my mind on books

Jason Pomerantz shares his review of My Stroke of Insight below. (See also: more of Jason’s reviews)

[If anyone else would like to chime in, please get in touch using the contact form in the sidebar. Reviews or other thoughts are welcome: What are you reading now? What was your favorite book in 2008? Do you have a “top 10 list”?]

It’s hard to give a book a bad review when the person who wrote it is so obviously deserving of sympathy and admiration. Unfortunately, I have no choice with My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor.

After years of training and working as a brain researcher, Ms. Taylor suffered a major stroke. Enough of her brain remained functional during the event that she was able to consciously decide to study what was happening to her, from the inside. After surgery and eight years of effort she managed to make a full recovery and fulfill her determination to tell her story.

When I learned of this book, I was fascinated. I was looking forward to reading a scientific discussion of the mind/body problem – the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the physical matter of our brain – from a unique perspective.

Ms. Taylor did deliver some of that, particularly at the start. She very effectively describes what she felt and experienced as various parts of her brain shut down. Those sections are fascinating.

Unfortunately, far more of the book is dominated by a New Age haze. It’s filled with discussions of positive and negative energy and our connectedness with the universe. It preaches endlessly that, if only we would all listen to the trillions of molecular geniuses that make up our bodies there would be world harmony and we’d spend our time hugging each other. Something like that, anyway. My mind sort of drifted.

The stroke that afflicted Taylor disabled the left side of her brain. As anyone with even a passing familiarity to neuroscience has heard explained a thousand times each side of our brains serve very different functions. The left more-or-less controls our linguistic and analytical selves, the right our intuitive and holistic. In an ordinarily functioning brain the two hemispheres are connected by a thick bunch of neurons called the ‘corpus callosum’, so much so that we perceive ourselves as one unitary being.

When her left side went out, Taylor’s consciousness became completely dominated by her right brain. She no longer thought in words and she lost the distinction between her body and the rest of the universe. Further, according to Taylor, the left brain controls our ability to weave individual moments of perception together into coherent narratives. Without it, she felt herself completely living in individual moments of time, focused intensely on the now.

If all of that sounds familiar, it’s because what one person calls symptoms, another calls Nirvana. Through a freak medical event Taylor achieved, almost instantly, exactly what mystics and meditators spend lifetimes seeking.

Taylor does a good job conveying her own ambiguity at the experience. She quickly grasps the value of her new state of being: A joy at her sense of oneness with the universe. But she also understands the tragedy of the loss of her rational self, particularly her inability to communicate with others.

It’s an inherently gripping story and parts held me rapt. But then, somewhere around the middle of the book, Taylor takes off the lab coat of a scientist and puts on the robes of a yogi. We hear far less about neurons and MRI’s and cognitive systems and far more about peace, love and understanding and universal compassion and we are all made of star stuff. All noble sentiments, but also very, very dull.

Taylor clearly touched something and she desperately wants us all to share the positive aspects of her experience. But the fuzzy, crunchy granola tendencies of her writing make it all lost in a hippy-dippy fog.

Another odd problem is that, for a brain scientist, Taylor exhibits a bizarre amount of mind/body confusion: She is constantly listening to her brain, and talking to her brain, and ordering her brain around. It all begs the question, what exactly is doing the listening and the talking and the ordering? My left side would like to suggest that it would have been far more clear for her to write that one part of her brain was listening to, talking to and ordering around other parts. But, I suppose, that would have lessened the right brain poetry.

My Stoke of Insight is the rare book that manages to be scientific and New Age at the same time. I’m only sorry there wasn’t more science and less New Age.

On a related note…

For a more consistently interesting discussion of the problem of multiple minds struggling with each other in our brains, read First Person Plural, by Paul Bloom, published in The Atlantic. (Bloom can also be seen in a fascinating Blogging Heads Diavlog with Will Wilkinson.)

[Reprinted with permission from http://www.fiddleandburn.com/me/#6]

Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind by Daniel Tammet (Free Press, 2009).

Tammet’s previous book is Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant.

Here is the product description for Embracing the Wide Sky:

Owner of “the most remarkable mind on the planet,” (according to Entertainment Weekly) Daniel Tammet captivated readers and won worldwide critical acclaim with the 2007 New York Times bestselling memoir, Born On A Blue Day, and its vivid depiction of a life with autistic savant syndrome. In his fascinating new book, he writes with characteristic clarity and personal awareness as he sheds light on the mysteries of savants’ incredible mental abilities, and our own.

Tammet explains that the differences between savant and non-savant minds have been exaggerated; his astonishing capacities in memory, math and language are neither due to a cerebral supercomputer nor any genetic quirk, but are rather the results of a highly rich and complex associative form of thinking and imagination. Autistic thought, he argues, is an extreme variation of a kind that we all do, from daydreaming to the use of puns and metaphors.

Embracing the Wide Sky combines meticulous scientific research with Tammet’s detailed descriptions of how his mind works to demonstrate the immense potential within us all. He explains how our natural intuitions can help us to learn a foreign language, why his memories are like symphonies, and what numbers and giraffes have in common. We also discover why there is more to intelligence than IQ, how optical illusions fool our brains, and why too much information can make you dumb.

Many readers will be particularly intrigued by Tammet’s original ideas concerning the genesis of genius and exceptional creativity. He illustrates his arguments with examples as diverse as the private languages of twins, the compositions of poets with autism, and the breakthroughs, and breakdowns, of some of history’s greatest minds. Embracing the Wide Sky is a unique and brilliantly imaginative portrait of how we think, learn, remember and create, brimming with personal insights and anecdotes, and explanations of the most up-to-date, mind-bending discoveries from fields ranging from neuroscience to psychology and linguistics. This is a profound and provocative book that will transform our understanding and respect for every kind of mind.

Tammet’s blog has book excerpts and links to a great video for the book that I’m embedding here:

The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory by Torkel Klingberg (Oxford University Press, 2008) (“Search Inside the book” available at Amazon).

Product Description
As the pace of technological change accelerates, we are increasingly experiencing a state of information overload. Statistics show that we are interrupted every three minutes during the course of the work day. Multitasking between email, cell-phone, text messages, and four or five websites while listening to an iPod forces the brain to process more and more information at greater and greater speeds. And yet the human brain has hardly changed in the last 40,000 years.
Are all these high-tech advances overtaxing our Stone-Age brains or is the constant flood of information good for us, giving our brains the daily exercise they seem to crave? In The Overflowing Brain, cognitive scientist Torkel Klingberg takes us on a journey into the limits and possibilities of the brain. He suggests that we should acknowledge and embrace our desire for information and mental challenges, but try to find a balance between demand and capacity. Klingberg explores the cognitive demands, or “complexity,” of everyday life and how the brain tries to meet them. He identifies different types of attention, such as stimulus-driven and controlled attention, but focuses chiefly on “working memory,” our capacity to keep information in mind for short periods of time. Dr Klingberg asserts that working memory capacity—long thought to be static and hardwired in the brain—can be improved by training, and that the increasing demands on working memory may actually have a constructive effect: as demands on the human brain increase, so does its capacity.
The book ends with a discussion of the future of brain development and how we can best handle information overload in our everyday lives. Klingberg suggests how we might find a balance between demand and capacity and move from feeling overwhelmed to deeply engaged.

See also: Author’s web page

In honor of Columbus Day, learn How to Be an Explorer of the World with Keri Smith, take a Head Trip with Jeff Warren, or follow Frigyes Karinthy on A Journey Round [His] Skull.

Emotional Awareness: Overcoming the Obstacles to Psychological Balance and Compassion by the Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman (Times Books, 2008) seems quite similar to the Mind and Life Institute series of books but it doesn’t appear on their list of publications.

Product Description

Two leading thinkers engage in a landmark conversation about human emotions and the pursuit of psychological fulfillment

At their first meeting, a remarkable bond was sparked between His Holiness the Dalai Lama, one of the world’s most revered spiritual leaders, and the psychologist Paul Ekman, whose groundbreaking work helped to define the science of emotions. Now these two luminaries share their thinking about science and spirituality, the bonds between East and West, and the nature and quality of our emotional lives.

In this unparalleled series of conversations, the Dalai Lama and Ekman prod and push toward answers to the central questions of emotional experience. What are the sources of hate and compassion? Should a person extend her compassion to a torturer—and would that even be biologically possible? What does science reveal about the benefits of Buddhist meditation, and can Buddhism improve through engagement with the scientific method? As they come to grips with these issues, they invite us to join them in an unfiltered view of two great traditions and two great minds.

Accompanied by commentaries on the findings of emotion research and the teachings of Buddhism, their interplay—amusing, challenging, eye-opening, and moving—guides us on a transformative journey in the understanding of emotions.