morgan_blackledge's reviews
664 reviews

I love Ramachandran, I'm literally in awe of his scientific work. I even think he's a cool dude (based on the interviews and lectures of his I have seen). But his cornball humor pretty much ruined this book for me.

I found this book to be pretty concise and useful. WARNING: the author is Christian, and the book gets kind of goofy towards the end (BTW some progressive Christians are really getting into family systems theory, great news). Don't let that scare you away though. I'm a fairly stalwart atheist and it didn't ruin the book for me, so, unless you're Chris Hitchens (and you're not) you aught to be fine. It's still a pretty great primer for family systems theory, well worth it.

Loved it. Concise and thought provoking essays and interviews by some of the more interesting and creative players in the neuroscience, philosophy and psych scene (e.g. Pinker, Haidt and Lakoff, LeDoux, Dehaen). Some of the essays were better than others, but over all, great stuff. I think of Brockman's books (and edge.org) as a sampler platter. You get to try a little something from a bunch of really cool thinkers and see if any of them capture your attention enough to investigate their work in more depth. My "must read" list grew by about six books based on what I read in The Mind, for instance; I'm going to read Dehaen's Number Sense and Lakoff's Philosophy Of The Flesh next because both of their essays were so dang good. I think I might grab another Brockman book too (probably Culture). My only apprehension in picking up another edge.org compilation is the inevitable overwhelm you feel afterwords, trying to figure out what rad book you want to read next. Quality problem right? BTW does Brockman have a cool gig or what? He's like the Hugh Hefner of nerds.

This book represents Philip Zimbardos life's work. Over thirty years in the making. It's brilliant. its important. But be warned, this book is way too fuckin long! The book weighs in at a tubby 575 pages. I believe it could have been more effective at half the length. One thing you should know before reading this book is that an enormously large portion of it is an account of the authors infamous Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE). If you (like me) are tiered of hearing Zimbardo talk (on and on) about this (over 30 year old) finding (from a poorly designed experiment that was aborted half way through), than really think twice before picking this one up. I'm currently teaching a social psychology course, so I (reluctantly) decided to read it, and I'm really glad I did. It's exhaustingly exhaustive at times, but truly brilliant when all's said and done. The central theses of the book is that; human behavior is very influenced by situational and social factors, but due to strong innate cognitive as well as cultural biases, we (particularly in the west) disproportionally explain human behavior in terms of dispositional (personality-based) factors. The central metaphor of the book is that; we often blame a few bad apples, when it's the rotten barrel that is to blame. For instance; prosecutors and spin doctors blamed the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib on "a few bad apples". Zimbardo makes the claim (convincingly in my opinion) that problems such as these, largely originate at the institutional level (a bad barrel), and a vast majority of otherwise healthy, normal people, If put in the same situation, would have behaved similarly. Furthermore, the same could be said for the mass scale atrocities of WWII and Rwanda etc. If we as a society, wish to curtail future institutional failures and mass scale atrocities (and we do), than we must focus our analysis and interventions on the systems level as well as the on the level of the individual. Zimbardo is not saying that bad acting individuals bare no responsibility for their behavior, he is however making the point that bad (corrupting) situations can influence good people to bad things, and we may want to hold institutions and policy makers more accountable when those in their employ do bad things while following orders.

Warning: this book can be a little dull in the autobiographical sections (which you are free to skim), and a bit challenging in some of the technical parts (particularly if you are new to the nuts and bolts of cognitive neuroscience). But if you're a cognitive neuroscience dork (like me) and you love reading about the history of science (like me), and if you are reading this book on an e-reader, so you can pop back and forth between the text and web based resources e.g. Wikipedia etc. (like me), than this book is amazing!

It's part autobiography of a son of a middle class Viennese toy merchant, who came to America as a child refugee from Nazi Germany, and went on to become a founder of a revolutionary new branch of science, and then was awarded a Nobel prize, and then kept going.

This book is also an account of the 150 year (+) emergence of neuroscience and its confluence with molecular biology, psychiatry, behaviorism and cognitive science (eventually to become its own sub discipline, cognitive neuroscience). Additionally, this book functions as a step by step primer (more or less a condensed text book) on the biological sub straights of learning and memory, beginning with the neuron doctrine, and proceeding up to our current cutting edge, without omitting any important steps along the way.

Lastly, this book serves a tacit function as an advice manual for young students who want to answer big questions (like what is consciousness), but really should begin by looking at small things (like neurons).

I think of this book as the ultimate supplemental reading (or refresher) for any bio psych, or cognitive psych course. It really fills in some of the big blanks and brings the data to life, making it more human and thusly, much more memorable (irony aside), and therefore, much more functional/useable.

If you have a real interest in the mind and brain (like me). And if you love to learn a subject both in the abstract, and from within a personal and historical context (like me), than I think you'll love this book.

Nothing is alive, or rather no thing is alive. Life (what ever that is) can only happen as an emergent property of (really) complex systems in (really) special conditions. Life is not a thing, its a process; a special domain of chemistry, which is its self a special domain of physics.

People have a pretty good handle on how the universe emerged from nothing (see A Universe From Nothing: Why there is something rather than nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss). And people have a pretty good handle on how complex life ratchets up from "simpler" life forms (see Darwin). But people don't quite know how (exactly) so called organic life emerged from inorganic stuff. It's like a razor thin barrier of scientific knowledge that, when pierced, will connect these two immense territories of human knowledge (inorganica and organica). This book describes what we currently know (or rather the competing theories) about how life began, from the bottom up perspective of organic chemistry.

This was a game changing read for me. I am coming at evolutionary theory and cell biology from a background in psychology and an interest in neuroscience. The approach to understanding evolutionary theory that I'm most familiar with begins with a curiosity about human behavior (including mentation, affect and and social behavior), and (more or less) attempts to understand brain/body function (down to the molecular level), in an evolutionary context, in order to try to explain, predict and manipulate future animal and human behavior (hopefully for the better).

When you're working backwards through evolutionary theory, somewhere at the bottom of the pickle barrel is the vague question "what exactly is life and how did it all begin"? The answers is equally vague, "life has something to do with reproduction and metabolism, and it began in a warm swamp full of chemicals and lightning struck it, and protoplasm happened, and a long time later, living things got interesting (i.e. multicellular) and then you get people.

This book exploded my former assumptions that the origins of life is a thoroughly understood, simple matter, and that we're on the verge of being able to synthesize cellular organisms from scratch. BTW; it isn't and were not. Even prokaryotic (non nucleic) organisms are so stinking complex that it literally staggers the imagination, particularly when contemplating what it will take to build one of these suckers from scratch. We may be able to "bioengineer" some cool shit by manipulating living cells (see Ventor's amazing work) but that's really different than creating a living cell from chemicals and sparks.

The fact that there is self assembling life at all is a freaking miracle! Words can't express the awe I feel as I write this. Forget about the fact that the human brain has circa 100 billion, networked, communicating and conditionable cells that can share information with billions of other brains. That fact even prokaryotic organisms exist is absolutely nuking my brain after reading this book! I call that a good investment of time and money (16.00 on kindle).

I'm embarrassed to admit it, but before reading this book, somewhere in the back of my mind, I had pretty much bought into the new age mythology that Tesla was a mystic genius visionary who was the victim of Edison's jealous, evil industrialist thievery and sabotage. Now, after reading accounts of Tesla's embarrassing social, financial and professional missteps, his ridiculous pleading correspondences to J.P. Morgan (and other wealthy would-be benefactors), and less than half baked journal submissions (particularly the one that interpreted a three beat radio transmission as a communication from intelligent extra terrestrials), I'm seeing Tesla in a whole new light. Rather than a victim of conspiratorial thuggery, I now see Tesla as a victim of his own chronic douchiness.

Tesla was clearly decades ahead of his peers. But being "ahead of your time", contrary to hipster dogma, is not necessarily a good thing. Tesla had amazing ideas. But good ideas without good execution are about useless, where as even mediocre ideas, well executed, can at least be useful to someone. Tesla was with out a doubt, an amazing inventor. But it's hard not to feel like he could have achieved so much more if he wasn't such a dysfunctional, self sabotaging, grandiose douche bag.

This book is a well done (if a little long) biography of a fascinating (to say the least) character from a fascinating time. But the real value of the book is as a cautionary tale of how unchecked cognitive biases (see: confirmation bias) and magical thinking can be the undoing of even brilliant and talented people like Tesla. Be warned; if your model of reality becomes too divorced from actual reality, you may needlessly fritter away your hard work and talent on some really ridiculous shit.

Read this book, particularly if you like biographies of scientists, but if you're one of those Tesla worshipers, be prepared to deify the guy a whole lot less upon completion. Ultimately, the book renders a portrait of Tesla that is humane and realistic. Uncovering Tesla's scammy shenanigans, unexamined self delusions and outrageous foibles, while concurrently celebrating his incredible creativity and authentic brilliance.

BTW: a film is in production starring (self serious, tortured) Christian Bale as Tesla. I think (brilliant, trixter, clown) Sacha Baron-Cohen would make for a better, more realistic, funner film.