Say that reminds me, I have a kind of love/hate relationship with Radiolab, which I listen to as a podcast, and which I will therefore treat as a podcast moving forward. Every time I think I’m done, every time I’ve had it “up to here” with their gap-mouthed Millennial wonder about things that happened before 1980, every time they transparently let Jad’s sound design muffle what would otherwise be a clear-eyed approach to scientific inquiry, they wind up posting an episode that captures both my heart and my attention -- and those episodes usually have something to do with the human brain.
It was probably one of those brain episodes that either mentioned or featured Carl Zimmer, a “popular science writer, blogger, columnist, and journalist who specializes in the topics of evolution, parasites, and heredity.” His Brain Cuttings is a collection of fifteen fairly short essays, each on some subject related to neuroscience. They, like most collections of essays I’ve read, left me fairly flat. The most interesting thing about the collection, I think, is how Radiolab-ish they are -- in the sense that none of them dive very deeply into their subject, each skipping along across the surface with some genuine wonder, but with a disappointing lack of precision.
Here are the handful of things that caught enough of my attention to make note of them in the margin.
Blushing Is Shame
In the first essay, “Does Shame Excite a Blush?”, Zimmer explores the neuroscience behind facial expressions and the emotions that give them rise. Or is it the other way around, the facial expressions that give rise to the emotions? Turns out it’s not always so easy to tell, because the two things, your emotions and your facial expressions, are inexplicably connected.
In other words, you don’t just make a sad face when you’re feeling sad. Making a sad face is an essential part of feeling sad. Take away the ability to make a sad face and you take away the ability to feel sad.
It’s another blow to our belief that we are thinking agents with premeditated volition. If one were to paralyze one’s face -- like through the use of Botox, a new craze at the time Zimmer was writing -- one would seriously limit one’s ability to feel emotions of any kind.
The Extended Mind
In “The Googled Mind,” Zimmer explores the concept of the extended mind, first posited by two philosophers, Andy Clark and David Chalmers. In a short essay they published in 1998, they…
...asked their readers to imagine a woman named Inga. Inga hears from a friend that there’s an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. She decides to go see it. She thinks for a moment, recalls that the museum is on 53rd Street, and starts walking that way. She accesses her belief that MOMA is on 53rd Street from its storage place in her brain’s memory network.
Now imagine a man named Otto, who has Alzheimer’s. His memory is faulty, and so he keeps with him a notebook in which he writes down important details. Like Inga, Otto hears about the museum exhibit. Since he can’t access the address in his brain, he looks it up in his notebook and then heads off in the same direction as Inga.
Clark and Chalmers argued that Inga’s brain-based memory and Otto’s notebook are fundamentally the same. Inga’s mind just happens to access information stored away in her brain while Otto’s mind draws on information stored in his notebook. The notebook, in other words, is part of his extended mind. It doesn’t make any difference that Otto keeps his notebook tucked away much of the time. After all, Inga tucks the memory of MOMA’s address out of her conscious awareness most of the time too. Clark and Chalmbers concluded that real people are actually more like Otto than like Inga: We all have minds that extend out into our environments.
It’s a provocative idea to many, but needlessly so, in my mind (extended or not). Because, like a lot of pop-science, the provocation rests on the choice of words, not on the actual concept. People freak out because Clark and Chalmers called it the “extended mind,” and then went on to claim all kinds of logical interpolations based solely on that phraseology.
They argue that Inga’s brain and Otto’s notebook are fundamentally the same thing. But are they? They both allow a person to record and access information, so they are similar in that regard, but does that make them “fundamentally the same thing?” What if Otto is only visiting New York and he left his notebook at home in San Francisco? Or if he gets mugged and his notebook is stolen and he no longer even knows where it is? Is the notebook still part of his extended mind?
The vernacular trick is that phrase itself. The extended mind. Nobody would view it as controversial if Clark and Chalmers called Otto’s notebook an “information storage device,” even though that wouldn’t change any of their argument’s conclusions. But which essay are you going to publish? “The Extended Mind”? Or “Information Storage Devices”?
The Sloppiness of Time
In “The Music of Time,” Zimmer explores the everyday phenomenon of time seeming to pass at different rates based on our emotional condition. There’s some real neuroscience going on when we have this perception (obviously), but here Zimmer seems more focused on dispelling myths that don’t exist.
We don’t need drugs for our feeling of time to change, however. When we experience a moment of terror -- falling from a tree, for example, or watching a car veer out of control and come towards us -- time seems to slow down. In 2007, David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, and his colleagues set out to probe how this feeling arises. They found some hardy volunteers who were willing to climb a 46-meter tower and fall backwards down into a net. After the fall, Eagleman asked the volunteers how long it took to fall. Their guesses were 36% longer on average than the actual 2.5 seconds it took for them to hit the net. Time did indeed slow down.
Wait. What? Time did indeed slow down? It did? Is time what the mind perceives it to be? Or an external construct of the universe? Why is the language here so sloppy?
But let’s get back to my essential point. In the essay’s conclusion, Zimmer makes this comment.
The old notion that our brains are governed by a single, simple clock is gone for good.
Yeah, okay. But does anyone think otherwise? No, sorry, my brain contains a unalterable time piece, with the precision of an atomic clock, and everything I perceive is meted out by its regular and constant progression of clicks. Why is Zimmer arguing against something that no one believes is true? Next he’ll be telling us that our memory isn’t exactly like a movie camera recording everything we see and hear.
The Spectrum
Let’s end with this one. In “They Imprint Your Genes, Your Mum and Dad,” Zimmer makes this interesting comment.
One of the most striking contrasts between autism and schizophrenia is how they affect the ability to understand others. Autistic people have a difficult time figuring out what other people are feeling. Schizophrenic people, on the other hand, sometimes do too good a job. They may come to believe that a refrigerator is talking to them, for example, or that people are conspiring against them.
Is schizophrenia on the autism spectrum? I don’t think so. Zimmer is simply making a connection here. And in that regard, it’s probably important to point out that seeing such connections puts Zimmer decidedly on the schizophrenic side of that non-existent spectrum.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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