Selected reviews of books about science, 1992-2000  
Reviews by Damien Broderick

THE ASTONISHING HYPOTHESIS: The Scientific Search for the Soul

by Francis Crick, Simon & Schuster, 317pp

THE MAN WHO TASTED SHAPES: A Bizarre Medical Mystery

by Richard E. Cytowic, M. D., Abacus, 249pp

THE BRAIN

by Christine Temple, Penguin, 233pp

A recent Melbourne academic conference on mythopoeic literature was entitled `Desperately Seeking Selfhood'. While the room had its share of pre-deconstructive academics and Jungians whose notions of wild transgression seemed confined to fairytales and Star Trek, many papers tore at certainties of identity, of self. Nor was this accidental. Far from seeking selfhood, the main projects in both arts and life-sciences today desperately flee from it.

            Beyond the humanities' departments, cognitive science is slowly picking apart the self into a vast flow-chart of modules, of specialised mental organs and their distinctive tunes. Oddly, unlike poststructural accounts of the self and its representations of body and world, this new story is finding a certain fondness for individuality, systematic emergence, an integrated `self' implicit in each unique genetic program.

            Cognitive science is often regarded by people from across the tracks as a playing field for deluded positivists whose doomed search for computerised artificial intelligence proves how derrière-garde their macho enterprise must be. To some extent, this belittling estimate is justified. Francis Crick's new book on consciousness is prefaced with a cautionary quote from philosopher John Searle: `As recently as a few years ago, if one raised the subject of consciousness in cognitive science discussions, it was generally regarded as a form of bad taste, and graduate students, who are always attuned to the social mores of their discipline, would roll their eyes at the ceiling and assume expressions of mild disgust'.

            Happily, there's been a shift in emphasis during the last decade or so. Now, some researchers in the neuroscience labs realise that `complexity' and `emergence' must be the watchwords in any developing understanding of self and its gooey components under the skull. This tempers the stern materialism of Crick's `Astonishing Hypothesis': namely, `that each of us is the behaviour of a vast, interacting set of neurons', and--culture aside--nothing more.

            Strange tales in support of this view pop up in neurological studies of both normal and abnormal brains. Lay readers enjoy Dr Oliver Sacks's beguiling case histories (wives mistaken for hats, that sort of thing). Sacks is, you might say, the neurologist from the Lake Wobegon Hospital for the Brain-Buggered. In his tradition, though without the rich voice and smooth syntax, is Dr Rick Cytowic, whose quirky book starts by investigating synaesthesia and ends with a new model of the brain.

            Fans of 19th century symbolism and the impressionists will recognise synaesthesia, a curious condition where one sensory channel seems to be cross-wired to another. Forty years ago, Alfred Bester's vivid protagonist Gully Foyle was slammed into synaesthetic confusion in the sf novel Tiger! Tiger!:

            `Touch was taste to him... the feel of wood was acrid and chalky in his mouth, metal was salt, stone tasted sour-sweet to the touch of his fingers, and the feel of glass cloyed his palate like over-rich pastry... Molten metal smelled like blows hammering his heart...'

            I was beside myself with rapture when I read this (blind to its declarative crudity) at 14 or 15, especially since my own mental-imagery repertoire is almost non-existent. I can't even make a picture of a red triangle in my head, let alone one that tastes like a lobster. Rick Cytowic's genuinely synaesthetic friend Michael Watson--who was brain-blood-flow scanned and drugged and tested up hill and down dale--specialised in linking odour/tastes with rudimentary but intense tactile impressions.

            It was beyond his control. Removing a chicken from the oven, Michael was thrown into a tizz because it had too few `points'--it tasted too `round'. Sucking spearmint under lab conditions, with amyl nitrite to enhance his sensory cross-link, and then amphetamines to dampen it, he felt the presence of smooth, glassy columns, projected outside his body.

            Only one person in ten million is a full-blown synaesthete, says Cytowic, but his high-tech tests suggest that we all make these sensory translations--but at a computational neural `level' prior to consciousness. Cytowic tracks the activity to the limbic system, deep inside the brain. It only comes to consciousness when high cortical activity is, so to speak, switched off. Usually this happens only to people with disagreeable brain damage and consequent terrible deficits of awareness or ability. Rare, healthy synaesthetes like Michael Watson enable us to peek in and see the way our normally-hidden or protected brain processes are partitioned and/or overlap.

            Few topics are more enthralling, and infuriatingly evasive, than the brain and its workings. Cytowic begins one chapter engagingly: for those who `read popular books about the brain, nothing I am about to say will be new, even though all of it is wrong'. A later chapter clears up the errors, offering a revised version. The human mind is supported by a brain that's parallel and multiplex in function, rather than linear, distributed rather than localised, with a reality-mapping cortex but a limbic zone which `determines the salience of that information'. So a powerful emotionality lies at the heart of our humanness (surprise!).

            For an excellent summary guide to our current picture of the brain, I recommend Christine Temple's deft and far less controversial introduction. She covers a huge range of material, but perhaps most intriguing is her own speciality. Like `split-brain' patients whose left and right hemispheres are severed at the corpus callosum, making them in some ways two persons in one skull, some children are born without this natural neural crossroads. Such victims of `callosal agenesis' show both unexpected deficits and compensations.

            Nobel laureate Crick, having solved DNA's structure 40 years ago, is now hot on the quest for consciousness. He deliberately restricts his approach to the problem of vision. What's the path from the retina to our aware sensation of seeing? Crick endorses the analysis of Ray Jackendoff, a Chomskyan linguist, who suggests consciousness dwells neither at some integrated level of the entire cortex nor at the lowest level of stupid individual neurons. But while modular philosopher Jerry Fodor insists that our (surmised) central interpreters are unlike modules--being dispersed and non-localised, in some way mysterious and holistic--Jackendoff is convinced that even interpreter functions are partitioned.

            How is it, then, that we co-ordinate our representations of world and self? We do so through abstract mental models. These are never available to awareness, but must exist as the templates for our neural computations. We never see things in true three-dimensional form, for that would require us to observe, in the same instant, the back and front and top and bottom and insides of an object. But we certainly construct interior models of the world with this character, and it's in these abstract models that different sensory modalities--sight and touch, say--are brought into common registration.

            It might well be, therefore, that Rick Cytowic's synaesthetes gain access, otherwise-forbidden (except in `out-of-body' hallucinations), to the processing of the 3D `model world'. This could be conducted in the hippocampus and other regions of the emotional and memory centres of the limbic system devoted to salience. Synaesthetes do so precisely by reducing the blood supply to the cortex, and flooding the deep core of the left hemisphere with rich energy supplies. Squirt radioactive tracers into the blood, and you can see it happen on the screen.

            For Cytowic, this is proof that the self is primarily emotional rather than rational, located in the deep brain rather than the neocortex that covers it like crushed gift wrapping. Even more piquant is Crick's suggestion that Free Will is localised in a portion of the inner brain, near the top and toward the front, called the anterior cingulate sulcus. Damage to this small group of cells caused an otherwise alert patient's mind to become `empty', unable to communicate but unworried by that awful loss. It is a notion to cheer the shade of Descartes (who thought the soul was attached to the brain at the pineal gland), and perhaps just as daft.

THE QUARK AND THE JAGUAR: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex

by Murray Gell-Mann, Little, Brown, 392pp

HYPERSPACE: Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension

by Michio Kaku, Oxford University Press, 359pp

BLACK HOLES AND TIME WARPS: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy

by Kip S. Thorne, Picador, 619pp

THE EDGE OF INFINITY: Beyond the Black Hole

by Paul Davies, Penguin, 194pp,

THEISM, ATHEISM, AND BIG BANG COSMOLOGY

by William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith, Clarendon Press, 342pp

It took me the better part of a month to absorb these 1800 pages, and a lot remained frustratingly opaque. If you're prepared to put your back into it, though, this terrific bundle of dispatches from the front line is strongly recommended.  

            Gell-Mann is a Nobel laureate who devised and named today's standard quark model of elementary particles, but also probes complex adaptive systems (like rainforests, economies, and us). Thorne and Davies are notable mathematical physicists whose research blends the tiny world of quark and electron with the far end of the universal scale: massive black holes where space and time are extinguished.

            Kaku is a leading pioneer in the same quest for a final or complete Theory of Everything, helping to show how the cosmos might be built of infinitesimal `strings' vibrating in 10 dimensions, six of which are curled up tightly out of view. And Craig and Smith, philosophers well versed in arduous physics, take the final plunge into metaphysics, debating whether these epochal upheavals tell us something new about the purpose, if any, of creation.

            The risk, as I've noted, is that these dazzling studies will be conscripted by quantum quackpots and black holists. One of Gell-Mann's chapters is entitled `Quantum Mechanics and Flapdoodle', and he cites with relish Stephen Hawking's dictum: `When I hear about Schrödinger's Cat, I reach for my gun'. This Cat is the celebrated victim of a thought experiment testing the reality of advanced physics, for on one interpretation the luckless animal is simultaneously alive and dead, trapped in a mysterious state, until it's observed by the experimenter.

            Gell-Mann and his colleagues believe they've found a more rational way to interpret the quantum equations, invoking what's called `decoherence'. This difficult topic is at the heart of his reflections on simplicity and complexity. But it's typical of Gell-Mann's rather pushy omniscience (he reads and speaks many languages, contributes to Meso-American archaeology and ecology, and knows everyone important) that he tells us, among many other tidbits, that Hawking's jest doesn't derive from Goebbels as we supposed. No, the chilling gag about Kultur and Brownings came from `the early pro-Nazi play Schlageter by Hanns Johst'. So much for the notorious gap between the two cultures...

            Despite the harrumphing, there's nothing meagre or killjoy in Gell-Mann's universe. He's as much concerned with the musky, muscular reality of a jaguar in the forest as with the rarefied quark. And his theories are gratifyingly wild. Beneath the carefully defined jargon, strange possibilities lurk.

            Quantum physics is a way to track divergent, alternative histories of the universe. Do those domains truly exist, so to speak, as parallel universes? `Could an observer utilizing one domain really become aware that other domains, with their own sets of branching histories and their own observers, were available as alternative descriptions of the possible histories of the universe?' For Gell-Mann, it's an open question.

            Michio Kaku is even bolder. Unified physics deploys many dimensions beyond the four of Einstein's spacetime. The best model available now for the grammar of reality uses `heterotic strings', vanishingly small loops that vibrate clockwise in 10 dimensions and counter-clockwise in 26 (16 becoming `compactified'). Is this an improvement on staid old Newtonian absolute space and time? Yes, as it permits wondrous mathematical elegance, simplifying the many laws of nature into a single geometry of fields in hyperspace.

            String theory mathematics, it's been claimed by their chief inventor Edward Witten, is 21st century physics that fell accidentally into our century. Even today's best minds are not quite up to the job of using this powerful new tool definitively. Oddly, current research opens the possibility that information might literally fall from the future into the past. The Paul Davies reprint, from 1981 but with a new introduction, provides a lucid background. Both Kaku and Kip Thorne describe wormholes in spacetime, solutions in quantum gravity theory that promise to link distant regions and epochs in the universe.

            Whether such wormholes are physically plausible, and not just annoying quirks of the equations, is the key question. Until very recently, wormholes and time machines (`closed timelike curves', in the jargon) were ignored by nice people. Now it look as if they might well be technologies available to our descendants--stellar engineering feats, using `exotic matter'-- or to other advanced civilisations elsewhere in the cosmos. Thorne's judicious, brilliant trek into `Einstein's outrageous legacy' is enthralling, although it might unhinge the chronically prosaic.

            The end of this road, flagged cheekily by Stephen Hawking in his famous quip about `knowing the Mind of God', is the question of the origin and destination of the whole universe. Even if our local universe is just one among a vast manifold or sheaf of entangled alternatives, or temporal loops, it had to start somehow. Is it reasonable--even necessary--to posit a deity who kickstarted reality? If so, must this be the God of the Bible (or the Koran, the Moonies, or perhaps David Koresh)?

            Philosophers Craig and Smith debate this issue on many levels, from arcane calculi of probability, through quantum and relativity physics, to the probity of applying Cantorian mathematics of infinity to the actual world. To follow the arguments you might need an IQ fifty percent greater than the book's absurd price, but it's a mind-whirling ride from Genesis and Aristotle to Hawking's vision of a self-caused universe.

            And the debate isn't foreordained: in one delightful passage, non-believer Smith excoriates a Hawking `howler': `This is probably the worst atheistic argument in the history of Western thought and I shall not waste the reader's time by refuting it.' That's the refreshing thing about scientists--they have no respect for authority or persons. Not even God.

UNCOMMON SENSE: The Heretical Nature of Science

by Alan Cromer, Oxford University Press, 240pp

THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT: The New Science of Language and Mind

by Steven Pinker, Allen Lane, 494pp
THE CAMBRIDGE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF HUMAN EVOLUTION
Edited by Steve Jones, et al., Cambridge University Press, 504pp

Suppose you flip to the golden oldies station, and the Beatles sing `the girl with colitis goes by'? Is this a weird acid flashback or what? Someone remarks `It's a doggy-dog world'. Then John Prine is singing `It's a happy enchilada, and you think you're gonna drown'. Can't be! Ah: `It's a half an inch of water', `dog-eat-dog', `kaleidoscope eyes'.

            Such errors show that even when the world comes at us in heavily pre-processed human language, we don't always find it easy to comprehend. It's much worse when we try to understand some completely new aspect of the world, one not yet modelled by our customary fallible set of linguistic gadgets. Arguably this is why science took so long to emerge, why it has done so only once in history (despite some honourable near-misses), and is easily gazumped by inane but comforting superstitions.

            Even ordinary speech can be evasive, which is why we are baffled by this perfectly grammatical sentence: `Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo'.

            No, I haven't gone mad. A bison from Buffalo is a Buffalo buffalo, which might `buffalo' or browbeat its kin. So `(Those) Buffalo buffalo (which other) Buffalo buffalo buffalo (will in turn) buffalo (still other) Buffalo buffalo'. This diabolical sentence is cited in Steven Pinker's charming, brilliant and altogether gratifying book on the reach and limitations of our language `organ', the DNA-specified mental `instinct' that powers our speech and writing. The buffalos' implications for the status of science as a special way of knowing are not self-evident, but they're worth teasing out.

            Consider two bullets. One is simply dropped at a gun's muzzle, the other fired horizontally, at the same instant, with terrific velocity. Which hits the ground first? Most of us have major trouble with this. Despite a lifetime of lifting and throwing and dancing, all our intuitions about motion start mumbling `buffalo buffalo' and conclude that the dropped bullet hits the deck first, probably way earlier.

            Not so. Gravity pulls equally on both bullets. The lateral motion imparted by exploding gunpowder has zero effect on the rate at which the fired bullet falls to earth. But we usually need disciplined training in vector maths to understand this elementary truth about how our world works. Science is not common sense. It is distinctly uncommon sense, and our brains resist its enlightenment.

            Recently, sociologists have asserted that `western' science is just one form of many `ethno-sciences', each with its own rich claim to be taken seriously as a form of valid knowledge. Alan Cromer is a fundamental particle theorist with a special interest in science education, and he won't have a bar of it. Most knowledge systems, he claims, project the culture-bound shape of human minds upon the outside world. In a special sense defined by the psychologist Piaget, they are `egocentric'.

            By contrast, the techniques of inquiry invented by the Greeks and rediscovered 300 years ago in Europe--techniques which have remade our world utterly--deny that outer reality can be known through intuition. And while the daily practice of science is clearly swayed by rhetorical skills, special interests and power politics, it works so well because at base it strives for objectivity. In Piaget's terms, its practice requires `formal operational' mental skills, never attained by more than half America's (and presumably Australia's) adults. Hence, most of us `can't analyze a situation with several variables or understand a simple syllogism'.

            Cromer's argument is frighteningly persuasive, and his surprising curriculum suggestions (he'd get rid of the last two years of school) are worth close study. Meanwhile, we can try to learn why the human brain has so much trouble thinking scientifically.  A good place to start is with Pinker's rigorous but delicious survey of Chomskyan grammar--the theory that we all possess a `language instinct' of great strength but annoying limitations. I would not have thought it possible to be entertaining about X-bar phrase structure theory, but Pinker is a hoot. Of course, it helps if you already possess formal operations in your mental tool-kit.

            Nor is Pinker content to explain these arcane theories while taking the mickey out of the `language mavens' who complain on ignorant grounds about such usages as `hopefully' and `to boldly go'. Boldly going beyond his master, Noam Chomsky, he proposes Darwinian paths by which our mental modules evolved, including language itself. He is especially caustic about claims that bonobo chimpanzees have been taught a form of true sign speech. But don't they share 98 percent of their DNA with us? Yes, but `the recipe for the embryological souffle is so baroque that small genetic changes can have enormous effects.'

            A different opinion in offered in the handsome though far less readable Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution. This remarkable volume is a superbly illustrated resource tool, chockful of sidebars and charts and gene maps. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh (wonderful name!) argues that Kanzi, a young bonobo, combined symbols using `a primitive English word order and conveyed novel information'. I think Pinker shows that Kanzi is just aping language. Such disagreements, of course, are the very stuff of a science that strives for objectivity even when it studies the mind.