Please find below some of my recent reviews.
A Mind of Its Own: How your brain distorts and deceives by Cordelia Fine - Icon Books
What's the big idea?
Your brain is like a good spin-doctor - it makes sure that reality is filtered through a rose-coloured prism so you never get to see the ghastly truth. In particular it protects you from ugly rumours about yourself - manipulating your perceptions to present your prospects in the most optimistic way, massaging evidence to cast you in the best light and selecting your memories to protect your self image . We fail a test, and the brain assures that we just didn't make the effort. He fails the same test and we smugly note that he must be thick. Or rather, you do, because, of course, my brain insists that I would never be guilty of such a double standard.
As well as polishing your halo, your brain tirelessly labours to protect you from facts that might undermine your beliefs. It discounts evidence that goes against your prejudices, and amplifies that which supports them. This pigheaded loyalty to old ideas sometimes works for our benefit. It is the basis of the placebo effect ( we expect a drug to work so it does) and if we think we are wonderful we tend to live up to it. One study found that school children who were given IQ test results which falsely boosted their scores later did better in genuine tests than classmates who had not previously been duped . But it can also delay progress and lead us to make disastrous mistakes. Doctors, for example, went on x-raying pregnant women for nearly a quarter of a century after one maverick physician produced evidence to show that radiation endangered unborn babies. Throughout that time the medical profession as a whole convinced itself the evidence was unsound, mainly because it went against prevailing opinion.
"A Mind of Its Own" is cringe-making and sometimes disillusioning. Happily, though, your brain will swiftly forget the bits that reflect less than kindly on you, and the take-away message is that by protecting your ego, your brain not only keeps you happy, but also helps to keep you healthy.
So what's new?
Nothing much. Most of the information comes from psychological studies dating back 10 years or more, many of which have already been written about quite widely. That's not really the point though - rather it is that the book pulls the evidence together in a particularly neat and revealing way.
How reader friendly is it?
Totally. Cordelia Fine writes clearly and elegantly and even made this reader laugh out loud (in public).
Boffin-rating
The only quibble I have with this book is that it talks about the brain in the way that some men talk of their penises - as a wayward appendage, to be fond of and grateful to, but not really responsible for. In fact, your brain is you, as mine is me. This, though, is nitpicking - its very difficult to write about the brain any other way. In fact, I have probably done the same here. Happily, though, my brain won't let on.
This review first appeared in The Daily Mail.
The Gecko's Foot: Bio-inspiraton engineered from nature by Peter Forbes - 4th Estate
It's a well known scientific fact that bumble bees can't fly. The lift that can be achieved by their stunted wings just isn't enough to float them.
Unaware of this, natural selection found a way around the aerodynamic obstacle aeons before humans put helicopters in the sky, and nature still boasts countless inventions that man-made technology can't match. There is, for example, the lotus that repels dirt from its surface, the sparkling "blue" butterfly that has no blue pigment in its wings; and the eponymous gecko which can run effortlessly across a ceiling.
You would think that adapting these wonders for our own use - stay-clean fabrics, novel paints, Spiderman feats of adhesion - would be easy. Given that evolution has already done the inventing, it should just be a matter of observing how, and copying. In fact, we have been surprisingly slow to use Nature's patent-book, and it is only now that "bio-inspiration" is really taking off.
One reason for this is that much of nature's cleverest work has been hidden from us until recently, because it happens in nano-world - a place where objects are between one millionth and one billionth of a metre in size. The problem with observing things on this scale is not just that they are so small, it is that light waves themselves are nano-sized, and when they hit another object of similar dimension they bounce off in a way that blurs the picture. This distortion meant that, until the invention of X-rays and electron microscopes, we were stuck with a massive (in nano-terms) "Blind Zone".
Take the gecko's foot of the title: look at it with your naked eye and you see some elastic bands of tissue. Look through an ordinary microscope and you will detect some sort of bristly structure on them. Neither explain its ability to stand upside down on sheer glass. Through an electron microscope, however, the bristles can be seen to have split ends which are so small that they actually merge with the molecules they touch. This creates an adhesive force so strong that, were it to use all its bristles at once, a gecko's foot could support the weight of an adult person.
Another reason for our failure to learn more from nature, according to Forbes, is that for a long time scientists concentrated, using chemistry, on getting down to the itsy-bitsiest pieces of matter, rather than studying their complex connections and interplay.
This review first appeared in The Daily Mail.
The Stumbling on Happiness: Why the future won't work the way you think it will by Daniel Gilbert - Harper
What's the big idea?
The harder you try to steer yourself into happy times, the less likely you are to get there because your navigation system is hopelessly up the creek..
Human brains, says Gilbert, are constantly trying to predict what will make them happy, but they usually get it wrong. They make us believe, for example, that things which sound nice to us now will be just as nice in reality, and that awful events - divorce, illness, bereavement - will be devastating. Yet our feelings now about future events are actually a lousy guide to how we will feel when they actually happen.
The result is that we hold back from doing things we ought because we overrate the emotional effect of failure and error, and we fling ourselves into things we oughtn't because we think the rewards will be greater than they are. Then, when we look back and ask ourselves where we took a wrong turn, we distort the view in such a way that we learn nothing from our mistakes. The consolation is that somewhere along the way, usually when we are not trying, we may "stumble" on happiness.
Gilbert's book explains how and why our brains delude, trick and misguide us into careering confidently down pathways that end in frustration, disappointment and confusion. As he himself makes clear, the book is not a manual on how to be happy. Gilbert seems to feel obliged, however, to offer some kind of practical guidance and, rather rashly, he promises at the start to end the book with "a simple remedy" for over-riding our brains' distortions. This turns out to be a rather limp bit of advice which, as the author himself observes "you will almost certainly not accept".
Never mind - rather as happiness itself is to be found on the journey rather than at the destination, the joy of this book lies in the reading rather than in some spurious self-help pay-off.
So what's new?
Nothing at all. The wisdom is old as the hills, and there are dozens of books that contain the science. But this one pulls it all together in the neatest, wittiest way possible..
How reader friendly is it?
If you didn't laugh at the parade of human folly laid out in this book, you'd have to cry, and Gilbert makes certain that you laugh. In fact, if you are like this reviewer you will giggle, splutter, guffaw and then possibly fall off your chair making weird wheezing noises. It is not a book to be read in public (or while consuming food.)
Boffin-rating
Gilbert is the Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He is also the winner of the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology. OK?
This review first appeared in The Daily Mail.
No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality by Judith Rich Harris - Norton
What's the big idea?
It's not your upbringing that makes you what you are, nor your genes. Rather it's the things that happen to you - often very tiny, random things. Hence even identical twins, raised together, may develop entirely different personalities simply because, as Harris puts it: "a neuron zigs rather than zags, one twin has a better position in the uterus, one twin falls down the stairs or contracts a virus…"
Harris's theory also accounts for how these little blips send personalities off on their different trajectories. The human brain, she contends, has three distinct systems: the "relationship system", which work's out who's who in society, the "socialisation system" which works out what's what, and the "status system" which works out what the person him/herself is like. The book describes how these systems interact to ensure that every human being is unique.
So what's new?
No Two Alike follows Harris's previous book, The Nurture Assumption, which challenged the old idea that children are moulded mainly by their home environment. She dissected mountains of studies to show that children's characters are shaped more by their interactions with their peers than with their parents. The book got a big spin from the fact that it came from Harris - a disabled housewife on a mission - rather than an established academic with a grant. She was widely celebrated as a feisty little David who took on the Goliaths of academia at their own game, and triumphed.
No Two Alike continues this heroic theme. "The little lady from New Jersey", as Harris calls herself, is endlessly vanquishing academic heavyweights who seek to dismiss her work. Apart from being an outsider, their animosity, she suggests, is because her idea is shockingly, and subversively, original..
But is it? Harris claims to be offering an entirely new theory of personality. In fact it is new only in that it gives more weight than is usual to a certain type of environmental influence - small, random events. However, the potentially massive effect of such blips is already well recognised by brain scientists. They know only too well how a blood clot the size of a pinhead or even a single moment of terrible fear can utterly transform a person. The only places unenlightened by this are a few unswept corners of social science departments. The people Harris is battling with here are not Goliaths but dinosaurs
How reader friendly is it?
Harris presents the book as a sort of science-thriller, with herself as a detective probing the mystery of human individualism. The first few chapters deal with what she calls "red herrings" - the culprits, such as genes and family, which are usually held to account for our idiosyncrasies. The idea is to keep you hanging on for the denouement, but is more likely to have you jumping off before you get to the point.
Boffin-rating
Harris has none of the normal qualifications for writing such a book. In order to make sure it is taken seriously she has therefore worked far harder at it than you might expect of a person who has already secured readers' confidence by a string of letters after their name and a fancy job description. If she says she has been through the figures, believe me, she has.
This review first appeared in The Daily Mail.
21st Century Brain by Steven Rose - Jonathan Cape
Steven Rose is worried. He's worried that neuroscientists are getting above themselves, that brain technology will get out of control, and that sinister forces will try to meddle with our minds. What will happen, he asks, if we really do get effective smart drugs, mind-reading machines and mood manipulators? "What will become of our self- conception as human beings with the freedom to shape our own lives? What new powers will accrue to the state, the military, the corporations?"
The first half of "21st Century Brain" is a clear, thorough and up to date account of current brain science. The second half, though, is perilously close to a rant. Rose is a vociferous critic of evolutionary psychology - the idea that human behaviour is biologically determined - and here he tries to convince us that our genes and neurochemistry have far less influence than we have been led to believe.
To this end he minimises, ignores or pooh-poohs practically all the evidence for biological causation in human affairs and opponents' views are scorned or simply dismissed. Rose also plays shamelessly on the "yuk" factor. Writing about ECT, for example (under the sub-heading "Thought Control") he first reminds readers of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and then describes the treatment as "a blast of electricity . . . inserting a large, clumsy spanner into the brain's machinery". Actually modern ECT uses tiny pulses of carefully localised electricity and is nothing like the horrible treatment immortalised in Cuckoo's Nest. He also cherry-picks his evidence. He claims, for example, that an (unreferenced) study showed Prozac worked in only about 30% of cases. No doubt one survey did, but Prozac has been subjected to thousands of trials, and meta-analyses of them show it benefits at least twice that proportion.
Having rubbished the idea that we are products of our neurochemistry Rose then, rather confusingly, tries to scare us silly about the risks of technology based on that idea. Brainscan lie detectors, neural "fingerprinting" and cognitive enhancers are, he says, largely snake oil. Yet still they should make you very, very scared. There follows his vision of a future with "an entire population drifting through life in a drug-induced haze of contentment . . . with the neurotechnology to erase such tremor of dissent that may remain added to the already formidable existing armoury of state control".
This book will delight technophobes and conspiracy theorists and (I would guess) exasperate many of Steven Rose's colleagues. Rose's own contributions to neuroscience are substantial, and his work on Alzheimers disease may well help future researchers find a cure for that cruel and dignity-stripping condition. Such benefits are a much more likely result of the 21st century neuroscientific revolution than state-sponsored mind control, and it will be very sad if their advent is delayed by sensationalist doom-mongering.
This review first appeared in The Daily Mail.
Monkeyluv by Robert M. Sapolsky - Jonathan Cape
This collection of essays is designed to hammer home the lesson that human behaviour is not dictated by our genes alone, but by the interaction between genes and environment. As Sapolsky admits, this is a cliché, so frequently is it chanted by biologists and, for that matter, geneticists. Yet it hasn't quite got through: the sterile "nature versus nurture" debate drones on, with too many people, according to Sapolsky, coming down in favour of genetic determinism.
One reason, I imagine, that people get carried away by gene gee-whizzery is that it makes for snappier stories than the infinitely more subtle and complicated truth. There is, for example, the story of the single gene mutation that appears to turn a monogamous vole into a promiscuous one; the genes that cause a male fruit fly to secrete poison in his sperm; the male/female genes that slog it out in a pregnant woman's womb....
Sapolsky gives us these and many more intriguing gene factoids, but he also explains the elaborate nature/nurture interactions in which they are embedded. The book is a witty blend of anecdote and analysis - the perfect brickbat to throw at the next person who tries to tell you "it's all in the genes".
This review first appeared in The Daily Mail.
The Intention Experiment by Lynne MacTaggart - Free Press
What's the big idea?
Everything is interconnected in a vast, mysterious force field and every thought is "tangible energy, with the power to transform". Hence we can change the world just by thinking.
Recently this idea has become known, rather grandly, as "cosmic ordering", but you probably know it as "positive thinking" or "mind-over-matter". There are countless books about it but this one is more ambitious than most because it claims to present a "coherent scientific theory" to explain it.
This is brave. Consciousness is known, famously, as the "hard problem" because so far it has defied the understanding of even our greatest minds. McTaggart, however, seems to think she has cracked it. Consciousness is "coherent information" or "ordered energy" - a force that both creates reality and has measurable effects on the material world. In support of her theory she claims a sizeable body of research … shows that thoughts are capable of affecting everything from the simplest machines to the most complex living beings."
What she doesn't say is that an even more sizeable body of research suggests that there is simply nothing to all these claims. When I was researching my own book about consciousness (Consciousness, Weidenfield and Nicolson 2002). I spent months trying to get to the bottom of this contradiction but it proved impossible. I agree with McTaggart that something very strange is going on, but the evidence doesn't prove that it is what she thinks it is.
So what's new?
Much of this book is a reiteration of McTaggart's earlier book The Field . One novelty, though, is that it invites readers to take part in a web-based experiment which the author describes as "the largest mind-over-matter experiment in history". It involves logging on to a website where you are given a precise date and time. When this date and time arrives you stop whatever else you are doing and concentrate for a few moments on altering some event - lowering the temperature in a distant laboratory, for example. The idea is that getting lots of people to beam out the same thought at the same time strengthens its effects.
Similar studies have been carried out for decades, but another one is welcome because research of this kind is rarely supported by established institutions and tends not to attract the grants which more orthodox studies rely on. Anything that helps gather data about the effects - or non-effects - of conscious thought is therefore to be encouraged.
How reader friendly is it?
There's a lot of quasi-scientific terminology and heavy-duty talk about quantum physics but McTaggart is good at explaining complicated phenomena in a clear and lively way. The danger is that her eloquent style will seduce naïve readers into uncritical acceptance of her conclusions.
Boffin-rating
"Straight" boffins will dismiss this book as New Age twaddle but wise ones will keep their mouths shut and their minds open (though not so open that their brains fall out.)
This review first appeared in The Daily Mail.
IQ - the Brilliant Idea that Failed by Stephen Murdoch - Duckworth
What's the big idea?
That IQ tests are bad, bad, bad. They decide the fate of millions of people each year - which school they get into, which job they get, whether they may adopt a child or be allowed entrance to a new country. In some places they are even used to determine whether criminals should live or be executed. Yet the science behind the idea of an "Intelligence Quotient" is dubious and the tests a relic of psychological misconceptions that date back to before the First World War. They have been used for the vilest purposes and have caused immeasurable suffering and unnecessary social divisiveness. "We do not really know what IQ tests tell us about individuals" says Murdoch, "and yet for a century we have relied on them to sort people in circumstances that are frequently life-defining and sometimes fearsomely dangerous". The tests survive only because "the notion that the IQ test is a measure of innate intelligence has worked its way into the general consciousness. It is broadly and unthinkingly accepted as fact, even though it is untrue".
So what's new?
IQ testing has been criticised along these lines for decades so there is nothing particularly new here idea-wise. The book's strength lies in its detailed analysis and intriguing historical detail. Murdoch traces the invention of IQ testing to a small group of psychologists who saw in it a way of gaining social influence, and describes how it flourished due to a combination of "chutzpah, self-promotion and timing". He tells how IQ tests were used as part of the selection process for American immigrants, and by the Nazis to help decide who should be subjected to their infamous sterilisation programme. Then he pulls apart the way that IQ tests are used in education (in the 11-plus and SATs exams, for instance) arguing that they have negligible ability to predict academic achievement and serve only to block worthy individuals from getting a good education.
How reader friendly is it?
Murdoch leavens his prose with personal anecdotes and case studies, and he writes fluently enough (as you would expect of a journalist who has contributed to many of the world's leading newspapers and magazines). If you are interested in the subject of IQ already you will find it fascinating but if not you may find it quite dry.
Boffin-rating
Murdoch has mined his subject deeply and come up with facts aplenty, all of which are no doubt sound. But he tells one side of the story only, so for all its scholarship it is not the definitive account of IQ.
This review first appeared in The Daily Mail.
The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker - Penguin/Allen Lane
When Steven Pinker first appears on stage at a scientific conference you half expect him to grab the mike and start singing. His cascading curls, chiseled jaw and Perma-tan give him the look, famously, of a (now slightly superannuated) pop star. Then he starts speaking, and you become aware of the awesome combination of analytical and imaginative thinking that has earned this Harvard psychologist a place among Time's list of "100 Most Influential People".
Pinker's latest book,"The Stuff of Thought - Language as a Window into Human Nature" is a perfect example of his special skill. By scrutinising seemingly trivial oddities of language, Pinker illuminates fundamental truths about the human mind.
His subject matter - tiny shifts in grammatical construction, for example - seems, at first, unpromising. Why, he asks, do the words "drink from a glass of water" and "drink a glass of water" mean different things even though the action described in both is identical? Why can you say, "I'll send a message to the boarder" or "I'll send the boarder a message" and mean the same thing, but if the message is going to a "border" rather than a "boarder" you can only phrase it the first way? Why is the past "behind" us in some languages, but "in front" of us in others"? Why do we ask absurd questions like "Can you pass the salt?" (as if it might be too heavy to shift). And why, when we swear, do we place the rude words randomly in sentences rather than positioning them, like other words, according to whether they are nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs?
Most of us take language so much for granted that we fail to notice these funny little anomalies or assume they are insignificant. Pinker, however, teases out the deep meanings wrapped within them. This is the Big Idea of "The Stuff of Thought" - that language is not just a way of communicating but a keyhole which reveals the (largely innate) brain mechanisms that force us to see the world in a uniquely human way.
He shows that the circumlocutions we use to issue requests and orders ( "would you mind terribly if I shut that window?") are not just cultural conventions but indicators of our need constantly to negotiate social relationships. Our disregard for grammar when we swear suggests that cursing comes straight from the deeper, older, and more primitive parts of the brain which are unconcerned about niceties of syntax. As for seemingly unimportant curiosities of speech like the border/boarder distinction, Pinker shows that these often reveal deeply embedded intuitions about space, time, causation, intention and agency - ideas that seem so obvious we rarely bother to question them.
When people do things, for instance, we assume the cause of the act is inside them, whereas non-sentient things do things because of external causation. This is why we say "rain dissolved the salt" but not "Judy cried Johnnie", even if Johnnie's tears are as much a direct result of Judy's cruelty as the salt's dissolution is a result of it being rained on. In other words, the notion of freewill is central to our view of the world and declares itself whenever we describe human behaviour.
Such a belief is not necessarily correct, though, any more than are our ideas about time and space.. As Pinker puts it "the foundations of common sense are just the design specs of one of our organs" and science suggests that many of them are wrong. By scrutinizing these built-in concepts we may come to see them as illusions created by our brains rather than a reflection of the real world.. So Pinker is not just offering us insights into our own thought processes - he wants to help us understand universal truths that we are not biologically prone to grasp.
Pinker writes lucidly and elegantly, and leavens the text with scores of perfectly judged anecdotes, jokes, cartoons and illustrations. Given the ambition, scope and 500-odd pages of "The Stuff of Thought", though, you should not expect to romp through it. Give it a month.
This review first appeared in The Daily Mail.
The Human Touch by Michael Frayn - Faber and Faber
What's the big idea?
It's not so much a big idea as a big question. Does the known Universe have some real objective existence, or is it all in our heads?. If we weren't here to observe and describe it would mountains still be big, skies blue, or water wet? Would numbers exist? Would a tree falling in a forest still make a noise……? As the author puts it: "Is the world in one way or another out there, or is it in here?
Michael Frayn is far too modest (and canny) to promise any hitherto unguessed-at solution. Instead he invites us to join him on an "excursion" over this well-charted territory, going "this way and that, without any particular system, wherever a path seems to offer, to get the lie of the land".
It all sounds very leisurely, but if you want to keep up you'll need a clear head and stout walking boots. His excursion is less like a Sunday afternoon ramble than a brain-stretching yomp through some of the most treacherous areas of philosophy.
Frayn starts by examining our view of the Universe (a muddle) then moves on to what we can actually know about it (not much) and how we can know we know (we can't). He looks at scientific laws (dodgy) and the stuff they relate to (weirder the closer you look.) All the while he urges us to ask: are we making all this up, from nothing? Or are we merely discovering it? Then it is on to the thorny issues of Truth, Choice, Morality, Language and Understanding.
Finally, in a neat recursive sweep, reminiscent of his cleverly structured plays and novels, Frayn deposits us back where we started - gazing out at the Universe in various degrees of awe, wonder and confusion.
So what's new?
Far from being new, Frayn acknowledges that what we are dealing with here is the world's oldest mystery - one which may have no solution at all. "In the end" says Frayn, " the world has no form or substance without us to provide them, and you and I have no form or substance without the world to provide them in its turn. We are supporting the globe on our shoulders, like Atlas, and we are standing on the globe that we are supporting...."
How reader friendly is it?
"The Human Touch" is one of those doorstop tomes that Grand Old Men tend to write to cap their glorious careers - the summation of a lifetime's wisdom. Such books can be windy and pompous but Frayn is too good a writer and too sharp a thinker to allow that. Once you get going he keeps you up to speed with clever analogies, witty asides and a direct, conversational style that flatters you into thinking you knew it all along. Those who want to dig deeper are provided with copious notes and references.
Boffin-rating
Frayn plays up his lack of formal expertise, both in science and philosophy, calling himself just a "thoughtful tourist". In fact his previous works - from the intellectual roller-coaster "Copenhagen" to his laugh-out-loud comedies reveal a lifelong engagement with the questions he now confronts head-on in this book. His qualification is the best there is: the possession of an extraordinarily lucid, penetrating, and original mind. Let's hope this is not its final literary product.
This review first appeared in The Daily Mail.