Despite the remodeling going on in our home, I managed to finish another summer book (essentially during bus rides to and from the hardware store), The Human Mind and how to make the most of it by Robert Winston. The title really states the subject and what a fascinating subject it is. The book attempts to capture the current state of knowledge about the workings of the human brain, from the physical level to the emotions. It tries to answer questions like how does our memory work, how do the neurons organize themselves, what level of plasticity does the brain have and so on. That’s a lot of ground to cover in just 500 pages and I looked forward to vastly increasing my knowledge on the workings of the mind.
However, I regret to say I had a few problems with the book. First, it’s apparent that a lot of it is based on the BBC TV-series of the same name. This manifests itself in the story continuity problems and creates rather blunt, short “cuts” in the story entirely unsuitable for books. In short, Winston strays from the main story too often with too short, not always entirely relevant, substories. Second, for almost every “feature” of the brain there are a couple of theories introduced on how and why they are the way they are – this is perfectly fine, of course, but for most theories there’s nothing but a brief mention of it and a sometimes forced inference on how various features would’ve increased our survival chances eons ago. I found this kind of sprinkling of short snippets of incomplete background information a bit annoying – the treatise on evolutionary disimportance/importance of lying and detection of liars was a good example of this with near-self-contradictory stuff presented in a haphazard manner.
But by far the biggest problem I had was the lack of substance to justify the subtitle of the book, and how to make the most of it. This subtitle implies that there are many practical things in this book that each and every one of us can do to make our mind work better. For the most part, this is not the case. Except for a couple elementary hints that everyone knows (e.g. eat more fish, exercise your brain etc), there’s not much practical stuff to act on. Some very interesting information is provided in relation to importance of nutrition in early years & brain development, but for most of the people reading the book it’s too late to correct the diet what we had during the first year of our lives.
All this is not to say that The Human Mind is a bad book (because it’s not) but my expectations were clearly higher than the result. Whle I didn’t learn as much as I had expected, I certainly still learned quite a few things. If you haven’t read much about the workings of the mind and the brain, you will find The Human Mind to be a good introduction to the various aspects of our brain. For those who have missed them, it repeats some well-known stories / case studies (such as that of of Phineas Gage), introduces the research of Antonio Damasio and other “classics” and covers, at least briefly, most aspects of how our mind works or is thought to work.
The last chapter on intelligence, creativity and intuition was perhaps the best one. While Gladwell’s Blink gives a much better overview to intuition, there is some good discussion on the definition and types of intelligence, effects of the environment, the fascinating mind-body connection etc. To demonstrate the latter, it has been proven that the mental state has a significant impact on your physical well-being (and vice versa) – but it hadn’t occurred to me this is true even in mice, as shown by this interesting though a bit cruel experiment:
The field of psychoneuroimmunology is new, but one that is gaining some acceptance within the scientifi community. [...] Robert Ader, of University of Rochester School of Medicine in New York, experimented by conditioning mice to feel sick after they had drunk sweetened water. He enforced this conditioning by giving the mice a drug immediately after consuming the sweet water, which made them vomit. After a few repetitions, the mice were sick whenever they drank the sweet water, without needing to ingest the vomiting drug. But Ader’s curiosity was alerted by the fact that these conditioned mice started to die, becoming susceptible to infections that they would normally have fought. When he studied the side effects of the vomiting drug, he discovered that it also suppressed the immune system of the mice. But its effects were short-lived; they ought to have reversed after the mice stopped taking it. The fact that the mice were dying suggested one thing – it was their brains that were causing the suppression of the immune system.
Overall, The Human Mind was perhaps the first time that my seemingly inexhaustible source for brilliant science books has left me a bit disappointed. Like I said, The Human Mind is not by any means a bad book as such, but I expected more – so I’ll give it 3- out of 5.
