Solid introduction to neuroscience, or more specifically computational neuroscience, and has an I think solidly argued premise. A bit on the brief sidSolid introduction to neuroscience, or more specifically computational neuroscience, and has an I think solidly argued premise. A bit on the brief side (I listened to the audiobook and it was 4 hours and 12 minutes), though even given that it had a good bit added beyond the main premise, not that I minded at all.
Essentially, the book talks about how the human brain first takes in information (spending a lot of time on visual information most especially), stores that memory, how human brain memory is vastly different from how a computer stores memory, and in the end, though humans only retain a portion of what their senses take in and then only retain a portion of that as memories and that memories are fragile and more or less constantly malleable, this not a bug but a feature, as not only is forgetting a crucial part of how our brains operate, but that in fact humans who do flawlessly remember everything don’t actually operate as well. In fact, perfect memory is very far from perfect understanding, and that perfect memory can very easily interfere with making inferences and understanding generalized concepts. While computers are undoubtedly better at remembering huge amounts of facts absolutely flawlessly, they aren’t able to understand these facts or infer things from them, which not only is a strength of the human brain, but some amount of forgetting is actually essential to the process.
There is a lot of discussion of how human sight works, not in terms of the eyeball itself, but how the brain receives, processes, and stores that memory. I thought it maybe a little much at times but it was never boring.
There was an interesting section on mnemonics, on how people train themselves to remember huge amounts of data, once very important in times of antiquity such as in Ancient Greece and Rome, and on interesting case studies of people (such as the individual that inspired Rain Man) who could remember vast amounts of data. These weren’t asides though, as they tied into the central premise of how remembering vast amounts of data is not only not necessarily or even likely understanding things but may in fact often be a huge obstacle to understanding them. They also tied into a lesser premise, that school work should not be memorizing things, and another one, that unless people just want to, there is no real need to train oneself to remember things better (such as appointments) given how many very easy options people have, something not true in ancient times.
Lots of great references, from Plato and Cicero to Terminator and Blade Runner.
A solid well-argued book, a bit on the short side as I listened to it in two days, but I do appreciate the occasional quicker listen. I think it could be a good gateway to further readings on neuroscience. I think it would also pair well with readings on language as well. ...more
Fast reading, entertaining, and informative look at the science of fear by a sociologist (with a PhD in sociology), one who professionally studies feaFast reading, entertaining, and informative look at the science of fear by a sociologist (with a PhD in sociology), one who professionally studies fear thanks to not only a life-long interest in the subject but also as part of her day job as a professional sociologist employed by a haunted house, ScareHouse in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to analyze data provided by customers and employees to make the haunted house scarier (but safe and not exploitative) and to create new attractions to satisfy people.
Part history of the study of fear, part review of the literature on the sociology and physiology behind fear and how people respond to it, part travelogue of visiting frightening attractions in Canada, the United States, Colombia, and Japan, and part gonzo journalism as again and again author Margee Kerr puts herself in fearful situations, analyzing her reaction, what this tells her about her own mind, and how she wants to handle fearful situations in her own professional and personal journey.
My biggest surprise reading the book was that this was clearly a book on sociology and mental health in general, that while each chapter was entertaining and informative, all along the author was pulling back the curtain to explain why people are afraid, what that looks like in terms of brain chemistry and physical response, is wanting to be scared healthy (it is), how scary attractions if designed and implemented correctly, can be quite healthy to one’s mental health, even healing, and how understanding fear and even using fear can help in mental health treatments of things such as phobia, processing trauma, PTSD, and other mental health issues.
Part I (Physical Thrills), had two chapters. Chapter one takes the reader to a particularly thrilling roller coaster in Japan while the author talks about the history of roller coasters, how and why people love thrill rides and what they do to the body, the science of screaming, and how screaming can even be therapeutic (that while there is no such thing as “bottled-up emotions,” screaming can help say people with ADHD). Chapter two looks at the fear of heights, particularly as part of thrill ride type activities, as the author does the CN Tower Edgewalk in Toronto, Canada, the world’s highest external walk on a building (at 1,168 feet high, or 116 stories). In this chapter the reader learns a lot about the role of the hippocampus in how our brain determines if a situation is really threatening, learns a bit about the role of the sympathetic nervous system, and about various chemicals like serotonin and endorphins and the roles they play in fear.
Part II (Psychological Chills), had three chapters. Chapter three took the reader to the chilling Eastern State Penitentiary (ESP) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in one of the scarier chapters and talked about the fear generated by total institutions (“those that hold people against their will,” whether places designed to help but are for people who can’t help themselves or a danger to others, like psychiatric hospitals and nursing homes, for punishment like prisons, or voluntary like schools, monasteries, and abbeys), the history of ESP and its annual fundraising seasonal haunted house (Terror Behind the Walls), the ethics of how some haunted house attractions sensationalize what was really real abuse in penitentiaries and psychiatric hospitals, how sadly even today the two really aren’t all that different (as many people with severe mental health issues end up in prison), and the science of fear of the dark, claustrophobia, and why time seems to move so slowly in scary situations (which was interesting). Chapter four continued with ESP and looked at ghost hunting as the author accompanied ghost hunters at ESP, looking at the science of why people think they have paranormal encounters, examining such things as infrasound and autonomous sensory meridian response or ASMR. Chapter five looked at haunted houses and Halloween (but not much I will admit), looked at Japanese horror or “J-horror” and how it is different from Western horror like in the United States, how Japanese mythology and religion viewed ghosts and hauntings, took the reader on a riveting haunted house experience in Tokyo, and a bit on how memory and senses of time are affected by novel and by scary experiences (“our brain interprets objects coming toward us as threatening, and therefore time is perceived to slow down as we work to process and encode every little detail for future use”).
Part III (Real Fear), had two chapters. Chapter six looked at how in the past and today Americans interact with as a society and individuals the dying and the dead (how we have become increasingly removed from actual dying and death which oddly makes Americans more anxious about dying), the author visited the famed “suicide forest” in Japan (Aokigahara Juki Forest in the foothills next to Mount Fuji), looked a bit at the sociology of suicide (comparing and contrasting American and Japanese attitudes and treatment), how people deal with thoughts of their own death, the death of loved ones and of near-death experiences, with the overall theme being a look at terror management theory or TMT and what it has to say (or not say) about such things as PTSD. Chapter seven related arguably the most terrified experience the author had, getting lost in Bogota, Colombia, looked at how Colombians view fear, the difference in how people act over fear of possible things versus fear over things they are certain that will happen, the science of what happens to people who live in an area where they are constantly at risk for say violent crime to themselves or witnessing it firsthand, the science of what happens in people’s brains of how they handle traumatic events, how memory is an active process, the science of reconsolidation interventions in dealing with trauma (“not to change the facts or content of an event, but to disrupt the process of emotional encoding”), how media exposure leads to things like misperception of threats and overprotection of children, how overprotection of children can have negative consequences, and different aspects of stress management.
Part IV (Bringing It Home) takes the reader back to ScareHouse and relates more history of haunted houses, how the author used her research to create a more interactive potion of ScareHouse (the Basement, where unlike in most haunted houses, the actors can and do touch the customers), some of the controversies of interactive or “extreme” haunted houses (with actors touching customers, either one customer at a time or couples), the various ways people manage their threat responses (such as suppression, simply shutting it down, the vigilant/avoidant response, and cognitive reappraisal, “actively redefining an experience and assigning new meaning”), and how people with anxiety or worry may “enjoy engaging with thrilling material” as their “stress tolerance undergoes a kind of recalibration” which may be beneficial (this she says needs “lots more testing”).
There are photographs at the start of each chapter, an extensive section of notes, and an index. I liked all the coverage of the physiology of fear, what fear looks like in terms of brain chemistry and physiological response, as well as all the mentions of what the sociology and psychology literature has to say on fear. I think a few historical sections could have been detailed a little better, as there was very little on the history of Halloween, covered basically in a few pages, and while Japanese supernatural horror movies were covered, really no coverage of Western horror movies. I think the topic of overprotection of children could have been discussed more than it was though perhaps that was a bit far afield to go too deeply into it. I think the author did a great job of conveying her personal experience in a number of sections, particularly at the Edgewalk, ESP, and the Japanese haunted house, though the section on Bogota, intellectually I understood the fear but I didn’t “feel it” like I did with those other chapters. Perhaps that was an experience that was very challenging to convey in print. ...more
Interesting book, it is not entirely what I thought it would be when I started reading it but in the end I found it a useful read. I had imagined the Interesting book, it is not entirely what I thought it would be when I started reading it but in the end I found it a useful read. I had imagined the book would take the opposite tack of other linguistic books I have read this year (I am no expert I need to point out), that language doesn’t shape thought but rather the reverse is true, that how we think shapes language (because among other things, there is a good bit of thinking we do that is nonverbal).
Interestingly, and to the enormous credit of author Guy Deutscher, he has heard all the objections to the notion that language (and culture) shape perception and thought. He not only brings up the objections, but runs through the objections that have been raised through the years and shows in fact why they are right, that language cannot prevent someone from thinking a certain way (there is no 1984 Newspeak that prevents certain thought in people). At times it felt like he was arguing that something exists – language shapes perception and thought – and then bringing up example after example and agreeing no, in fact that wasn’t the case.
As I read further into the book, it became evident he was arguing instead it “is not what they [languages] allow their speakers to convey but in what they habitually force their speakers to say,” that any human being can learn anything and say anything, that the particulars of their mother tongue never means they are unable to find new ways to perceive and talk about the world (anyone can learn), but rather (particularly when dealing with the “tropical languages,” the lesser known and sadly often endangered tongues spoken in say the Amazon Basin or New Guinea or among Australian Aborigines, which can have radically different constructions and rules than say Spanish or other typical European languages) there are indeed languages that through simple force of habit, continually forcing users to see or talk about things certain ways, can shape automatic responses to certain criteria, even when tested used nonverbal means.
Though at first glance it seemed Deutscher was going to talk primarily about color and language (and indeed there is a lot of discussion of the idea that perceptions of color have changed through time, the author discussing at length 19th century analyses of the odd by modern standards way Homer of Ancient Greece described color, an interesting discussion that though at times became a bit of a sidebar with its discussion of evolution, was nonetheless worth reading), the author in the end looked at three examples in different languages ways in which how humans think have been shaped, namely “spatial coordinates and their consequences for memory patterns and orientation, grammatical gender and its impact on associations, and the concepts of color, which can increase our sensitivity to certain color distinctions” based on how the person’s original languages recognizes the existence and classification of certain colors, that it isn’t that they can’t perceive certain colors or recognize the differences of say shades or tints, but how their language recognizes such colors can influence how they respond to or recognize colors in nonverbal ways.
The author discussed in several chapters say how languages like Guugu Yimithirr (a language of coastal northeastern Australia, from which gave ultimately gave us the word kangaroo, a story that is discussed in the book) and Tzeltal (a Mayan language from Mexico, which among other things uses one term for green and blue, treating blue and green as shades of one color) with their geographic coordinate systems instead of an egocentric coordinate system (talking about a chair being north of you rather than to your right, of giving all directions “with respect to the fixed cardinal directions at all times”) can among other things force its speakers to have a much greater awareness and ability to discern direction than those using an egocentric coordinate system (often talking how things are in front or behind or right or left, that speakers of these languages “register and remember information about space that we do not”), with the author addressing whether or not this is a product of environment (in a trackless desert a geographic coordinate system makes sense while in a urban environment an egocentric system might do very well) alone or of language.
It is an interesting read and he does as several reviewers have noted spent a great deal of time on color and language and in that discussion had a lot of biographies of various people involved in the history of this discussion as well as number of interesting black and white and also color diagrams and photos. I found in the end though ultimately I grasped his points as far as how language forces people to think much easier with regards to gender (in languages that gender various animate and inanimate objects of how this element can impart a gender influenced view on things such as bridges, “that the grammatical gender of an inanimate object affects the properties that speakers associate with this object”) and with regards to egocentric versus geographic coordinate systems.
A quick read, there are extensive notes, a bibliography, a thorough index, and color plates. ...more
Well-written popular science book on linguistics and psychology, I originally bought it wondering if I would get an answer to my question, does the laWell-written popular science book on linguistics and psychology, I originally bought it wondering if I would get an answer to my question, does the language one speaks shape the way one thinks? It turns out, not really, not as much as one might think, but I was introduced to me a much more interesting concept, that humans have a sixth sense, a language instinct, one that is separate and distinct from general knowledge or mental abilities, one specifically geared towards in one’s crucial early years of life picking up a language, of recognizing rules of syntax and grammar and building mental dictionaries well before ever explicitly being taught this (and often in defiance of specific instruction), and far from copying adults or any sort of media around them, people acquire an ability to speak, to say phrases and sentences that they couldn’t possibly have heard before and quickly adapt knowledge of rules to words that they could not have possibly heard before, of how to say pluralize a new noun or recognizing a word as a verb or noun long before a child could ever explain such concepts.
Much of the book is a really fascinating study of how children and adults learn language, whether it is a child learning the language of his or her parents or adults or children learning pidgin or creating a creole language, even using many examples of how this applies to sign language and how people with mental disabilities or injuries speak or learn to speak (or learn to speak again). Further, in addition to a universal trait among humans of a language instinct, humans have basically Universal Grammar, that while of course the specifics of say Chinese or English or Arabic vary greatly, fundamentally without really being told to at a very young age children understand and quickly use concepts like “nouns and verbs, phrase structures and word structures, cases and auxiliaries, and so on” and often do so quite well. In essence, as a fundamental part of being human, the human brain is wired in such a way to quickly learn, understand, and use language.
After a preface the book is divided into thirteen chapters. Chapter one introduced the concepts of the language instinct, that “language would stand out as the preeminent trait” among humans, with the author adding this book “will not chide you about proper usage, trace the origins of idiom and slang, or divert you with palindromes, anagrams, eponyms, or those precious names for groups of animals like “exaltation of larks”….but is instead “about something much more basic: the instinct to learn, speak, ad understand language.” The chapter also introduces the reader to Noam Chomsky, a hugely influential linguist that the author comes back to again and again. Chapter two talks about the “universality of complex language” (there are no Stone Age languages, even “nonstandard dialects of English,” discussing how it is a myth they “are grammatically deficient”), that “complex language is universal because children actually reinvent it, generation after generation – not because they are taught, not because they are generally smart, not because it is useful to them, but because they can’t help it” and “children deserve most of the credit for the language they acquire…[as] they know things they could not have been taught.” The chapter also looks at pidgin and creole languages. Chapter three looks at how language does not in fact shape thinking at all, that Newspeak aside, not creating or allowing words for certain concepts does not in fact erase a concept, about how much thinking in the human mind is nonverbal and not in fact tied to any language, and along the way explodes a few myths, such as the “Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax” (“contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more words for snow that do speakers of English”). Chapter four talks about how instinctual and universal the ability to recognize and follow rules of generative grammar in order to “translate between orders of words and combinations of thoughts” (this grammar different from “pedagogical and stylistic grammars we encountered in school”). At times a rather complex chapter with lots of diagrams, it does get into the nitty gritty of how grammar works at a structural level, looking at concepts like word-chain devices, case tags, auxiliaries (“function words”, not “content” words, such as various articles like the, a, some), and the differences between the deep structure of a sentence and the surface structure of a sentence. He uses a lot of Chomsky in the chapter, hoping that Chomsky’s writings not be treated “as a set of cabalistic incantations” (Chomsky can famously be difficult to read and understand). Chapter five, “Words, Words, Words,” looks at the morphology of words, the concept of headlessness in a noun (important to understand such things as why the plural of say still life is still lifes not still lives), listemes (a term coined by Anna Maria Di Sciullo and Edwin Williams, of how some groups of words are treated as if they were in fact all one word, basically phrase-sized units like many idioms, such as kick the bucket), and the importance of understanding homonyms and synonyms (concepts that children seem to grasp to a great degree). Chapter six looked at issues of speech perception, the physiology of speech production, the concept of phonetic symbolism (tied to the “link between the postures of the tongue and the vowels it sculpts”), onsets, rimes, feet (“rhythmic groups” that syllables are collected into, “salient chunks of word that we tend to manipulate in poetry and wordplay”), and had a fascinating section on how phonetic spelling would actually obscure meaning and make communication harder. Chapter seven spent a good deal of time on the problems of making AI understand language, discussing how grammar alone does not explain language comprehension, that “speaking and understanding share a grammatical database…but they also need procedures that specify what the mind should do, step by step…[a] mental program that analyzes sentence structures during language comprehension” (the parser, a key concept to understand in this chapter, different from grammar), had an interesting discussion about the “unintelligibility of transcribed speech” (also relevant to issues of language comprehension in general), and in the end, writes “human communication is not just a transfer of information like two fax machines connected with a wire; it is a series of alternating displays of behavior by sensitive, scheming, second-guessing, social animals.” Chapter eight looks at differences in various languages and the concept of Universal Grammar, of how all the world’s languages “have a vocabulary in the thousands or tens of thousands, sorted into part-of-speech categories including noun and verb,” that there are rules for how new word structures “can be created and modified by derivational and inflectional rules,” etc., why languages differ (from linguistic innovation, heredity, and isolation), and some interesting historical asides on the incorporation into English of Norman French words and on the Great Vowel Shift in English. Chapter nine goes into great detail on how the language instinct works in children, noting such things as “far as grammar learning goes, the child must be a naturalist, passively observing the speech of others, rather than an experimentalist, manipulating stimuli and recording the results…to become speakers, children cannot just memorize; they must leap into the linguistic unknown and generalize to an infinite world of as-yet unspoken sentences.” Lots of time spent on how children learn to speak, discussing such things as the importance of babbling and how children are so easily able most of the time to pick up on word boundaries, and the physiology of how and why children are guaranteed acquisition of a normal language up to the age of six. Chapter ten was a fascinating look at the human brain as it relates especially to language, different disorders and how they affect the use of language (such as Wernicke’s aphasia and Broca’s aphasia), and where exactly in the human brain language might be processed. Chapter eleven looked on how the language instinct and the physical ability to speak might have evolved, looking at issues of natural selection, language ability (or lack thereof) in chimpanzees (with a lot to say about teaching sign language to chimpanzees), and where on the hominid family tree language might have first appeared. Chapter twelve looked at the difference between descriptive rules (“describing how people do talk”) and prescriptive rules (“prescribing how one “ought” to talk), “the scandal of the language mavens,” why the author doesn’t have much use for prescriptive rules, and the different types of people who are self-appointed experts on proper use of at least the English language, among them wordwatchers (looking for unusual words and documenting word origins, writing “for me, wordwatching for its own sake has all the intellectual excitement of stamp collecting, with the added twist that an undetermined number of your stamps are counterfeits,” referring to the dubious origin stories of many words), Jeremiahs (“expressing their bitter laments and righteous prophecies of doom” on language usage), and the entertainer (“who shows off his collection of palindromes, puns, anagrams, rebuses, malapropisms, Goldwynisms, eponyms, sesquipedalia, howlers, and bloopers”). There is also an interesting discussion on why whom is on its way out (and preceding it is ye, which once existed as a subject to you as an object much the same way who/whom exist). The final chapter, chapter thirteen, looked at issues with the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) in understanding human behavior, dismisses the “mindless dichotomies of hereditary-environment” (nature vs nurture) in understanding the language instinct, how there is a concept of Universal People (postulated by Donald E. Brown, which rather than looking for exotic differences in various cultures, sees a massive number of universals, such as value placed on articulateness, gossiping, recognized facial expressions of say sadness or anger, a sense of self versus other, dividing labor by sex and by age, standards of sexual modesty, distinguishing between close kin and distant kin, displays of affection, and a sense of right and wrong), and the idea that in addition to in addition to a language instinct, the human mind has other built in modules, such as concepts of contamination, mental maps for large territories, and one discussed at length, the idea that there is an intuitive biology, or folk biology, of understanding how in a basic sense plants and animals work and how humans naturally seem able to classify plants and animals into groups hierarchically.
This book was originally published in 1994 and there were a few sections that might be a little dated. I can’t really speak to the psychology and linguistics aspects, but it did seem some of the sections on the difficulties of teaching AI language comprehension have been at least partially solved since 1994, though I would not be able to explain why. Social media wasn’t really a thing yet in 1994 (at one point the author discussed xeroxlore, which while I had never heard of the term I do remember photocopied humorous lists or urban stories being passed around from ultimately unknowable original sources) though it is clear from his discussion the culture was there ready to receive it. Every now and then various hacker terms are discussed just in passing, the majority of which I had never heard of. I do wonder if it is because I am not a hacker or the terms never really caught on.
No photographs, drawings, or maps (it doesn’t seem necessary for this particular subject) but there are many diagrams of phrases and sentences. There is a section of end notes (not readable, just a list of where to find more information on a particular topic discussed in the text) and multiple pages of references. Also a thorough index and a glossary. This edition also has an update (it appears from 2007, where the author discusses advances and controversies chapter by chapter since the book was originally published) and author's suggestion for further reading. ...more
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