Mind Wide Open by Steven Johnson
Posted on May 24th, 2005
On the strength of Emergence, I went for another Steven Johnson book. This time the subject was brain science. Mind Wide Open looks at why memories work, how attention, automation, and the unconscious fit together, and some of the ways neural science is able to show us what's going on inside our grey matter. I liked this book quite a bit. On one hand there were echoes of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, with regard to the brain's ability to register the tiniest of changes in someone's facial expression. Even better, Mind Wide Open made me pause several times and question various aspects of how I think, or to see patterns in my thinking that I had otherwise taken for granted.
I'm not saying reading this book will catapult your neurological expertise, but at the very least it has the potential to push your interest and enthusiasm deeper into the field if you're otherwise a brain science Morlock (like me). It might even make you think about your own thinking in a new light.
Here are a batch of interesting quotes that I took note of as I was reading:
Regarding memories:
For a long time, neuroscientists assumed that memories were like volumes stored in a library; when your brain remembered something, it was simply searching through the stacks and then reading aloud from whatever passage it discovered. But some scientists now believe that memories effectively get rewritten every time they're activated, thanks to a process called reconsolidation... Instead of just recalling a memory that had been forged days or months before, the brain forges the memory all over again, in a new associative context. In a sense, when we remember something, we create a new memory, one shaped by the changes that have happened to our brain since the memory last occurred to us. So the science is telling us two things: our brains are designed to capture the idiosyncrasies of our lives, and those lives-- our memories of them-- are being rewritten with each passing day.
Listening and spatial skills versus reading skills:
Watch yourself the next time you read a phone number off a piece of paper, and then walk upstairs to make the call. Most likely, as you read the numbers you'll repeat them to yourself-- either out loud or internally-- and then keep repeating the string as you walk up the stairs. You could theoretically memorize the shapes and arrangement of the digits on the page, and recall the number by recalling the image-- but you don't (We have innate skills as listeners, but our reading skills are all learned.) We do have powerful spatial memory systems, however, which is why we'll sometimes recall a number by capturing the spatial sequence of the numbers dialed on the keypad. But most of the time, you'll capture the number as a phonological loop. That process is what attention experts call "encoding."
Attention as a system of interacting modes:
Jettisoning the idea of attention as a Single Unified Thing leaves you with two primary implications. The first we've already seen: if the art of paying attention is actually divided among several different modes, it's helpful to learn which of those modes works well for you and which ones don't pull their weight. The second insight operates one level up: if your attention is a system of interacting modes, then one of the most essential high-level functions that your brain performs is switching those modes. You can be the most brilliant auditory encoder in the world, but if you can't switch into auditory encoding mode when it's appropriate, your talents will be wasted.
Laughter:
"Since laughter seems to be ritualized panting, basically what you do in laughing is replicate the sound of rough-and-tumble play," Robert Provine says. "and you know that's where I think it came from. Tickle is an important part of our primate heritage. Touching and being touched is an important part of what it means to be a mammal. I mean, this is why we're not lizards!"
Two types of talent:
I suspect that the world of talent is made up of two kinds of brains: some that have specific modules that are unusually good at their job, and some that are unusually good at keeping all the different modules organized. Both types of brains come across to us as talented, as intelligent, but I think the types are different enough that you an learn to recognize them if you know what to look for. We all know people who have dazzling skills: they can sit down at a piano and pick out a tune they heard last week; they can calculate interest rate payments in their head; they can actually understand quantum mechanics. But we also know people whose brains seem gifted in a different way: no stunning, off-the-chart skills, but a general competence and efficiency, with very little noise complicating their signal.
Unconsciousness as automation:
Another word for unconscious is "automated"-- the things you do so well you don't even notice doing them. It's stepping on the clutch when you want to change gears, or flipping your middle finger over your thumb while playing the last three notes of a piano scale. We're unaware of these decisions or urges not because they threaten our culture-bound ego or because they're too explosive for the psyche to handle directly. We're unaware because we have better things to think about. It's more efficient for the brain to automate processes that get repeated a lot. The mission-critical ones-- don't stop breathing, flinch when an object looms suddenly overhead-- eventually find themselves encoded in our genes, while we have to learn the more mundane repetitions via everyday experience: tying shoes, typing words, swinging a tennis racket.
Self-reinforcing neurons:
Certain thoughts have more neurons in common than others. Neurons that fire together wire together.