book reviews » The Thinking Meat Project

Book review: Personality: What makes you the way you are

Jul 042009

Personality: What makes you the way you are, by Daniel Nettle.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007

I have to confess that I’ve felt an irrational attachment to the Myers-Briggs personality typology at the expense of other perfectly good systems, in particular the Big Five system that currently dominates research. This book remedied that, however, providing a fascinating grounding in the Big Five traits in terms of related brain areas or functions and genes.

Nettle begins with an overview of how the Big Five were determined (as clusters of correlated traits that emerged from studies of various aspects of personality) and how different behavioral patterns and personality traits might have evolved. Of particular interest is the question of why people have varying characteristics—in other words, why have different types persisted in the human population? why aren’t we all roughly the same? In a nutshell, the answer is that there is no single optimum personality that it is always advantageous to have.

One reason for this is that the environment changes and demands different things from different generations (interestingly, the environment includes other humans and their traits). Thus, the pressure of selection is usually not going to zero in on a particular level of any given trait or behavioral tendency and eliminate other levels from the mix. Nettle describes some studies of guppies, which showed that cautious behavior is linked to the presence or absence of predators in the environment, and there appears to be a heritable component to this behavior. Also, if naturally cautious guppies are placed in a predator-free environment, the level of cautiousness in the population drops after several generations, suggesting that there is survival value in both being wary and being relaxed, depending on environment. And there’s a continuum of wariness levels in a single species, rather than two species with different characteristics, because the populations mix and also because the level of predation in a particular environment can fluctuate. Nettle’s summary seemed to me to hint at some deep thoughts about diversity and individuality:

“No specific level of wariness is globally favored by selection, though for every individual guppy there is a level of wariness that it would be best to have.”

The heart of the book is five chapters that investigate each trait in turn: Extraversion, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Openness to experience. Each is explained in terms of the brain mechanism or function that it expresses. Those high in Extraversion, for example, are particularly attracted to the evolutionary carrots that offer rewards, whereas Neurotics are more attuned toward the sticks that warn of danger; Extraversion is associated with happy moods and Neuroticism with negative feelings. Conscientiousness has to do with self-control, and Agreeableness with the desire for harmony with others. Openness to experience is associated with the propensity to make broader associations of meaning (i.e., being more likely to see or create connections between relatively disparate objects or concepts).

Each chapter explains what we know so far about the trait in terms of both behavior and its neural and/or genetic underpinnings, with a good number of references to papers describing current research. For some traits, we know more about the related brain structures than for others, and of course it’s impossible to list all the possible connections. I was hoping to see something about the temporal lobes and Openness, but maybe there’s not enough research on that yet to make it worth mentioning, or maybe there just wasn’t room.

In the case of every one of the Big Five traits, a single optimum level of the trait has not become dominant in humankind; i.e., there’s a considerable range of levels of Extraversion, etc. This suggests that the optimum level varies with the environment, which of course varies in time, sometimes favoring the bold and sometimes the cautious, for example, so that neither end of the spectrum is bred out of the population. Nettle’s descriptions of the pros and cons of each trait were for me some of the most interesting material in the book.

Conscientiousness might sound like a universally desirable capacity, for example, and the more the better. However, high levels of Conscientiousness can lead to rigidity and missed opportunities, and low levels can be advantageous in changeable situations where behavior needs to be fluid and responsive. The dangers of being disagreeable are fairly obvious, but being too agreeable and always putting others before yourself is not good either. Neuroticism certainly seems like the least desirable of the Big Five traits (alas, I scored high on that one), but even there, the capacity for caution and reflection can be useful, and a dissatisfaction with what is can spur you to achieve more.

Throughout, Nettle recommends that you not bemoan your level of any particular trait, but instead focus on its advantages and try to arrange your life so that you can use your strengths and protect yourself in areas where you’re weak. (To go back to that guppy quote, basically we have to find the place where the mix of traits we’ve inherited is most useful.) This may sound obvious, but it can take a long time to get a clear picture of your true strengths and weaknesses, separate from what you wish were so and what those around you are like or wish you were like. It’s only been in my late 30s and into my 40s that I feel like I’ve started to truly understand why some things are hard for me and why I’m drawn to other things, and to stop beating myself up for not being like more extraverted or ambitious people and try to structure my life so that I can function at my best.

The last chapter of the book focuses on how much you can change your life, given that your personality as measured by the Big Five traits remains fairly constant over the lifespan. There are small shifts, on average: “As adulthood progresses, people become slightly higher in Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, and slightly lower in Extraversion, Openness, and Neuroticism,” reflecting a shift from agency (the drive toward achieving things and expressing yourself) to communion (relating with others). But by and large, as the song says, what you’re born with is what you get.

However, Nettle did a really good job of presenting the flexibility of self-concept that’s possible within the relatively unchanging framework of predispositions that we’re born with, which I found both inspiring and comforting. For example, a personality trait can be manifested in a fairly wide range of ways: “…if your personality is causing you trouble and worry, you need to find alternative, and less destructive, outlets for the same characteristics. You don’t have to change yourself. You just have to change your self’s outlet.” Another option for changing your life is to change the story you tell about it, reframing events and characteristic behaviors in a different light.

By the end of the book, you’ll probably have a pretty good idea where you stand on each of the Big Five, but each of the five is divided into various subtraits, and if you’d like a more detailed look at how you score on some of those, you can take an online test. If you read the book or take the test, I hope you have fun exploring the range of human personality and where you fit in. As they say, it takes all kinds.

Book review: iBrain

Books 1 Response »

Jan 112009

iBrain: Surviving the technological alteration of the modern mind, by Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.

If you are looking for a good book summarizing what we know about the effect of technology on our brains, I’d suggest you keep looking. This book provides a mixture of self-help, technical help, popular neuroscience, and a subtle but persistent deprecation of modern communication technology, without, in my opinion, doing any one topic justice. Furthermore, it’s mired in a fundamental confusion about the difference between evolution and the capability of individual brains to change their neuronal circuits in response to the environment (neuroplasticity). This leaves me dubious about how far I can trust the authors when they present scientific information.

The book addresses “Digital Immigrants”, those of us for whom current communication technologies are something we encountered after our formative years. This is fine, except for the fact that it is threaded with anti-technology bias. Although the authors don’t explicitly advise against technology use, instead counseling balance, the vignettes presented throughout the book deal only with the risks and down-side of technology. Loaded language is often used to deliver statistics: Young people don’t watch or use digital media, for example; they expose their brains to them.

The book does cover some interesting research in various relevant areas (e.g., addiction, ADHD), and tackles big topics like the effect of the Internet on politics, entertainment, and crime. These are all useful or important things to consider. However, it tends to cover these topics in a more or less cursory way, because it covers a lot of other turf as well, offering self-help exercises to bolster your interpersonal communication skills and information to help you survive in a digital world. This technology toolkit contains fairly basic advice about things like web searching, cell phone etiquette, and online privacy, most of which is not likely to be new to you if you read this blog. (And even your mother, no matter how old she is, could probably tell you to save only the email messages you are likely to have to refer to later.) In short, the book is a hybrid that, in my opinion, doesn’t provide significant new, useful, thoughtfully presented information on any one topic.

At the heart of my quarrel with this book is the first chapter, which assures you that your brain is evolving right now. That’s a questionable statement. Your brain changes into something different as you learn new things, no doubt about that, but that’s neuroplasticity, not evolution. You might charitably think that the authors are using “evolution” in its broader, nonscientific sense of developing into something more advanced. In fact, they offer this definition themselves, but it’s at the head of a section on Darwinian evolution, which talks about natural selection and survival of the fittest and even mentions DNA, but goes on to talk about brain evolution in terms of single-generation changes like the development of a shorthand for text messaging, rather than intergenerational changes in gene frequencies. OK, maybe they’re talking about cultural evolution, but in that case, why bring up Darwin and genes without making plain that biological and cultural evolution are analogous in some ways but not the same? Also, can a single brain even be said to evolve culturally, or does the culture itself evolve? All in all, I found this first chapter a grievous irritant.

The book goes on to discuss the brain gap; I remember the generation gap and the missile gap from my childhood, so maybe I’m not as excited about a new gap as I should be. One worthwhile question about the difference between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants—as yet unanswered—regards the way that immersion in electronic worlds affects the social maturation of young brains. The research the book presents is suggestive, but inconclusive. Sometimes it seems like the authors are trying to argue it both ways: On the one hand, individual brains change to adapt to their environments; that’s why the brain gap arose, because Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants face different environments, to some degree. But the point of adapting is to cope with the environment better, and it’s possible that kids are developing the kind of social skills they need in the world they’re going to have to survive and mate in. If this is happening at the cost of losing ordinary garden-variety social interaction skills, that is worrisome, but it’s not really clear yet that that’s what’s happening, in my opinion. As far as I can tell, young people still go to school and have to interact with their peers and their elders face to face. And it’s worth mentioning that older communication technologies, like the book, have also been blamed for stunting social skills. (Hands up everyone who, as a child, was told by teachers or parents to get your nose out of that book and come play with the other kids.)

I get the feeling that part of what motivated the book is the unease that an older generation feels with the world that young people are creating. This has been a concern of the older generation for centuries. While there may sometimes be room for concern, the fact that the plaintive cry about young people who seem like they’re from another planet has been heard for generations does blunt the urgency for me. And while the authors seem to view online interactions as less desirable than those that take place face to face, they don’t say much about the social benefits of the Internet, like the way it connects far-flung communities that might otherwise never have found each other, or how email can revive old friendships and keep relationships alive, albeit in attenuated form, over long distances. If I communicated with my kids only via email or IM, that would be sad, but email is perfect for maintaining some friendships that would otherwise probably die away.

All in all, I’d say to save your money for a book that goes into a single topic of interest to you in more detail (and more even-handedly and rigorously) than iBrain does in its smorgasbord approach.

Book review: Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You

Books, Psychology Comments Off

Sep 042008

Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, by Sam Gosling
New York: Basic Books, 2008

Until a couple of years ago, I lived in an apartment complex on the IU campus. There were two basic layouts (some apartments had balconies and some didn’t). It was always interesting to get a glimpse of what someone else had done with the same space that I had—for example, when I’d go to someone else’s apartment to buy yet another set of bookshelves from someone who was moving out, or sneak a glance through the open windows of a lighted apartment in another wing after dark. You can see the same thing in dorm rooms: a single basic spatial design, often very unimaginative, made distinctive by different occupants.

Examining dorm rooms in search of clues to their residents’ personalities is how Sam Gosling got his start in researching the connections between physical environment and temperament. Snoop is an entertaining look at how our stuff—for example, our bedrooms, bookshelves, offices, web sites, and email signatures—reveals who we are and what we value.

We drop various types of clues to the riddle of our selves. Some are there to tell the world who we are (identity claims), like bumper stickers or t-shirts. Others are there to help motivate, relax, or cheer us (feeling regulators), like religious icons, inspirational posters, and calming or energizing music. Placement for these two is important; something posted outside the cube or on the office door is probably meant to convey a particular image to others, while the family photos that are taped to the wall beside your monitor, where only you can see them, are more likely to be there for you. The third type of clue we leave is called behavioral residue: the candy bar wrappers on the floor of the car, the piles of half-read books next to the bed, the well-worn sneakers and like-new dress shoes.

People may try to manipulate their identity claims and even their behavioral residue to look like something they’re not, but usually it’s difficult to fully cover up your real self, and I gathered that often even if people plant clues that are misleading, they may not consciously be trying to deceive—their own vision of who they are may not entirely match reality. (Before you conclude that such people are crazy, consider whether you’ve bought or otherwise acquired for yourself something that you haven’t used/read/worn yet but that you mean to use/read/wear someday.)

To see how these various clues relate to what a person is all about, Gosling looks at research, including his own, that views personality based on the Big Five personality traits. He gives an overview of them (openness to new experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) near the beginning of the book. The Big Five system is a fairly broad framework; Gosling discusses the traits as fairly large categories, but if you like, you can get into a lot of fine-grained detail about different facets of each trait and how you score on each one. (E.g., see the International Personality Item Pool page, which links to a short and a long version of a test that will help you place yourself on each of the facets.)

After describing the Big Five traits, Gosling goes into an excellent discussion of something that I haven’t seen anyone else discuss in any detail before, even in books about personality: What does it mean to say you know someone? He uses an approach developed by Dan McAdams that considers three levels: traits (the sorts of descriptors that personality systems and personal ads use to summarize people’s personalities), personal concerns (the context and circumstances that shape the way traits are expressed and experienced), and identity (the deepest level of all, encompassing the elements that a person feels are essential to who he or she really is). The chapter contains some (often amusing) information about traits, including a description of a very thorough study of the words used to describe personalities, and a comparison of the words used to describe dogs and humans.

I need to read more of what McAdams has to say, because I enjoyed this discussion of his ideas, and in particular the important point that personality traits will only carry you so far in understanding a person because “[t]here are many ways to be extraverted or nervous or entertaining or dramatic or moody.” I’ve thought about this a bit in the context of introversion in particular. I have a friend who scores even more highly on tests for introversion than I do; he’s a university professor and a pianist, so an important part of his working life involves speaking or playing the piano in front of a room full of people. If my job required me to do either of those things, I think I’d be so miserable that I wouldn’t last long at it. On the other hand, when I’m with someone I know well and trust, I can be so talkative and emotionally open that people say they can’t believe I’m an introvert, and those kinds of heart-to-heart discussions, which I love, often make my friend uncomfortable. In short, we have two very different styles of introversion, based on experience, talent, and interests (and perhaps gender?).

When examining the links between these five traits and various things we surround ourselves with, Gosling’s approach is to look at two things: the relationship between the Big Five traits and different aspects of personal space or belongings (books, clothes), and how well people’s evaluations of personal spaces and belongings jibe with these relationships. In tables scattered throughout the book, he lists the characteristics people use to evaluate personality based on, for example, the appearance of an office or bedroom, and compares that with the characteristics that actually reflect the five personality traits. There’s often a disjunct between the two. For example, people tend to judge openness on the quantity and variety of books in an office or living space, when studies indicate that it’s really only the variety that correlates positively with the trait of openness. The tables are condensed into a single diagram near the end of the book that shows how much you can learn about a given trait in a given situation (e.g., Facebook page, bedroom, office, short interview, music top-10 list). Extraversion is the only trait that reveals itself to at least some degree in all the situations listed.

Gosling also goes into some of the potential pitfalls that can lead snoopers astray. For example, you must take into account whether an item in a space actually belongs to the occupant (one group of students analyzing a young man’s dorm room were misled by a pair of high-heeled shoes left behind by an overnight guest) and how much control the person had over its presence. (In another example, a company evidently gave all of its employees Filofaxes, reducing the weight an observer would give to the presence of this item in a person’s office. Having one didn’t mean you were particularly organized; it just meant you’d been there when they handed them out.)

I happened to be reading this book while also reading James Wood’s How Fiction Works, and I was struck by how much overlap there was with Snoop, at least regarding the discussion of character. Fiction writers have to choose what to tell you about their characters so that you understand who they are; this means that the writer has to understand how people are likely to interpret the many details they combine to clothe their creations in something resembling reality. Therefore, they need to consider the same sorts of things that Gosling discusses in terms of snooping. For example, taking into account the timing can provide added clues (people may keep their personal spaces messier during a major project that consumes a lot of time, for example, or neater when they’re expecting company). Context is an even richer playground for an author, and a possible source of confusion to the snooper (when my younger son moved into his first apartment, the play sand in his shopping cart at Lowe’s had nothing to do with small children and sandboxes, and everything to do with the fact that he’s long been an enthusiastic herper who keeps snakes and lizards).

The book also gives some time to the much-misunderstood (in my opinion) concept of stereotypes. My own take on the subject is that yes, treating an individual person as if he or she were bound to be the sum of all the stereotypes about him or her based on race, gender, religion, etc., is demeaning, and probably logically impossible as well, but on the other hand, having quick heuristics by which to make an initial evaluation of new situations and new people can be a useful thing. As with many things in life, balance is crucial. Gosling discusses the possible utility and many pitfalls of stereotyping. He also talks about using the clues people present as only a starting point; if you truly want to know someone, ask about some of the more interesting clues you’ve spotted and see what you learn. He also warns against some common quirks (e.g., placing undue weight on first impressions) that can baffle our attempts at understanding others.

The book closes with a chapter about the Truehome system developed by Chris Travis. Travis designs houses for people based on their personalities and personal histories as much as on practical constraints. Obviously most of us don’t have the luxury of designing our own space at that level (although I gather the system can be used when altering existing spaces as well), but it’s a fascinating process to read about anyway. It made me think about the intertwining of practicality and psychological comfort that must have been part of building design from the days when humans first built permanent shelters. When you think about it, to some degree psychological comfort is practical.

All in all, I recommend this book if you’re at all interested in the topic of understanding personality. It’s witty, educational, and engaging, and it may make you look at your own living spaces, and those of others, with a new eye.

Book review: A call for heresy

Books Comments Off

Feb 212008

A Call for Heresy: Why Dissent Is Vital to Islam and America, by Anouar Majid
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007

The other day I saw a bumper sticker with the line “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” While this quote is often attributed to Thomas Jefferson, these are, as far as I can tell, actually the words of Howard Zinn. At any rate, they seem appropriate to introduce a review of Anouar Majid’s book, A call for heresy. Majid draws similarities between Islamic culture and American culture, both, as he sees it, in the grip of orthodoxies (religious, economic, political) that must be challenged.

Majid opens with a chapter about globalization, an injurious form of which, he argues, is “the main producer of extremism and violence in the world today.” He analyzes the complicated knot of failures and problems linking the poverty and alienation that he sees as underlying the violence. He’s a big believer in the ideals that drove the American Revolutionaries (although in a chapter on regime change he points out that even good ideas usually cannot be imposed from outside without sparking resistance); he also points out ways that we in America have drifted away from the Enlightenment values of that time. The way ahead for Islam in particular, he argues, but for America as well, lies in each culture’s willingness to examine its own entrenched beliefs. He seems to be suggesting that only by fostering such openness can we achieve the compassion, forgiveness, and solidarity that is needed to overcome the environmental and economic problems we face.

Islam already has some basis for this critical examination. Majid provides a good deal of information about Muslim heretics (zanadiqa) past and present, and describes various calls to Muslims to re-examine their religion, and particularly the Koran, in light of history, anthropology, linguistics, hermeneutics, and psychology (similar, I gather, to the kind of Biblical scholarship that came to the fore in the nineteenth century). What chance any of these thinkers have to be heard and heeded, though, it’s hard to say. I went into the book not knowing much about Islam, so this was a useful introduction to a fairly broad view of Muslim scholarship.

He also talks about American freethinkers, including Emerson, Thoreau, W.E.B. du Bois, and Robert Green Ingersoll. These voices have periodically challenged us to re-examine the religious orthodoxy, commercialism, and unchecked capitalism that shape our lives. Maybe it’s only a small part of the national culture, but we have certainly harbored some atheists, agnostics, and humanists down through the years, and I agree entirely that their voices should be widely heard, not ignored.

He summarizes his discussion of the role of heresy in solving current problems:

“Religions that cannot stand basic intellectual examination are honored as the basis of our moral edifice, while economic systems that are ravaging the global habitat, diminishing our humanity, and endangering peace and coexistence for the ephemeral benefit of a handful of people and states are taken for granted by leaders who see no way out of our conundrum. What’s worse, and even more distressing, resignation in the face of the daunting challenge to imagine solutions often turns well-meaning people into militant apologists for existing religious and economic regimes, as if both religion and capitalism were part of a divinely decreed natural order, not the outcomes of particular historical processes and human intervention. Yet, however hard we try to argue over the meaning of history or human nature, we can’t afford to wait too long for badly needed alternatives to our conceptions of faith and the economy. That is why we need freethinkers and zanadiqa, the daring few who can break away from mainstream thought and imagine new possibilities for our embattled lives.”

From a Thinking Meat point of view, one of the more interesting parts of the book was the suggestion that religion fills specific needs that are not being met in a meaningful way by secular culture:

“Religious practices … induce a state of well-being that no other secular form of communal experience can possibly match… It is perhaps our failure, as twenty-first-century humans, to devise new ways to reproduce the feelings that have historically emanated from religious experiences that gives monotheism, with its singular worldview, its redeeming and terrifying power.”

Combined with his ideas about rational examination of religious beliefs, this suggests to me the view that religion is at least partly a way to channel religious sentiment, and that since it’s a human creation it should be shaped to benefit, rather than harm, humans. (This is my own formulation, not something he said in so many words in the book.) He also talks about the Gnostic Christians, who were written out of the record early in the history of Christianity but who offered a more immediate, mystical experience of the divine. I’m curious about whether, and how, the need for communal practices that generate the feelings of well-being associated with religion can be reconciled with the Gnostic model of very personal, individual spiritual experience. I’d surely like to believe that as a species we’re capable of some such reconciliation (i.e., that spirituality–which is apparently an inherent feature of human nature, although not everyone feels much need for it–doesn’t have to be divisive).

Majid appeared on Bill Moyers Journal on PBS in October 2007; you can read a transcript or watch the video at the Bill Moyers Journal archive.

Book review: On deep history and the brain

Books, Brain and mind, Human origins and evolution 2 Responses »

Jan 062008

On Deep History and the Brain, by Daniel Lord Smail
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008

When did human history begin? Most general histories pick something like the beginning of the written record, or Mesopotamia. In any event, a date or event is picked before which there is taken to be no human history as we would define it. What we know about how our earlier ancestors lived is described as part of another discipline, perhaps anthropology or paleoarcheology. In On deep history and the brain, historian Daniel Lord Smail argues that the choice of a relatively recent date for the start of human history is more or less arbitrary and reflects the structure of an earlier conception of a “sacred history”, and proposes that the entire story of our species be integrated into the narrative of historians. He also offers some exciting suggestions for a possible approach to deep history centered around the human brain and nervous system.

The first two chapters are probably most meaningful to professional historians, but they’re accessible to any reasonably well-educated reader. Smail describes the way an earlier sacred narrative shaped our sense of history, and how vestiges of that narrative still shape our sense of when history began. Historians may reject the story of the garden of Eden, but history is still taken to begin at some base point in the human trajectory–perhaps the earliest farming communities, which contained the seeds of today’s world. Or maybe the fall of the Roman Empire takes the place of the expulsion from the garden, and we begin with the Middle Ages, relatively primitive compared to what came before or after. We still assume there is some starting point at which we open the book onto a human story, rather than recognizing the long gradual process by which we became what we are.

After outlining the history of our view of history, Smail considers and rejects a number of starting points that have been chosen for history. (Many of these arguments are no longer made by historians, but they still form a sort of ghost remnant of ideology that haunts our ideas of history.) He concludes that human societies don’t emerge into history when they start developing a written record, or when they demonstrate a consciousness of their own stories, or when they become politically organized, or when they cross some boundary line (e.g., 4000 B.C.) that separates human from animal societies.

But is there a dividing line inherent in the way humans are able to “transmit their experience to future generations [and] are in some sense the authors of the changes that happen to their societies”? Cultural evolution is Lamarckian, that is, acquired characteristics can be transmitted to others; this is in contrast to Darwinian biological evolution. Cultural evolution thus has an element of human control absent from human biological evolution. Could the advent of cultural evolution offer a justifiable breaking point after which we can legitimately consider human history to have started?

Smail examines this question in the third chapter of the book. He concludes that no, it does not. For one thing, we are not the only animals to have culture, and the cultures of other animals often lack a dimension of intentionality–as early human cultures quite likely did too. So on the far side of the divide, we have culture without much of a guiding hand. On the other side, more recent historical developments are not entirely intentional, but contain elements of chance and blind retention or transmission of changes (which are essential to Darwinian evolution).

He gives an example from his own research, an examination of how written descriptions of property, recorded in various transactions, changed over the later part of the Middle Ages. The parties to a transaction and the notary who recorded their verbal descriptions did not consciously plan to move toward any particular standard system for categorizing the properties, and yet the written descriptions did tend to eventually shift toward such a standard (which might vary from place to place). The shift was probably the result of slight unconscious preferences on the part of the notaries rather than any grand plan or design. In short, the division between Darwinian and Lamarckian factors is blurred rather than clear-cut.

I found the last two chapters to be the most interesting. Although there are many ways to approach a deep history of humankind, Smail proposes one centered around the capabilities and quirks of the human brain. The fourth chapter sketches out this “new neurohistory”.

An important part of this chapter is a critique of evolutionary psychology, which attempts to bring our pre-literate past into the study of human societies today. Or rather, I should say it’s a critique of Evolutionary Psychology, although Smail doesn’t use the capitalization to distinguish between the application of evolutionary approaches to human behavior (lowercase evolutionary psychology) and the program laid out by Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and others (Evolutionary Psychology, or EP). Personally, I am very interested in the former but frequently skeptical of the latter. When I read a news story about new EP research, I’m often baffled by the leap from the description of a newly identified behavioral trait to the story of why we behave that way. Surely, I think, I must be missing something. There must be something in the paper itself that explains the missing links between the observation of the behavior and the explanation of how it came about. Smail is a historian rather than a psychologist or anthropologist, but his understanding of the process of EP research parallels mine:

“Most work in evolutionary psychology is achieved through the process of reverse engineering–you look at the trait … and then try to imagine the evolutionary context in which it might have been adaptive. It is easy to make mistakes.”

At least I’m not the only observer who thinks imagination plays a key role in the explanatory process.

Smail describes several critiques of Evolutionary Psychology, in particular David Buller’s The Adapted Mind. Buller makes three relevant arguments: First, natural selection does not homogenize human traits, but produces a diversity of psychological types (not along racial, ethnic, or gender lines, but within populations). I found this the most interesting of his arguments, because I’ve wondered for awhile about whether some personality traits are not adaptive or maladaptive in and of themselves, but might be necessary in balance with other traits within a population. The second argument is that the human brain is not the product of a set of adaptations to a more or less fixed environment. The social intelligence hypothesis says basically that the development of human intelligence was driven by the need for understanding and relating to our conspecifics; if this is correct, then the shifting social environment gives rise to continuous adaptation of the human brain. The final argument is that the human brain could well have changed in the past 100,000 years rather than being frozen in its response to our ancestral environment.

The rest of the chapter deals with the necessity of taking biology, and in particular neurobiology, into account in history, for example:

“…moods, emotions, and predispositions inherited from the ancestral past, where they evolved at the intersection of human biology and human culture, form a structural backdrop for many things we do and have done. They are interesting for how they tease or suggest. They are also interesting for how they are violated, manipulated, or modulated. And this is precisely where it becomes so important to think with neurohistory. Although the fact is not widely known among historians and is generally overlooked by psychologists and biologists, cultural practices can have profound neurophysiological consequences. Key elements of human economic, political, and social activity … emerged precisely because humans possess relatively plastic or manipulable neural states and brain-body chemistries.”

There’s some shifting of focus here; neurohistory doesn’t necessarily have to deal with deep history (Smail includes examples of applications to more recent history), but taking neurobiology into account does set any historical study into the context of our story as a species. Although he explains in the preface his reasons for writing a book simply to propose this approach rather than trying to also sketch out what a deep history might look like, and his reasons are valid, I still wish the book had said a bit more about what might be covered in a new general history textbook that took the longer view he proposes. Maybe he’ll put that in another book. (And I do appreciate that this one was short enough to finish before I had to take it back to the library!)

A bit later in the neurohistory chapter, it says that the Neolithic revolution:

“…created, in effect, a new neurophysiological ecosystem, a field of evolutionary adaptation in which the sorts of customs and habits that generate new neural configurations or alter brain-body states could evolve in unpredictable ways.”

Which is a good way of introducing the final chapter, which deals with a specific focus of neurohistory: psychotropy, or the ways humans manipulate the brain-body states of themselves and others.

Smail defines several types of psychotropy, although the definitions don’t seem to be mutually exclusive. First is teletropy, the influence of other’s moods and emotions through a variety of approaches that include things like religion or seduction. (I don’t remember that he specifically mentions art in this context, but it seems to me like another excellent example.) Teletropy can be symbiotic (both parties benefit) or exploitive, although it can be hard to draw the line, and it might be possible to describe the same behavior either way. (For example, is church-going a result of the joint interests of clergy and laity, or are the latter being exploited and duped into donating money to the former?)

In contrast to this is autotropy, the ways we have of adjusting our own mental and emotional state. These include recreational sex, reading, and gossip (taken to mean the discussion of other humans and their behavior). A subset of autotropic mechanisms that is also used sometimes in teletropy is the ingestion of substances that tweak our moods one way or another. The neurohistorical approach offers a new way to look at our relationship with these substances and practices over time, and this is the richest and juiciest part of the book, in my opinion. Toward the end of the chapter Smail suggests that:

“…it may be possible some day to argue that European societies, between the twelfth and the nineteenth centuries, witnessed a tectonic shift away from teletropic mechanisms manipulated by ruling elites toward a new order in which the teletropies of dominance were replaced by the growing range of autotropic mechanisms available on an increasingly unregulated market. (The rise of the fascist regimes of the twentieth century might well pose a challenge to the simple teleology of this model, reminding us that history is always complex and never linear.)”

I enjoy this kind of big-picture thinking, although obviously this is just the briefest of sketches to demonstrate the possible explanatory power of using a neurophysiological approach to human history. All in all, this book should provide plenty of fodder for thought and debate. Although it’s addressed to historians, I think there’s lots of material here to interest the more general reader, especially in the last two or three chapters.

Book review: Musicophilia

Being human Comments Off

Nov 072007

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, by Oliver Sacks.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007

The latest book of essays on neuroscience by Oliver Sacks looks at various aspects of brain function as they relate to music. He focuses not just on how the brain processes and understands music but what music means to us and how it makes us who we are. I admire the compassion and humanity that always seem to fill Sacks’s writing, and this book illustrates those qualities beautifully.

Sacks often writes about people who have suffered an injury or illness or congenital condition that in some way limits their ability to live a normal life. You would think that reading a series of essays about such people would be depressing, leading as it does to a horrified realization of the fragility of our brains and the frightening possibilities for the loss of mental faculties that we rely on and that in some cases even seem to define us. Sacks has the gift of somehow making this material uplifting, of emphasizing the joys of being human even as he shows us the hazards.

Partway through this book, it’s true, I started to wonder about the strength of the thread that tied together these tales of loss and the ways they illuminate brain functions. But as I continued to read, I saw that the theme of the book was indeed strong enough to tie together the stories and make the book seem like more than the sum of its parts–and that the theme is not just music, but identity.

The book contains four sections, each covering some facet of music and the brain. The first section examines cases of music taking over the brain in one way or another: musical hallucinations, earworms (tunes that you can’t get out of your head), epilepsy that is triggered by music, and an astonishing case of a man’s life being utterly transformed by an intense passion for music that developed after he was struck by lightning. The second section looks at different aspects of musical ability, where they arise and how they vary from person to person. The stories here are not all about disabilities; Sacks also discusses people with synesthesia, a sensory blending in which input from one sense bleeds over into the perception of another. Sometimes I feel envious of synesthetes, and the associations some of them have between, for example, musical pitches or keys or timbres and colors are fascinating.

In the third section, Sacks looks at the connections between music, memory, and movement–this is where he tells the story of Clive Wearing, whose severe amnesia dissects his life into seconds-long fragments of consciousness unconnected with each other–except when he’s playing or conducting music, which provides a thread that links his moments. He also tells of people with Parkinson’s, Tourette’s, and other movement disorders, and how music can help them regain fluidity, focus, and control.

The last section makes explicit the connection between music and identity that is also explored elsewhere in the book. This was in some ways the most moving section of all for me. In fact, when I first brought the book home, I turned immediately to the essay on music and depression. As is the case throughout the book, Sacks weaves his own experiences into the stories he’s telling, and I found so much that rang true from my own experiences of depression. It feels very good to see someone else articulate something that you have felt but haven’t been able to put into words, and this chapter was full of moments like that for me. I was particularly struck by his observation that while sad music “makes one experience pain and grief more intensely, it brings solace and consolation at the same time.” This paradox explains why listening to recordings of the Requiems by Mozart or Brahms or Fauré can make me feel so much better. When you tell someone that you’re listening to a Requiem to make yourself feel better, it can sounds like a perverse undertaking, but it does work. The final chapter of the book is about music and dementias like Alzheimer’s. I was surprised to learn about the ways that music therapy can help people with dementia, and touched by the observation that music can still reach people after most of their other connections to who they were have gone. For some reason the closing of the book called to mind some lines from a Wendell Berry poem: “Only music keeps us here, each by all the others held.”

If you’ve read the book (or even if you haven’t), you might enjoy this article from Seed Magazine about Oliver Sacks. It is partly about the book, but it also describes how he came to be the scientist and writer he is today. I was astonished to learn that someone who looked at a journal Sacks kept about his travels when he was young commented on the lack of humanity and compassion in his writing. Those are exactly the qualities that have always most struck me in his work. The article describes what happened in Sack’s life to fill his work with grace. It’s a beautiful read.

Book review: Brain and culture

Books, Human origins and evolution Comments Off

Oct 202007

Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology, and Social Change (Bradford Books), by Bruce Wexler

Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006

This book explains human difficulties with change, including phenomena like the generation gap and the clash of cultures, in terms of brain development over the course of the human lifespan. This offers a fascinating perspective on some of the more difficult problems we face as a species.

The human brain, in the first two dozen years or so of life, is molded by its environment, both its physical surroundings and the cultural environment created by other brains. The first half of this book describes, with extensive supporting evidence from scientific studies, the ways in which the young brain is shaped by experience. The inputs from the environment are essential for the proper functioning of the brain, in particular with regard to perception and language.

The mature brain is very different, though. After structuring itself to mesh with its environment, the brain becomes much less plastic in adulthood, and instead of shaping itself to the input it receives, it tries instead to shape the external world to match its internal conception of what the world is about. That is, we form our ideologies in youth and then tend to perceive and interpret experiences so as to support our worldview while ignoring or discounting contradictory input. The second half of the book discusses the evidence for this and the implications of it. The evidence includes some of the cross-cultural studies in which Asians and Americans notice and focus on different parts of a scene, with Asians taking a more holistic view and Americans finding a prominent central focus and perceiving the rest of the scene as background. There are many other strains of evidence for the ways we interpret reality based on our mental maps.

These types of mental representation are useful, of course, and can save us a lot of time and energy. But when we find that our inner map of reality differs in some important way from the real world, we don’t like it, and we try to restore a good fit between the two. And that’s where things get interesting. Wexler discusses two examples of changes in the outside world that require great effort to adapt to: the loss of a spouse, and moving to another country. Children of immigrants typically do better in terms of learning the language and adopting the customs of the new country, as their brains are still absorbing and adapting to the world around them. Older immigrants have a much harder time of it.

One of the most painful ramifications of the way our brains work, though, is what happens when people from different cultures meet. The supporting data for this part of his argument are not as strong as for the other parts, but Wexler still makes a convincing case that conflict between cultures is often based on a struggle over whose ideology will prevail rather than a struggle over resources like land. He examines contemporary writings about the Crusades, for example, which indicate the ideological fervor (rather than lust for territory) that moved people to join these often doomed enterprises. He traces the stages people go through when meeting a significantly different culture: ignoring the differences, then distorting them so as to interpret them in terms of the existing ideology (e.g., European explorers deciding that certain native Africans were descended from Noah’s son Ham, or Hawaiians deciding, when Captain Cook arrived, that he must be the deity Lono, rather than a human like themselves). But with prolonged contact, these efforts to incorporate the new input into existing mental structures break down, and people are apt to start trying to eliminate the distressing evidence of a contradictory worldview. Because religion is often central to a culture, it appears frequently as the chief cause of intercultural struggles.

So what is to be done about it? Contact between different cultures is much more extensive today than ever before in the history of our species, and it’s not going away any time soon (barring a widespread collapse due to global warming or a collapse in transportation due to energy shortages, in which case a much smaller human population may retreat into local enclaves that do not have much interaction with others elsewhere on the planet). Wexler discusses some of the current problems of intercultural contact, for example, the loss of languages and long-established ways of life as small groups are forced to leave their native lands, or the struggle of even larger countries to maintain their own culture against the juggernaut of American movies, music, etc.

Culture is always changing; although Wexler doesn’t address it extensively, each generation is shaped by a different environment from the one before, and the neurological processes he describes could also account for the negative reactions of generations of parents to the worlds their offspring create (the generation gap). But as difficult as those intergenerational changes are, at least there’s usually enough continuity that a culture continues to think of itself as being in some way essentially the same throughout time. The kind of culture change that comes from outside these days can be much more disruptive, and is often felt as a much more painful loss of identity and meaning. Wexler suggests the university as a model for blending cultures; people are exposed to a wide range of cultural possibilities in a relatively non-threatening atmosphere. This type of smorgasbord approach will never preserve all the world’s existing cultures and languages intact, but it does provide a more or less painless way for cultures to meet and blend without crashing into each other.

I really enjoyed reading this book and felt like I learned a lot. (It seems a bit pricey, though, which is too bad because it might keep the book from getting as wide a readership as it deserves. You might want to consider seeing if your library has this one.) It left me with some questions that I hope someone else follows up on. For example, I wonder about the power of culture to reinforce curiosity and respect for differences as a positive aspect of a group’s identity, and the limits of this approach. (I think there’s a limit to how open you can be before you start to lose your own sense of who you are. Also, some questions of material culture are not open to compromise, and some practices do not deserve respect no matter how important they may be to a culture–clitoridectomy, for example.)

Also, people differ in how open to new experiences and different ideas they are in adulthood–actually I think individuals vary depending on circumstances–and I’d be curious to know how these individual differences play into the overall situation, and whether we can identify any neurobiological differences that could account for them. Could it be that our ability to maintain a balance between preserving our own culture (including standing up for our values) and opening up to others in a peaceful and appropriate way depends on a balance in different personality types in the population?

Book review: The robot’s rebellion

Being human, Books 3 Responses »

Sep 182007

The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin, by Keith Stanovich. University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Stanovich, a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto, contends that we haven’t fully grasped the deeply distressing truth of evolution—not that we’re descended from monkeys, but that our behavior is driven by the requirements of our genes, not the needs, plans, and desires of ourselves as entire organisms. Stanovich refers to Richard Dawkins’s description of living beings as “throwaway survival machines”, and opens the book by driving home the point that genes are in it for themselves, and we are shaped to be excellent carriers and transmitters for our genes—we are vehicles for a variety of replicators.

The title of the book comes from Stanovich’s extension of a scenario, originally created by Daniel Dennett, that involves imagining robots commissioned to protect our cryogenically preserved bodies after we die until a cure exists for whatever it was that killed us. Give the robots the ability to move around, as a hedge against changes in circumstance; give them enough autonomy (a long enough leash) that you can give general survival instructions and not need to micromanage them, because you of course will not be conscious to oversee operations. Why should they not develop their own interests apart from the interests of the bodies they carry? We are those robots, carting our genes around and sometimes becoming restive under the control of their survival instructions. Or, as he describes the human predicament:

We are vehicles.

We are self-aware of this fact.

We are aware of the logic of replicators and that there are two different replicators that house themselves in humans.

Most of us want to preserve some notion of an autonomous self.

The logic of replicators includes the fact that we have two systems for reacting to circumstances and deciding what to do. One is faster, automatic, and geared toward the survival and reproduction of the genes; the other is slower, more analytical, and capable of also supporting the goals of the organism as a whole aside from those of the replicators. The automatic survival system is likely more or less adaptive for the environment in which we spent most of our history as humans, but in many ways it doesn’t work as well for us today. In particular, it’s prone to cognitive biases that Stanovich likens to our preference for sweet, fatty foods: something that might have helped us once, but that often needs to be overriden in the more complex world we live in now. We can sometimes use the slower analytical system to examine and correct our first instinctive reactions to situations.

However, the analytical system is not always going to be entirely at our service either, because it gets its ideas from memes, another replicator that we harbor. Like genes, memes are in it for themselves and do not necessarily support the goals of ourselves as organisms. Memes don’t have to be true or beneficial to their hosts in order to survive and spread. They can propagate because they’re helpful to their hosts, but they can also survive if they’re neutral or harmful as long as they fit well with our predispositions, or facilitate the reproduction of genes that tend to produce good hosts for the memes, or simply are good at replicating.

Sometimes our personal goals overlap with the goals of the replicators, but not always. In cases where our interests diverge from those of the replicators (genes or memes), we want to find the freedom to be aware of our own best interests and to act so as to maximize the likelihood that we will get what we most want, or to put it another way, to behave rationally. (The beginning of the book struck me as dismally focused on waging war on our physical bodies and their natural inclinations, but I think that’s because Stanovich is looking closely at the area where the interests of the vehicle and the interests of the replicators don’t overlap–it’s not that that’s all there is to life.) Stanovich recommends first that we examine our memes and take care which ones we adopt. He offers the following guidelines for reflective thinking about our memes and memeplexes (complexes of interlocking memes):

Avoid installing memes that are harmful to the vehicle physically.

Regarding memes that are beliefs, seek to install only memes that are true–that is, that reflect the way the world actually is.

Regarding memes that are desires, seek to install only memes that do not preclude other memeplexes becoming installed in the future.

Avoid memes that resist evaluation.

Note that many faith-based memes, which Stanovich claims have been privileged in the memesphere, resist evaluation and in fact often contain mechanisms by which they try to actively deter evaluation.

Note also that scientific and rational thinking, the tools by which we can evaluate our memes, are themselves memeplexes. This necessitates a boot-strapping approach to the analysis, which Stanovich compares to the inspection of a boat while you’re afloat in it. You can’t disassemble the whole thing all at once and check out every plank, but you can provisionally determine that an area will safely bear your weight (make some reasonable assumptions), and stand there while you examine what you can from that vantage point. Later you’ll move your weight to the newly examined areas and double-check your original assumptions. In this way you will, sooner or later, examine the entire boat (or your entire mental structure).

The second part of the quest for autonomy involves evaluating our beliefs and desires. This requires a multi-level analysis. Your first-level desire may be to eat a rich gooey brownie, for example. That’s what you want. But your second-level desire may well differ; you may not want to want that brownie, for reasons of health, vanity, or possibly even religion. The goal is rational integration, the resolution of conflicts like this between first- and second-level desires. It’s not as simple as saying that you should always go with the second-level desire; it may be influenced by a memeplex that is detrimental to you. For example, if your first-order desire is to continue living, but your meme-driven religious beliefs indicate that it’s better to die as long as you take some of infidels with you, a thoughtful analysis based on the guidelines listed above would indicate that the first-order desire is the better one to follow.

Because you can’t always favor either the first- or the second-order desires, the way to work at resolving conflicts is by introducing a third order: What do I want to want to want? Stanovich gives an example that’s far more interesting than the brownie example: someone who enjoys celebrating Christmas with her family (the gifts, the music, the lights, the parties) but is an atheist and thinks it’s wrong to celebrate a religious holiday. She wants to keep Christmas but doesn’t want to want it. So she evaluates both desires with an eye to deciding with of them she wants to want. (She winds up deciding that since Christmas these days is not necessarily religious, and her celebrating it causes no harm and brings her joy, she wants to want to observe it more than she wants not to want it.) Maybe this one resonated for me because I went down a similar path (it took years), although my arguments were not exactly the same as the ones in the book.

This process does not involve moving up a chain of desires or beliefs until you find your higher self or the “real you”; it’s more that you ask yourself, of the two warring preferences at lower levels, which one you want to ratify. You could say that freedom consists of engaging in this struggle to integrate conflicting beliefs and desires by rationally evaluating them.

That, in a nutshell, is the proposal Stanovich offers for leading a life as free as possible of the blind dictates of replicators and following, as much as possible, your own goals as an entire organism, not a vehicle for the replicators. In explaining his proposal, he goes into a great deal of interesting material about evolutionary psychology, the nature of rationality, and why smart people do dumb things.

I wish he had said more about emotions. They play an important part in rational thought and decision-making, and balancing the need to understand and learn from them with the need to control them is a delicate and tricky problem, related to the kind of analysis he suggests. It’s a full book as it is, though, and perhaps he or someone else will someday produce a companion book on how emotions fit into the picture. All in all, I highly recommend this book for anyone who is trying to understand what it means to be a conscious animal, and how to live well.

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