Krishna
Don’t get taken in by the prosaic title. The title does the book a disservice, sounding like a college textbook with dry descriptions on the mind and psychology. This book is anything but.
Starts brilliantly in discussing how a child’s mind is incredibly more sophisticated than the best AI programs out there and why the android dreams of filmmakers (think Alien for example) are just that – dreams.
He talks about how AI has not even scratched the surface of what a human child can do effortlessly – recognizing pictures of things at an angle or upside down, walking effortlessly in all kinds of terrain and so on.
He goes on to say how evolution built this complex machine called the mind in our brains, and how it easily surpasses all the technology humanity has so far devised ingeniously.
The style appears a bit pedantic (like the title) but once you get into the swing of it, you see why this is a brilliant book. . Still, given when this was written, the technical examples are dated. A powerful computer with 1 GB RAM? How quaint!
But his ideas are interesting. He talks about the evolutionary pressure creating the modern mind and how we are still instinctively influenced by the evolutionary hunter gatherer instincts of homo sapiens’ early evolution.
It gets a bit boring when Pinker goes into (the archaic, as the book was written much earlier) descriptions of a computer solving a problem in boring detail. At this point, you begin to wonder if it is like some of the books which start with blazing brilliance but lose their way somewhere along the line.
However, have patience: either bull through the detailed descriptions that you don’t want or simply skim over them. You will be richly rewarded later.
Even in this piece, you find some vignettes to ponder about what constitutes consciousness.
He goes into more esoteric discussions on the mind and how it is layered, and how cognition works – all probably amazing stuff but your heart does not really stay with the book because of the same issue – the narration sucks. Sometimes he goes so deep into (elementary) logic gates of ‘and’, ‘or’ and ‘nor’, to name just three, that it is totally irritating.
He goes deep into how the mind recognizes the difference between ‘the girl ate the slug’ versus ‘the slug ate the girl’. Seems like splitting hairs to me, as I did not pick up the book to learn the esoteric technical details of cognition. As they are, this is not as taut with tension all the way through but except for a couple of places like this, the book is really up there with anything that Bill Bryson, Yuval Noah Harari or Brian Greene came up with.
The details he goes into – how do you recognize sentences, how does the mind makeover the two dimensional image that falls on two retinas into a coherent whole, how the mind of even a child manages to make generalizations – are in themselves interesting.
Some interesting tidbits poke through, in bits initially. The rocket that US sent in space for eternity was sent in the hope that some alien intelligence will stumble upon it. They had sent a sample of humanity as it existed then (in the seventies) – that included classical samples from Beethoven, a few Chuck Berry songs, the sound of a whale etc on a CD. (In itself an odd choice because the aliens need to have not only a concept of reading from a CD but cultural references to earth, mainly America – which even others outside America on earth struggle with!). It also had a message of peace read by the then UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim. This last one was ironic because Kurt was later found to be a Nazi officer. Even though he did not participate in the genocide, he did sent several Jews to the concentration camps. By the time the world discovered this, the message had gone irretrievably on the spaceship.
Another related tidbit is the Saturday Night Live parody on it, where the aliens send a reply message. It read : “ Send more Chuck Berry”.
Where the book takes off is when Stephen Pinker leaves off the computer analogy and turns his attention to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He mentions the most famous SETI initiative and others. He argues that it is not certain that intelligence is the only end point for evolution and certainly is not the ultimate goal of evolution. He argues that intelligence is only one and by no means the only mode for survival and evolution simply facilitates survival. Brilliant stuff.
It gets a lot better. Just like Richard Dawkins, he demolishes arguments against evolution from both the bible belt people offended by how it repudiates the Bible, as well as scientists who are in favour of complexity theory and argue that blind evolution could not have designed complex features like the eye.
He counters arguments that evolution is stupid because even birds like penguins have useless wings that they cannot use to fly with ‘Wrong twice. Birds like moa have no traces of wings at all and penguins do use the wings to fly – they just do it underwater!
From here it picks up speed and really blazes on. His description of animal behaviour may seem amazing. For example, he describes a Tunisian desert ant that seems to ‘remember’ where its home is even after randomized wandering, but only relative to where it has reached. If taken and placed in another spot, it goes directly back to where its nest was relative to the last place it was in, and gets confused. Fascinating. Does it do calculus in its mind? If yes, it is intuitive, of course. Similar items about the bee dance (which Richard Dawkins also explains in depth in his River Out of Eden) is fascinating.
The evolution of the human brain and how we take action ‘instinctively’ based on some inherited impulses in the brain (neurons) is fascinating. As is his discussion on why does the hen sit on its eggs to incubate them? Does it know the future? (That chicks will come out of it?) Or is it just an instinct that makes the eggs feel precious to it so that it guards them out of ‘a vague desire’? Is it the same instinct that makes young boys vie for attention from young girls and makes them feel that there is absolutely nothing more important than gaining her attention?
He also explores why, among all animals, cognitive intelligence only evolved in humans. He shows that a prerequisite to intelligence is group living, which was in primates. Then he shows how the group living invites deception, and games because of the risks of rivalry for mates, food and risks of cuckoldry. A monkey, when shown a set of boxes with food and one with a snake, led its mates to the box with the snake. When they fled in terror, he sat down to enjoy the food unimpeded. (Other prerequisites for evolving smartness were depth perception, colour vision etc, in case you are wondering). The gregarious animals- bees, dolphins, wolves, elephants and others are the smartest in their group of animals. The lone exception seems to be the orangutan, which is smart but solitary – a puzzling exception.
By now you realize that Steven Pinker is a deep thinker and the details he goes into that seem to be leading you astray are the details of the discussion. A bit too indepth for those of us who want to be entertained but do not want too much detail, but these are very absorbing for those who are willing to spend time to drill down.
Even for the rest of us there is a lot to amaze. For instance, he says that the ability to see stereoscopic images (known more commonly as Magic Eye pictures) are caused by the brain’s ability to make sense of some seemingly random images. Moreover, 2% of the people are unable to see the 3D images that pop out for others using varying cross-eyed techniques. What is more, this is not present in babies but gets formed in slightly older children. In an amazing experiment, monkeys which were made to wear blinds on one eye since birth until they grew up to be three years permanently lost the ability to form stereoscopic images, so it is something that the brain ‘learns’ during child developmental stage – even in humans. (Yes, I am very cognizant of the implied animal cruelty in the above research)
More things to amaze? Yes! Animals grow (cats, monkeys, humans) and their eyes grow too, the distance between them varying throughout the growth. The brain continuously monitors and learns to modify its algorithm to present a unified vision with the growing distances. Some animals are born with eyes in the adult position – a famous example being rabbits. They are usually universal prey for other animals and so ‘nature cannot provide the luxury of helpless childhood’ for these!
He also goes into symbols that the mind stores to remember objects no matter what their orientation – which is a difficult AI problem again – but if you do not want that level of depth you can just skim over it without much loss of understanding of the rest of the book.
He goes into a fascinating case study of a patient identified with prosopagnosia (yes, a new word for me too: it means inability to recognize individual faces). It was a result of a head injury in an accident. He recognized even his wife and children by only their voices or other means. He could recognize faces but not a particular face. He had trouble naming animals (but could, after some struggle, it appears). Also described is a person with the opposite problem. He had no trouble identifying faces but had trouble recognizing everyday objects.
More such interesting facts follow. Starting from the ‘kind of obvious’ inferences – for example, the meeting went from 3:00 pm to 4:00 pm does not mean that the meeting physically moved, or the house went from Mary to Linda means just the possession of the house moved, not the house itself – he goes on. The point is to show how the language has built in analogies from the earliest times because human mind looks at time and property movement as similar to the physical movement.
More interesting examples follow. We look at arguments as war (Your claim is indefensible or He attacked my weak points and won the argument) or ideas as food (what he said left a bad taste in my mouth or I can’t swallow that claim). Most of us use these without thinking about the association in everyday life. Interesting.
He turns his considerable intellect to the mass killing in revenge by disgruntled psychopaths. He talks about how the situation is not unique to US or the West or even to modern times. (US invented the slang ‘going postal’ after a string of such incidents in a row, all by postal workers). The word ‘running amok’ has been there for a long time in the language and the word amok comes from Malaysia where such incidents were occurring long ago.
He then demolishes the theory that lemmings are altruistic by committing mass suicide for ‘the benefit of the remaining lemmings and to self cull their overpopulation’. He demolishes the theory that wolves hunt the weakest to keep the prey’s herd fittest. He explains that they all behave selfishly for the animal and not the herd. The natural instinct to protect one’s own family – children in all species and even mother/ grandmother in humans is wired into the brain through gene propagation and humans act according to their ‘natural’ (as in programmed) instincts, without being aware of the nature of the behaviour. Heady stuff, this.
He is amazing when he discusses subjects like incest – not from a cultural or taboo standpoint but from a genetic standpoint. He shows who benefits – between the two partners – in incestuous relationship and why it is rare – not because of cultural prohibitions but due to natural genetic impulses. Brilliant. In addition, he analyzes child and arranged marriages and discusses amazing things – not about the nature of the marriage vs choosing one’s own life partner but about what sending a young bride to live with in-laws to whose son the bride was promised does to the psyche later in the marriage. Just mind blowing stuff backed by research. In the midst of this, he sprinkles cultural references (the movie Matrix for instance) and quotes that make it even more lively. (One sample quote : ‘Men and women. Women and men. It will never work’ by Erica Jong)
What follows is another amazing discussion of the necessity of sexual reproduction, which is very expensive in genetic terms. Also why there is are two genders, male and female. A lot of the fundamental description is unknown to most of you, and, if you are one of them, will knock the socks off of you.
Be prepared to have your mind blown while reading this book. His arguments about the rationale for war and why people sign up to do dangerous things – all make exciting reading as they are all based on science and, specifically, genetic payoff. Brilliant.
Why are women not interested in war? There are evolutionary reasons for it. (This is not to say that they do not make good soldiers in modern times but we are talking about olden times where wars were started because of women but never by women.
He goes on to explain altruism and even fashion trends with scientific reasoning. The book is absolutely absorbing.
After explaining how an ‘evolutionarily valueless’ thing like music was favoured by natural selection he goes deep into the arrangement of musical notes and why they please the mind. (He calls music the ‘cheesecake for the ears’. )
He goes into why some people mistake actors for their parts in, say, a TV series – a very common problem all over the world. In America the actors playing evil parts get death threats – in the name of their parts!
The ending is equally astonishing.
This is a thought provoking book that opens your mind to another level of thinking, rather like Sapiens or A Short History of Nearly Everything. If there is a flaw, a tiny one, I’d say that the depth he goes into on some of these is possibly not for everyone.
Still, even with that, this book deserves a near perfect 9/10
== Krishna