An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain

Rating:
Summary: What an accomplishment.
Review: Ackerman writes brilliantly, her descriptions are charming, her keen observations are both original and scientifically astute. It's a perfect bridge between science and art. What more could one ask for?

Rating:
Summary: A naturalist-poet explores the mysteries of the human brain
Review:    Diane Ackerman remembers a pubescent summer at a camp in the Poconos. Ten 13-year-old girls in a bunkhouse. They talk about boys, canoeing, boys, applying makeup, boys, building fires. And boys. They are exactly alike. But they are also totally different. One might be easily bored, one a loudmouth, another broody. They conceal much from each other about their inner selves. The 13-year-old Ackerman thinks in sensory images and hides her borrowed copy of "Siddhartha." Why are they alike? Why are they different? Of all the mysteries of evolution, the development of the human brain is perhaps the most mysterious.

Ackerman, our poetic chronicler of the natural world, still thinks in sensory images. "An Alchemy of Mind," her brief but lush meditation on the brain, melds scientific research and personal reminiscence with an avalanche of metaphors as she tackles this facet of what she calls her "favorite fascinations," nature and human nature.

The interaction of the brain's 100 billion neurons, she tells us, is like "rush hour on the jammed streets of Manhattan." People are "sloshing sacks of chemicals on the move." Memories are "the shoals of a life." All true, all vivid.  It's an apt technique, because the brain is at its essence a metaphor machine. We look for similarities, patterns, generalities because they point to evolutionary survival strategies. Language itself is metaphor. "Pupil," Ackerman
explains,derives from the Latin word for "little doll," because we see ourselves reflected in one another's eyes. "Windows" comes from the Norse "wind 's eye," which is what they called the ventilation holes in their roofs. "Each word is a small story," she writes.

On the ever-vexing question of whether we are formed more by nature or nurture, Ackerman wisely opts for all of the above. We start our lives with genetic predispositions. But the human being is nothing if not a learner, particularly in the first years. We even learn things that are not true. Hence the false memory. If you tell a small child often enough that he has been sexually molested, he will believe it, and pass any lie detector test.

Ackerman also confirms what we all figure out, sooner or later: the brains of men and women really are wired differently. Women have fewer neurons, but they connect more. That may explain why women are more prone to depression, better at multitasking, remember emotional events longer and better. Women talk, men react through action. Except for the exceptions. And to some extent, we are all exceptions, and that's what makes life so interesting. Sure, we're all human animals, but what about the different personalities in the bunkhouse? What about the Shakespeares, the Einsteins? Einstein left his brain to science, but for years, researchers didn't see anything exotic. Now, scientific techniques have improved, and they realize that Einstein's brain is missing a fold running through the parietal lobes. "Did his cunning spring from an anatomical mistake that allowed better wiring?" Ackerman asks. "Or was it more complicated than that, created from the chemical pond of his brain, a wealth of unique experiences, and the zeitgeist of the era?"

Ackerman delves into her own brain as she wrestles with such knotty questions. For years, the sound of Ralph Vaughn Williams' musical composition, "Fantasia on Greensleeves," triggered a traumatic flashback, because it was the first radio music she heard after a horrifying accident at sea in the South Pacific. Her brain was reminding her to feel fear. But she tells us she has
taught herself to control her panic by consciously turning off her senses, one by one. It is no longer "the terrifying emotional red alert" it had been.

Alchemy is the pseudo-science that seeks to turn base metal into gold. The human mind turns brain cell connections into a self. It's a feat just as improbable as alchemy, but it works. With rare imaginative fertility, Ackerman goes a long way toward explaining how and why.

  

Rating:
Summary: pure delight
Review: Diane Ackerman takes concepts that have interested but eluded me since high school and makes them vivid and alive and crystal clear. She is the master of the perfect analogy, and can make everything in my brain fall easily and contentedly into place. Reading this book gives you a new appreciation of what it means to live in this world, and to experience it through our human brains. She's a gorgeous writer. Reading this will make your cocktail conversation smarter without a doubt, but it will also enrich your life.

Rating:
Summary: This is a fascinating book
Review: I enjoyed reading this book very much. Diane Ackerman takes a complex subject like the human brain and makes it easy to understand. Ackerman begins each chapter with thought prokoking quotes by famous writers, thinkers, and popular movies. My favorite quote in the book is by author Pearl Buck. It is about how people have a need to express themselves creatively. My other favorite quote is from Franz Kafka that says that being happy changes your entire outlook on life.

I loved the way Ackerman explains how the brain works in simple language. I learned that neurons grow new dendritic connections every time a person learns something new or expands on connections that already exists. Neurons communicate with each other by using axons.

There is an interesting chapter in this book that explains the differences between the way men and women think. Women solve problems using both sides of the brain. Men use only the side that specializes in that problem. Men lose more brain cells in the temporal and frontal lobes affecting feeling and thinking as they age. Women lose more brain cells in the hippocampus affecting memory as they get older. Ackerman makes an interesting observation that women worry about losing emotional attachments. This is in contrast to men who worry about losing face.

I also learned that human beings share the same motives, feelings and instincts with animals. We all share and seek a need for protection, hunger, status seeking, social contact, sexual desire, and acceptance. I also learned that tool use isn't just limited to monkeys and humans. Crows have the ability to bend wire into a hook to retrieve food in a bucket.

One of the most interesting sections of this book is the one about memory. I learned that the brain does four things to remember. It recognizes patterns, interprets them, records their source, and retrieves them. Ackerman defines the different types of memory which I found helpful. Working memory holds crates of information for immediate use, but it can only do one thing at a time. Episodic memories are those that are linked to a certain feeling. Memory suffers when we are under stress or if we are bored. Challenge, exercise, and novelty of new things improve our memory. I really liked the way Ackerman connects the subject of memory and language. Language gives us a verbal memory that allows us to learn and remember without physically experience something. Words serve as memory aids for some people too.

An Alchemy of Mind is a very informative and entertaining book. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in learning more about neuroscience or psychology.

Rating:
Summary: Brain Candy
Review: Since 1990, when she published "A Natural History of the Senses," Diane Ackerman has continued to explore how intimate human experience defies rational explanation. "A Natural History of Love" appeared in 1994. Next came "Deep Play" (1999), an account of human creativity and our need for transcendence, and "Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden" (2001), about the way gardening elevates our souls. What fascinates Ackerman in these books is the pervasive mystery of nature, despite the increasing depth of our scientific knowledge.

Her approach is to select a topic that is in its essence ineffable, then gather information about it from the worlds of science and evolutionary theory,literature, myth, popular culture and personal experience, and lavish her findings with elaborately worked, poetic prose. Her intention is to say the unsayable. Here, for instance, is Ackerman defining memory in her newest book, " An Alchemy of Mind," which considers the human brain and consciousness from her customarily impressionistic mix of perspectives: "An event is such a little piece of time and space, leaving only a mind glow behind like the tail of a shooting star. For lack of a better word, we call that scintillation memory."

She is a grand, erudite synthesizer, positioning herself at the place where knowledge ends and reporting back to us in the language of lyric. "I believe consciousness is brazenly physical," she tells her readers, "a raucous mirage the brain creates to help us survive. But I also sense the universe is magical, greater than the sum of its parts." This is not the way things sound in neuroscience journals or philosophy of mind papers.

With "An Alchemy of Mind," which might as well have been called "A Natural History of the Mind," Ackerman delights in finding metaphors that simultaneously describe and demonstrate what she is saying. Explaining our compulsion to make subjective order from objective chaos, for instance, she speaks in terms of cartography: "The brain is still terra incognita on the map of mortality, still the fabled world where riches and monsters lurk. But we've begun mapping its shores and learning about its ecology."

As always, Ackerman has done her homework. Her book offers a useful, evocative picture of what is known about the brain's landscape and environment. It presents current research in cognitive science, neuroscience and technology to show how the brain evolved and is structured. It discusses memory and emotion, the formulation of self, the development and operation of language, the differences between human and animal brain function.

Ackerman loves the clarity of fact. But she adores the quixotic, the paradoxical: "Language is so hard only children can master it," she tells us.

Any page reveals a gem of expressive clarity.Early in the book, examining how the brain adapts as we learn new information, Ackerman says, "We arrive in this world clothed in the loose fabric of a self, which then tailors itself to the world it finds."Later, talking about emotions,she says, "Our ideas may behave, but our emotions are still Pleistocene, and they snarl for attention, they nip at passing ankles." To this, in a brilliant throwaway line, she adds, "Emotions often provide a dark italics to our lives." These are memorable translations of scientific premises.

"An Alchemy of Mind" is a bravura performance in the field of popular science writing. At a time when books about the brain, mind and consciousness compete for readers' attention,Ackerman has presented a helpful survey of the field leavened by yeasty writing and provocative insights.
--Floyd Skloot, Newsday