Krishna
Starts at full speed and within the first three pages, you realize that connectome is the sum total of all your brain’s connections and makes you, you. He even gives the (to me at least) shocking proposal that it is your connectomes that may make you smart or dull, able to grasp complex things quickly or even have depression or dementia. Fascinating.
The descriptions are crisp, and the ideas are new. You are right away drawn into the subject matter and realize in the first ten pages that this is one of those books which provide excellent and new subject matter in the exactly right prose to maintain your interest and also excite and educate you.
But the theory is strange even in the modern world. You can appreciate how your experiences shape your brain and the connections shape your character but connectome as a basic science equivalent to the study of, say, neural composition of brains sounds a bit like a fantasy theory. But the author is a neuroscientist and so you kind of go along with these frontier scientific concepts.
The narration is interesting. He talks about empirical studies in the past that ‘established’ brain size as a factor of intelligence and were amazed when the brilliant scholar Anatole France had a brain was – it was weighed after his death – 25 kgs less than an average male brain! They talk about Gunther, an obsessive scientist who wanted to count everything and how he divided men into various ‘scientific’ categories : genius, specially able, capable, fair intelligence, slow intelligence, slow, slow dull, very dull and imbecile. (No, I kid you not!). Gunther was also obsessed with counting (or taking a census of ) beauty. In his wanderings, he secretly kept count of the women he saw categorized into attractive, indifferent or repellent. He came to the scientific conclusion that ‘London ranks the highest for beauty and Aberdeen the lowest’.
The author talks about the enlarged area of brain for scientists like Einstein and some famous writers without assigning any causal significance to the fact.
Along the way, you learn interesting tidbits as well. For instance, did you know that the disease Syphillis is named for the first mythological man who is said to have contracted it? Yes, it was named, by the Italian physician Giralamo Fracastoro (who, due to the patient he saw, concluded that it is a ‘French disease’) named it after the mythical shepherd Syphilus, who was punished with the sickness by Apollo. Even after the drugs were discovered for syphilis, they were found ineffectual in curing it after the bacteria responsible for it attacks the nervous system. German physician Julius Wager – Jauregg discovered that if you intentionally infect the patient with malaria, the resulting fever killed off the syphilis bacteria, after which malaria can be treated! This is before the era of penicillin, of course. Syphilis, left untreated, invaded the brain, causing madness. Famous writer Maupassant, painter Paul Gaugin and others may have suffered from it.
We learn that for those who have Alzheimer’s Disease, the brain size actually shrinks. Interesting.
Also some portions are perhaps too detailed and technical.
The author talks about the now famous ‘Jennifer Aniston’ neuron that lights up only when a picture (or the written name) is shown to the viewer but not for other pictures including other celebrities. He talks about strengthening connections when two subjects are frequently mentioned together or associated together.
The book drags in parts when the author meanders around the subject for too long. There are nuggets of information about the scientists who made progress but this is no ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’. The author does not have the gift of narration that is anywhere comparable.
An interesting book nevertheless.
You pick up a lot of nuggets along the way. The brains of canaries have been studied and the HVC, a portion of the brain associated with learning songs, actually is seen to shrink in winter when the canaries don’t sing and grows back in spring when they do start singing!
More tidbits follow. The fond hope of people wanting to live forever is interesting. They give their body and a substantial donation to Alcor, which promises to preserve your body (or just your head for a smaller fee) in liquid nitrogen “forever”. That is, until humankind solves the problem of aging and learns ‘age reversal’ where your old cells can be rejuvenated into youth. At which point, Alcor will help thaw out your frozen body (or head to be attached to a suitable body) and revivify you. This whole process of freezing, or cryonics, was brought into world attention when a court battle was fought to prevent the body of baseball star Tad Williams being thus frozen by some family members against the wishes of other family members. (Finally, the body was placed in Alcor, when the family members who wanted to freeze him won, despite his will asking for cremation when he died).
Don’t get me wrong – the book is still pedantic and fairly boring. It requires constant mental push to keep reading if you are, like me, a layman not interested in the esoterics of medical technology. But you get to interesting parts in between – like eating a bitter cookie with raisins in the middle, I suppose.
One exception is the belief in the members of Alcor of the power of technology coming to rescue in a far future and the belief that the body can be reanimated even though it was ‘dead’ but current standards and how he shows the parallels between the religious belief in heaven with no direct proof of that either.
The other ‘salvation’ is to turn yourself – mainly your brain and your awareness – and live forever as a computer simulation – a la Matrix, I suppose – when computers are powerful enough for you to be able to do so. Another interesting branch that keeps you occupied with its speculative discussions and what the leading proponent wants to do. One of them, Ken Hayworth, wants to plastinate his brain. Plastination involves preserving organs in plastic, like the Body World so famously demonstrated. Hayworth wants to do it when his brain is ‘healthy’ so that future can simulate the essence of it – which will wait undecayed because of plastination – into a computer model. When he ‘thus wakes up’ he will live forever in a computer. The catch of course, is that plastinating his healthy brain involves what we today think of as suicide.
The ‘uploaded’ consciousness will be even more powerful than the living consciousness because it can easily interact with other consciousness elements on the network having all the advantages of a ‘super brain’ which is a collective brain function of all those who live thus in the computer. (Metaverse on steroids, it looks like!)
That part gets interesting and stays very lively all through to the end of the book. In all, I’d say it is still spending time on, even if some of the arguments repeat themselves and some are fairly pedantic. You get to know a new concept related to the question ‘What makes us us?’ and this keeps you thinking after you have finished the book.
5/10
= = Krishna