the end of the book the author's thesis veered from general interest in cognition, to a passionate case for altering the criminal justice system. The end of the book really went wild, becoming more and more off tone and off topic from earlier chapters.



Eagleman explored the justice system by making an interesting case for punishment based on reformability instead of culpability. He began with extreme examples of brain damaged criminals physically incapable of controlling their violent behavior, and stated that it was cruel to punish such criminals, as they were not able to change their own behavior in response to the punishment. So far, so good.



Then my skin began to crawl as Eagleman extended the definition of brain damage to include criminals who had genetic tendencies toward depression, had suffered lead poisoning as children, or were raised in abusive households. The goosebumps did not come from the idea of a society in which crime goes unpunished- Eagleman was careful to state he intended to contain and/or behaviorally recondition all offenders to protect the general populace. I was creeped out by the broad definition of brain damage (nearly any history of physical or emotional trauma of significance qualifies you as brain damaged by Eagleman's definition). And if a criminal is identified as brain damaged, the idea of their correctional reconditioning was also creepy and ill-defined. The lobotomy as correctional reconditioning, Eagleman concluded, was no longer a socially acceptable form of reconditioning. That leaves correctional therapists with drugs and other shadowy brain reprogramming techniques to reshape criminal brains. Yikes.



Further, Eagleman hopefully anticipated a future when brain scans are used during sentencing to help determine the extent of a criminal's brain damage. Based on the scan, the criminal would be diverted to either punishment, correctional behavioral reconditioning, or indefinite containment. Eagleman claimed that taking the human element out of sentencing, and replacing it with science, would take the cruelty out of the justice system and make it more efficient. I think his hope for the future looks like a nightmare scenario rife with potential for abuse. The best biometric scans of the future will provide a stream of information that will be interpreted by human brain scientists, or by programs written by human brain scientists. That means the human element would still be alive and well, rife with prejudice, corruption, self-interest, and pressure from exigency (hmm, these results could go either way, but our reconditioning facility is overcrowded...). And the worst part would be, the justice system and our whole society would be pretending that we were perfectly impartial, purely scientific. Giving human foibles the face of absolute, impartial legitimacy is a dangerous, frightening, and downright threatening vision of a future criminal justice system.



And to end this book with a truly crazy bang, Eagleman knocked Occam's Razor, and made some pretty broad claims about science in general that I don't have the scientific background to agree with or dispute. But the remarks seemed quite off topic and out of keeping with the rest of the the book.



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Tasting Cheddar in the key of D-flat

Today I've been reading This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin. I was calmly digesting the differentiation of neural circuits into linguistic and musical pathways, when a sentence in the text hit me right in the solar plexus. Levitin was defining synesthesia, or the rerouting of a sensory impression from one of the five senses to another. For readers, like me, encountering the concept of synesthesia for the first time, Levitin likened the phenomenon to a "psychedelic union of everything sensory" in which one might "see the number five as red, taste cheddar cheeses in D-flat, and smell roses in triangles."

As story ideas about synesthetic aliens crashed thorough my head, I dropped my book and ran to Wikipedia to learn more about synesthesia.

My first surprise was how many of my favorite composers and musicians have synesthesia: Duke Ellington, Rimsky-Korsakav, even John Mayer. I was also interested to learn that adults with synesthesia normally map one specific sense to another, such as sounds to color, or words to taste.

I am hardly the first writer to be struck by the poetic juxtaposition of tasting cheddar in D-flat or smelling in triangles. Wikipedia noted that Mary Shelly used synesthesia to describe the mental state of Frankenstein's monster before he grew fully self-aware. In Dune Frank Herbert attributes synesthetic perceptions to Paul Atreides. The melding of the senses is a mind-blowing cosmic metaphor, the union of what we perceive representing a sense of unity between the individual and the universe.

The fascination of synesthesia for me, and I suspect for the dozens of authors who have used it to describe a character's state of mind, is exactly that power of perception. Every author builds the relationship between reader and character through the use of sensory details. Readers see what a protagonist sees- hears, tastes, touches, and smells what the character does. Tampering with the reader's expectations of the character's sensory mapping, plunges the reader farther from the world as he knows it, and deeper into the experience of the protagonist.

Amphibious Houses and Sea Snakes

In the news recently have been some interesting futuristic engineering solutions to building homes and harnessing energy. Notice the common theme- water!

Amphibious houses, or "floating eco-homes," as the BBC article terms them, are already in use in the Netherlands, where rising water and real estate shortage have birthed the invention of a home that can float on water. If you're not a young Dutch couple desperate to move out of the tiny apartment you share with in-laws, this is still an interesting technology to follow. Amphibious houses can withstand flooding (accommodating a water rise up to 13 feet) and are promising alternatives to coastal housing in flood zones. People with their eyes on a future drowned by global warming can also imagine these houses as models for "floating cities" of the future.

Sea snakes are being used by Scottish engineers to harvest wave farms off the coast of Scotland and Portugal (read the BBC article on sea snakes). Sea snakes are actually enormous metal tubes called a Pelamis wave energy converter. In very simple terms, the rocking of the waves rocks the metal tube. The pulsing motion of the tube pushes hydraulic fluid through a generator to produce electricity. An interesting problem of wave farming is that engineers purposely build them to be inefficient. Wikipedia says that's because a storm at sea could cause a power surge that would put Marvel Comic's Electro to shame (they didn't say it exactly like that, but you get the point). I love the concept of tapping into the unfathomable power of the ocean, and the fact that the biggest challenge in harnessing it is how to tone that power down.

The Goldfish Are Alive!

On Thursday I posted about the fate of the goldfish frozen in the pond next door. I thought they were goners. But, good news! Now that the ice has melted, the familiar orange bodies are darting around in the water again.

Miracle? Cryogenics?

No- when I stuck my head way over the fence to get a good look, I saw that a small section of the ceramic water container goes deep underground. Warm water is actually more dense than cold water, so the warmest water (and the fish) head as low as they can go.

Goldfish hibernate in the winter- lowering their metabolic rate and basically chilling out until the warm weather comes again. Wikipedia's article on goldfish in ponds says that as long as the entire pond isn't frozen (as I feared it had), the goldfish survive unharmed. In fact, goldfish are one of the few species known to survive anoxia, or the absence of oxygen. They survive by lowering their metabolic rate. As with our cryogenic frog friends, regulation of glucose plays a major role during anoxia and reoxygenation (waking up from anoxia).

Ironically the organs undergo the worst stress not during anoxia, but during the period of reoxygenation. The liver suffers the most, but the brain and kidneys are also affected. Goldlfish (and our friends the wood frogs) rely on the elevated presence of antioxidants in their body chemistry to ease the strain of warming up back to life again. (Source: Oxidative stress and antioxidant defenses in goldfish Carassius auratus during anoxia and reoxygenation).

Good-bye Goldfish, Hello Frog

It's sunny and a little warmer this first day of March, but the goldfish pond in the garden next door is still frozen. Every time I walk past the fish pond I stop to say hi, but I fear in the cold weather I've been saying hi to dead fish, frozen solid in the shallow ceramic basin.

For some reason my brain keeps insisting those fish are alive down there. I know the ice on top of a lake actually warms the water beneath, allowing the fish to survive, but this pond is far too shallow to behave that way. Maybe I believe the taxi driver in The Catcher in the Rye, who claimed that fish live frozen under the pond in Central Park while kids skate over the ice. Maybe the science fiction writer in me is plotting cryogenic fish survival. But by now I've read enough practical gardening posts to know those fish are dead.

To cheer myself up, I did a little research on frogs- turns out certain frogs can survive being frozen. The wood frog buries itself underground or undercover of leaves during cold spells. Its body temperature drops below 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Ice crystals form in its blood, portions of its body begin to freeze, and if it keeps on getting colder and colder, the frog freezes solid. In an article from the Seattle Times, professor Ken Storey says the frog is frozen so solid it "makes a thud" when dropped. But hours after warming back up, the frog's heart begins to beat and it hops on its merry way, unharmed.

Sure enough, the wood frog has evolved with its own system of cryogenics, what the article calls "natural antifreeze" made of glucose (frogs go on a starch-eating binge when cold weather approaches). The scientists interviewed weren't ready to say the frogs held the key to freezing humans for future generations. What they did hope to learn was a method to cryogenicaly freeze human organs for use in organ transplant and organ donation. Studying these funny little frogs could take the nightmare out of organ waiting lists and save lives.

Virtual Limb

As an SF writer I find the idea of an amputee's phantom limb fascinating fodder for the imagination. As a human being I feel bad for the amputees! What can be done to cure intense discomfort in an area of your body that does not exist anymore?.

Graphics technology may have found an answer. This CRAVE article describes how a virtual reality system using video game graphics helped a woman experience the use of her fingers again and find relief from the her painfully clenched missing hand. Participants in the program get nifty virtual reality goggles and enter into an absorbing virtual reality where they can wiggle non-existant fingers and run with legs that have magically come back to them.