Book review: Incognito by David Eagleman

Remember the old adage that we use only 10% of our brains? It’s a myth; we actually are using most of our brains almost all the time. In his latest book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (published in paperback in May 2012), professor of neuroscience at the Baylor College of Medicine David Eagleman explains the surprising ways the brain actually works.

An accessible and entertaining tour of modern brain science, Incognito covers artificial intelligence, brain damage, drugs, synesthesia, visual illusions, and much more. Eagleman also considers the implications of modern research on society, particularly criminal law. Along the way, he shatters the traditional view of our conscious selves being in charge of what we do.

Eagleman is a bit of a media star (he was profiled in The New Yorker and interviewed on the NPR show Fresh Air). He is also author of Sum: Forty Tales from Afterlives in which he ponders in fiction what might become of us after death.

Eagleman is an interesting guy whose work thought-provoking to read and listen to, and his book should be required reading for all brain owners.

Article first published as Book Review: Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman on Blogcritics.

Book Review: Zone One by Colson Whitehead

“Mark Spitz” is a survivor. Although mediocre in all aspects of life until the plague hit, he is one of the minority who have survived the worst of the pandemic that has turned most people into zombies.

He has volunteered to be a “sweeper” in Manhattan — a member of a three-man military team that goes door-to-door looking for zombies who weren’t destroyed when the Marines secured half the island and walled off the other half. The government, what’s left of it in the U.S., has established itself upstate in Buffalo. Buffalo is supplying the bite-resistant uniforms and ammo.

“Mark Sptiz” is the ironic nickname given to the protagonist and the only name ever given for him in the novel. He earned it when he refused to jump off a bridge being overrun by mindless human flesh eaters. After annihilating them all, he was asked why he stayed instead of taking the safety route of jumping in the river like his comrades. “I can’t swim,” he replied, even though it wasn’t true.
Mark Sptiz’s ferocity on the bridge was probably the result of his PASD (post-apocalypse stress disorder). All survivors have it to some degree, because they’ve all seen and lived through horrific things. It takes different forms and is treated as nothing more than a personal tic.

Mark Sptiz volunteered to help secure Manhattan in part because he had always wanted to live there, like his rich uncle had. The city left behind after the plague is a ghost town, of course, but it retains its structure and architectural character, the empty office buildings, shops, apartments standing like statues made in tribute to life before the end.

Literary author Colson Whitehead (his latest previous novel, Sag Harbor, was published in 2009) uses this zombie apocalypse to explore Manhattan, American culture, and human nature. What are we when the social contract, with its preoccupation with the material, is broken? In a world where it’s not safe to become attached to others, lest they go out and never return, what’s left?

I found Zone One (released in paperback in July 2012) thoroughly engaging, and it has stuck with me. I became attached to Mark Spitz, but what really struck me was the vivid scenes of Manhattan: the office with zombies kicking around it, withering away for lack of food, still in their office attire; the empty residential street with the fortune-teller storefront among the brownstones.

Unlike many writers of apocalypse tales, Whitehead does not spend time on what caused the plague, no doubt because it doesn’t matter a whole lot for those left behind. They are too busy staying alive.

The post-apocalypse world is a hot topic in publishing, but Colson Whitehead’s offering is not your ordinary zombie novel. It’s a thoughtful monster story that stands out from the crowd.

Book Review: The Information: a History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

In The Information, science writer James Gleick offers an engaging and eye-opening trip through the history of human communication.

He starts with the “talking drums” of Africa and traverses the creation of writing, the ingenious inventions of the steam age, information theory’s origins and development, and ends with the current state of the internet communication glut. He includes profiles of lesser-known innovators such as Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, who in the 1800s envisioned computers made of gears and powered by steam, and Claude Shannon, a World War II code breaker without whose work computers could not have progressed.

Gleick traces the infiltration of information theory into other fields, such as the role it plays in our understanding of DNA. While previously biology had been considered mostly a matter of chemistry, Watson and Crick realized DNA’s purpose was to convey instructions about how to construct organisms. At the time, this idea was so novel, they put the word information in quotation marks whenever they mentioned it. Today we take for granted that DNA contains the genetic code.

Gleick takes the information infiltration even farther. In his review of the book in The New York Times Geoffrey Nunberg’ says, “Information, [Gleick] argues, is more than just the contents of our overflowing libraries and Web servers. It is ‘the blood and the fuel, the vital principle’ of the world. Human consciousness, society, life on earth, the cosmos—it’s bits all the way down.”

I found The Information (released in paperback in March 2012) in turns fascinating, startling, and baffling. I loved reading about the history of communication and felt I followed it well through the mid-19th century. After that, things got complicated, with discussions of logic proofs, unsolvable mathematics proofs, and I-still-don’t-get-it-and-probably-never-will particle physics. Then, abruptly, I was back in my comfort zone, with a timely and engaging chapters on memes and Wikipedia.

As a librarian, I probably should be more distressed that Gleick finds it fit to talk about the profession in one paragraph in the whole book; to him, libraries are just one way of organizing information in a pre-digital world. Geoffrey Nunberg points out that Gleick treats information “at a remove from the larger social world, rather than as an extension of it.” Of course no view of information is complete without the context of human understanding.

Regardless of any limitations, The Information is as entertaining as it is illuminating and is a must-read for anyone interested in communication and the history of information.

Article first published as Book Review: The Information: a History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick on Blogcritics.