Dawn of the New Everything by Jaron Lanier

Hardcover, 304 pgs, Pub Nov 28th 2017 by Henry Holt and Co., ISBN13: 9781627794091

The ideas in this book are so refreshing, thrilling, amusing, enlightening, and sad that they had me eagerly looking forward to another session with it whenever I got a chance. I found myself fearing what was to come as I read the final chapters. If I say I wish it had turned out differently, it wouldn’t make much difference. I am just so relieved & reassured that such people exist. We share a sensibility. I suppose such people forever be shunted aside by more talky types, louder but not more capable. Anyway, this kind of talent shares a bounty that accrues to all of us.

Everyone knows Lanier was exceptional for his ideas about Virtual Reality. He created, with others, an industry through the force of his imagination. What many may not recognize was that amid the multiple dimensions that made his work so special was his insistence on keeping the humanity—the imperfection, the uncertainty…the godliness, if you will—central in any technological project. It turns out that slightly less capable people could grasp the technology but not the humanity in his work, the humanity being the harder part by orders of magnitude.

It was amusing, hearing such a bright light discuss ‘the scene’ that surrounded his spectacular ideas and work in the 1980s and ‘90s, the people who contributed, the people who brought their wonder and their needs. He gives readers some concept of what VR is, how complicated it is, what it may accomplish, but he never loses sight of the beauty and amazing reality we can enjoy each and every day that is only enhanced by VR. Much will be accomplished by VR in years to come, he is sure, but whether those benefits accrue to all society or merely to a select few may be an open question.

While ethnic diversity is greater now in Silicon Valley than it was when Lanier went there in the 1980s, Lanier fears it has less cognitive diversity. And while the Valley has retained some of its lefty-progressive origins, many younger techies have swung libertarian. Lanier thinks the internet had some of those left-right choices early on its development, when he and John Perry Barlow had a parting of ways about how cyberspace should be organized. It is with some regret that we look back at those earlier arguments and admit that though Barlow “won,” Lanier may have been right.

Lanier was always on the side of a kind of limited freedom, i.e., the freedom to link to and acknowledge where one’s ideas originated and who we pass them to; the freedom not to be anonymous; or dispensing with the notion that ideas and work are “free” to anyone wishing to access it. he acknowledges that there were, even then, “a mythical dimension of masculine success…that [contains] a faint echo of military culture…” Lanier tells us of “a few young technical people, all male, who have done harm to themselves stressing about” the number of alien civilizations and the possibility of a virtual world containing within it other virtual worlds. He suggests the antidote to this kind of circular thinking is to engage in and feel the “luscious texture of actual, real reality.”

In one of his later chapters, Lanier shares Advice for VR Designers and Artists, a list containing the wisdom of years of experimenting and learning. His last point is to remind everyone not to necessarily agree with him or anyone else. “Think for yourself.” This lesson is one which requires many more steps preceding it, so that we know how to do this, and why it is so critical to trust one’s own judgment. There is room for abuse in a virtual system. “The more intense a communication technology is, the more intensely it can be used to lie.”

But what sticks with me about the virtual experience that Lanier describes is how integral the human is to it. It is the interaction with the virtual that is so exciting, not our watching of it. Our senses all come into play, not just and not necessarily ideally, our eyes. When asked if VR ought to be accomplished instead by direct brain stimulation, bypassing the senses, Lanier’s answer illuminates the nature of VR:

“Remember, the eyes aren’t USB cameras plugged into a Mr. Potato Head brain; they are portals on a spy submarine exploring an unknown universe. Exploration is perception.”

If that quote doesn’t compute by reading it in the middle of a review, pick up the book. By the time he comes to it, it may just be the light you needed to see further into the meaning of technology.

Lanier is not technical in this book. He knows he would lose most of us quickly. He talks instead about his own upbringing: you do not want to miss his personal history growing up in New Mexico and his infamous Dodge Dart. He talks also about going east (MIT, Columbia) and returning west (USC, Stanford), finding people to work with and inspiring others. He shares plenty of great stories and personal observations about some well-known figures in technology and music, and he divulges the devastating story of his first marriage and subsequent divorce. He talks about limerence, and how the horrible marriage might have been worth it simply because he understood something new about the world that otherwise he may not have known.

All I know is that this was a truly generous and spectacular sharing of the early days of VR. It was endlessly engaging, informative, and full of worldly wisdom from someone who has just about seen it all. I am so grateful. This was easily the most intellectually exciting and enjoyable read I've read this year, a perfect summer read.

Here is a link to a conversation with Jaron Lanier conducted by Ezra Klein for his podcast The Ezra Klein Show, available on iTunes or Stitcher.

Tweet

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opioid Epidemic by Sam Quinones

Hardcover, 384 pgs, Pub Apr 21st 2015 by Bloomsbury Press (first published April 15th 2015), ISBN13: 9781620402504, Lit Awards: PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Nominee for Shortlist (2017), Los Angeles Times Book Prize Nominee for Current Interest (2015), National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction (2015)

The spectacular public service reporting Sam Quinones does in this nonfiction is so detailed and many-faceted that it left me feeling a little voyeuristic, not having been visited by the scourge of opioid addiction myself. Good lord, I kept thinking, so this is what we are dealing with. I knew something was different, I just didn’t have any conception of the size, scope, method, and means of this problem.

Quinones starts his story in the early 1980s when the first ranchero Xalisco marketers came up from Mexico with an innovative method for just-in-time drive-by selling of drugs to rich white kids in the suburbs. They explicitly avoided cities and black people because they admitted they were afraid of them, their violence and their gang activity. Besides, the thinking went, blacks never had any money. They’d just as soon steal from a dealer as pay him. The white kids had money and wanted convenience above all.

At almost the same time, and a cultural habitat away from small-time drug dealers of black tar heroin from Mexico, a drug company owned by the Sackler medical empire released an opiate derivative in pill form meant to alleviate pain. Early on, it is possible that creators, marketers, and prescribers of this plague did not know what they had unleashed. But within a couple of years, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that great numbers of people within and without the company sold the product in full knowledge of its wicked potency and addictive properties.

Quinones has been researching and reporting on this topic for a couple of decades, and lived in Mexico for ten years, observing the supply-side. Before having a comprehensive understanding of the subject, Quinones thought the heroin problem began with U.S. demand for drugs. After researching the situation in the heartland United States, he has decided that our problem now with heroin and fentanyl overdoses was paradoxically caused by a huge supply of opioid pills, prescribed by doctors in legal clinics, and condoned at every level of society and government in our country.

The story Quinones shares is un-put-down-able and truly remarkable, particularly his discussion of the marketing techniques for black tar heroin used by the small farmer-seller systems first set up by residents of Xalisco. Their method of growing-packaging-selling expansion into the heartland of America should make us sit up and pay attention. Ground zero for the meltdown of middle America is identified by Quinones as Portsmouth, Ohio, a middle class town at the center of a web of major cities like Cincinnati, Cleveland, Louisville, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh. The first known vector of the opioid infection was an unscrupulous doctor who overprescribed pills, knowing they were addicting his patients. Aided by ordinary well-meaning doctors who listened to marketing spiels by the drug makers, and who believed the pills to be non-addictive, the infection spread rapidly. Quinones tells the tale as it unfolded, involving Medicaid scams and cross-state purchases and sales.

What Quinones tells us gives us lessons for many other supply-side problems (marijuana? guns?) we may face in our society, now or in the future. When asked in an interview why restrictions on Class A prescription pills or opiates of any sort would produce the better outcomes, Quinones points out that when prohibited liquor was once again allowed to be sold openly, it was classified as to strength and sold differently. He warns that we are rushing to sales of marijuana with potency levels unknown fifty years ago and may wish we’d instituted some restrictions or controls before it becomes socially acceptable.

This nonfiction is dispassionate enough to allow us time to adjust our thinking around the problem of young people—entire families, really—losing their place in a productive society, with almost no way out. Now, with the recognition of the problem being forced upon our politicians, teachers, medical personnel, and law-enforcement officers, some changes are being instituted which may help after the fact of addiction, never a good time to try and solve a problem. With discussion and buy-in by ordinary citizens it may be possible to attack this problem before it begins.

There are at least seven interviews with Quinones free on Soundcloud, ranging in length from 15 minutes or so to an hour and a half. You have to hear some of these stories. It's mind-blowing. I listened to audio version, very ably read by Neil Hellegers, and produced by Bloomsbury. It is a must-read, must-listen.



Tweet

What It's Like to Be a Dog: And Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience by Gregory Berns

Hardcover, 320 pgs, Pub Sept 5th 2017 by Basic Books, ISBN13: 9780465096244

Berns uses what he’s learned about human cognition and emotion in the title of this book, which promises insights into the understanding of the dog brain. To be fair, the book does discuss experiments and findings involving what happens in a dog’s brain while commands are given and associations are made. But the book goes far beyond the dog to discuss cognition and sentience in animals of many kinds, principally by using evidence from MRI and fMRI brain scans. It is a fascinating look at the study of neuroscience on animals.

Despite the density of terms required to study neuroscience, Berns guides us easily through the basics, allowing us to understand the principal goal of their studies on dogs: to determine how dogs process information. I will admit to a degree of awe to think they could manage to get a dog to voluntarily crouch within a noisy MRI machine and stay immoveable long enough to be scanned while the scientists perform tests. Georgia dog trainer Mark Spivak was given a shout-out at the end of this book for his insights and indefatigable efforts to this end.

The decades-long work of Peter Cook of the pinniped labs in Santa Cruz, CA is highlighted for several chapters beginning with “Seizing Sea Lions.” Berns and Cook worked together to determine the effects of domoic acid toxicity on normal patterns of connectivity in the brains of dead sea lions. Domoic toxicity caused by agricultural runoff was determined to be the cause of a wave of malnourished sea lion strandings during El Niño years.

After the sea lions come dolphins, a discussion of how echolocation manifests in the brain, and some indication how dolphin brains resemble and differ from other mammals. Then back to dogs, where studies have shown a real possibility that rats and dogs may experience regret: regret for choices that do not turn out as desirable as anticipated. Berns acknowledges it is difficult to imagine regret in a rat, but he suggests that our word for it does not limit the experience of the emotion to those who understand the word. From here he moves from “what do words mean to animals”?

The detail in his discussion of dog training with words and visual cues may lead other scientists to suggest tweaks that may lead to even greater understanding of the emotional responses of animals. Enough work has been done now on a variety of mammals (and even crows!) to show emotions are a part of their brain activity and daily life. But what appeared to be almost a failure of dogs to recognize words led to a new insight:

“It may be that in a dog’s semantic space, actions and things are very close, which would explain why it was so difficult to teach the dogs the names of things. The semantic representation for ‘squirrel’ might be to ‘chase and kill,’ while ‘ball’ becomes ‘chase and retrieve.’…Human represent the world with nouns…it might require a shift in perspective—in this case, from a noun-based worldview to one based in action…In an action-based worldview, everything would be transactional.”

In one of the final chapters, called “A Death in Tasmania,” Berns tries something completely different. He writes of his experience traveling to Australia to view the habitat and scan the brain of an Tasmanian Tiger, a marsupial mammal species thought to be extinct. As an experience and as a piece of research, it is as different from his earlier work as studying the brains of placental mammals and marsupial mammals, two animals who evolved differently over millennia. Berns uses narrative nonfiction techniques to situate us visually, historically, physically in “one of the last great wildernesses on Earth…utterly unique and worthy of protection.”

The chapter on Tasmania really highlighted Berns’ special skills as a scientist—his ability to look beyond the lab to the wider meanings of neuroscience “for the rest of us,” as he emphasized in his final chapter on the “Dog Lab.” Working for so long on understanding the extent of animal cognition, consciousness, sentience, or self-awareness has led him to animal advocacy, if only for our own selfish reasons. “We, Homo sapiens, might soon be an animal in the eyes of our successors…” given our tinkering and experimentation with the human genome. One day unmodified humans may be considered undesirable, inferior.

Berns has skill in involving us, allowing us to follow his work. He would like to map the brains of the Earth’s megafauna with the best science and equipment available today.

“The WWF estimates that two-thirds of many species’ populations maybe gone by 2020. Apart from the ecological catastrophe, scientific opportunities may be lost forever. It is imperative that we begin the archival process for all species, and especially for megafauna…”

Is 2020 a misprint? I surely hope so.



You can buy this book here: Tweet

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky

Hardcover, 790 pages Pub May 2nd 2017 by Penguin Press ISBN13: 9781594205071

Whatever your discipline of study, this book has some degree of relevance, considering as it does human biology. I wish to convey that this book is aspirational for everyone, even the author himself. He readily admits to gaps in his/our knowledge about human biology, but he tries to give us, in this mighty interdisciplinary work synthesizing a lifetime of observation and thought, the current state of knowledge and points to areas for further study.

Don’t be intimidated by its size or erudition. The author is amazing but he has always been approachable. Just flip through, stopping where something catches your eye. You will find yourself absorbed, amazed, provoked. Notice the chapter headings: the last several chapters are about humans doing the right thing…or not. The first several chapters reference those later chapters, showing how what he is telling us is related.

What we do and how we act is related to our biology..all of it…like neurobiology, endocrinology, genetics, the relevance of which he attempts to be very careful and specific about explaining. He goes back in time, bringing in examples from our ancient history to show how things have changed and how culturally conditioned our reactions and responses are to stimuli. Each chapter ends with a summary, and the book ends with insights he has developed over years of study.

Skim these to see if there is something more you wish to pursue. The studies he discusses in each section are referenced by authors focusing on different aspects of human knowledge and you may already be familiar with them. The concepts explored underpin much of what we understand about human behavior and morality. The work of Steven Pinker, cognitive scientist and currently professor of psychology at Harvard, is described by Sapolsky as “monumental” and is given its own critique late in this book.

Sapolsky is not arrogant. He writes this book not to show off his knowledge, but to share his knowledge, which is why he tries to make it as readable as possible without dumbing it down. It is a work to be grateful for. One of the more moving moments in the work comes near the end, after over 600 pages of science and Sapolsky is talking about doing the right thing. He introduces us to Anglican cleric John Newton, born in 1725.

Newton composed the hymn “Amazing Grace” but that is not what Sapolsky wants to tell us. Newton is remembered as an abolitionist, mentor to William Wilberforce who worked through parliament to outlaw slavery in the British Isles. But he didn’t start out that way. Read the story for yourself--plan to read the whole back-end of the book because you won’t be able to stop with Newton—about individuals, ordinary individuals making a difference and doing the right thing.

Sapolsky may be a great scientist, but he is great writer and a great teacher. He makes us think and challenge our own assumptions. He tries to answer questions as they arise and he does not intentionally obfuscate. He does not dodge and only occasionally dismisses, and only then when an argument falls of its own weight.

If you wish you had the background to soak up everything he says but do not, go for one of his earlier books which he wrote as a younger man, less burdened by all he has studied. They display his trademark intelligence and humor and are as much fun as a barrel of monkeys book on baboons.



You can buy this book here: Tweet

Nicotine by Gregor Hens, translated by Jen Calleja

Paperback, 157 pages Pub January 10th 2017 by Other Press; November 4th 2015 by Fitzcarraldo Editions (first published March 3rd 2011) Orig Title Nikotin ISBN 1910695076 (ISBN13: 9781910695074)

The story Hens tells of his struggle with nicotine addiction sometimes makes us laugh, though of course addiction is anything but funny. And he had it bad, real bad. The time he spends detailing his addiction is time he still indulges, for a little while, his obsession with nicotine, a drug which Will Self tells us in the Introduction is like taking an upper and downer at the same time:

"The first few drags after a period of abstinence induced head spin and dry mouth, while a drowsy numbness crept over my extremities. Soon enough this narcotics phase was succeeded by excitation: spit balled in my mouth, my palms itched, my heartbeat accelerated—in my own small and unsophisticated way, staring at the algal scurf on the duck pond, I believed I could achieve something."

Maybe only people that know what he is talking about can laugh at that. But Hens picks up where Self leaves off, his short history of relapses an opportunity to forgive himself and to try to understand what happened physically and psychologically—nicotine is psychoactive—to cause and stoke his need. And to laugh in the face of his addiction is a kind of fierce refusal to submit: "I’ll write my way out of my addiction by telling its story."

Addiction stories tell us something about humans, plot points on a neuroscience graph. Mikhail Bulgakov wrote a moving monograph of a country doctor suffering from morphine addiction. And I will never forget reading Carolyn Knapp describe her addiction to alcohol, how just the sound of ice against glass would calm her down, as she pictured in her mind a glass, clouded with cold and beaded with sweat. It cheered her up, and took away brain strain. Hens’ addiction was something like that: he enjoyed running into groups of smokers huddled in doorways, imagining that they are smoking on his behalf, for his inner contentment. Sometimes he even nodded to them, until he realized they might think him predatory or odd.

There was a time when everyone seemed to smoke. Hens reminds us what it was like growing up with parents who smoked, in his case chain-smoked in a closed vehicle for hours while he and his brothers clustered in the back seat, wreathed in a dense, noxious cloud. When he reached his destination, he and his brothers would stumble, wooly-headed and thirsty, from the car, exhausted from their journey. Certainly his aunt, who was paid a monthly pension in cigarettes in lieu of cash but who smoked only occasionally, might have had something to do with his parents’, and subsequently his own, cigarette habit.

But his recognition that “my personality is a smoker’s personality” must have come from his early family life, when smoking in secret was a way to both defy his parents and earn their love. How confusing the roots of addiction become when examined closely, and how, ultimately, irrelevant. Whatever the reason, he had to break his love affair with tobacco. He was a connoisseur; tobacco was a hobby, a kind of art, something that gave him pleasure but which became as necessary as eating. He was obsessed, addicted, planning his consumption. His life, his passion for sports, and his lover were suffering.

Every person dealing with addiction experiences it in their own way, and Hens recalls for us several others writers who have explicitly chronicled their nicotine habits, among them Italo Svevo, for whom the last cigarette, which Hens begins to familiarly call “LC,” was always remembered with great intensity and affection, while the relapse cigarette was always the one Hens himself craved: “…the rush of relapsing is a very special gift… a kind of investment that would be paid back five or ten times over.”

Hens recalls a heavy smoker friend of his who could get on an airplane for a flight of eight or more hours and suffer nary a twinge of desire for the length of the flight: “There’s no point in thinking about something that’s forbidden, he says.” That friend would do well in America, I think, while Hens himself, once forbidden to smoke, can think of nothing else.

Apparently studies done on rats at Duke University by Theodore Slotkin

"confirm that the consumption of nicotine during adolescence leads to permanent neurological and functional changes that cannot be reversed. The changed structures are still detectable even after the (addictive) behavior has been stopped, an effect that is especially pronounced in male animals."

Hens is philosophical about this, unable to say what he could have done even had he known as an adolescent. He reminds us every couple of paragraphs that he no longer smokes. It is a thought, a chant, a wish, a dream, an aspiration. It is a fact.

The book has a strangely old-fashioned feel, perhaps because smoking is so long out of fashion now in America, and because of an anecdote about Hens spending a summer in Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong, “filling a pile of notebooks...in just my underpants…which never became the great postcolonial novel I had intended…” Can Chungking Mansions still exist? But Hens’ writing is a little addictive, too, as when he veers delightfully off topic several times, once to relate a cycling accident which involved him waking up, bandaged, in the “reanimation” department of a strange hospital. It freaked him out, understandably.

For anyone who has ever considered writing about a psychological obstacle, addiction, or other obsession, to rid oneself of it, this is a fine example of how one man has managed to make his life larger, richer, and more meaningful than his scourge.

Two terrific reviews of this title have recently been published, one in The New Yorker, and one in the New York Times.





You can buy this book here: Tweet

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

Hardcover, 228 pages Published January 12th 2016 by Random House

What makes human life meaningful? Kalanithi, a thirty-six year old neurosurgeon, tried to locate the nexus of language between science and philosophy to answer the question. “Literature provide[s] the best account of a life of the mind, illuminates another’s experience, and provides the richest material for moral reflection.” There is messiness and weight in real human life that is not accounted for by science, says Kalanithi. Science and analytics (and atheism) cannot encompass all the mystery of human life. He gives the best argument I have heard for religious faith, suggesting that no one human has any answers because each individual has only piece of the puzzle. It is only in human connection that we can start to put the pieces together, making sense of the world. “Human knowledge grows in the relationships we form between each other and the world.”

Science, created by human hands to make sense of the world, cannot contain the world. It doesn’t account for those things that make literature, and life, so compelling and so meaningful: “hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue…sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness…justice...goodness…mercy.” Questions without answers. Pieces of a puzzle.

Kalanithi died of lung cancer shortly after writing these words. But he strove every day, in his work, in his studies, in his family and friends, to find meaning in life. He thought it might reside in words. Language. As a neurosurgeon he was taught, and he believed, that if a person lost the capacity to communicate--to speak or to understand language—their life became no life at all. He was a student of literature besides being a neurosurgeon, and in language was meaning.

This memoir is Kalanithi’s attempt at connection. The Foreword is written by a Dr. Abraham Verghese, author of the unique and unforgettable novel about medicine and Africa, Cutting for Stone. The Epilogue is written by his wife, Lucy Kalanithi, also a doctor. Their words fore and aft add heft and a kind of imprimatur: this man really existed and, yes, he was as thoughtful as he appears. His life had meaning.

Kalanithi changed my mind about something, and showed up a deficit, a smallness in my own thinking. I have always been suspicious of people who spend their lives in school, even though they might be concurrently working, piling up more and more degrees. Anybody can do that, I thought. Kalanithi completed a Bachelor's in English literature and human biology, a Master's in English literature, a degree from Cambridge in the history and philosophy of science and medicine, a medical degree with neuroscience and neurosurgery specializations. He was in his mid-thirties when he finally finished. And then he died. That last year he wrote this book and he managed to show me that, if one is focused and serious and seeks the critical nexus between life and death, one may begin to perceive the outlines of a moral philosophy that might help answer the large questions. We only have a lifetime to find meaning, and sometimes that lifetime is short.

When Kalanithi talks of his 8-month old daughter shortly before his death, how she is all future and he is all past, we see what he sees: that their circles just touch, but don’t significantly overlap. She will never know him. This has the poignancy, truth, messiness, love, and tragedy of literature. Of life.

I listened to the audio of this book, read by Sunil Malhotra and Cassandra Campbell. I have encountered Malhotra before and he is one of the best narrators in my experience. His pacing is perfect and he makes the reading very easy to follow. I ended up buying the hardcover because the book was so meaningful for me and because it is easy to pass around.

“One key to managing a terminal illness is to be deeply in love, vulnerable, kind, generous, grateful.” –Lucy Kalanithi

You can buy this book here: Tweet

Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer

Lehrer comes at this topic with a goal: to see what we can and should be doing to improve the innovation successes in the United States. He tries to explain moments of inspiration and examples of ongoing innovation and uses anecdotes to illustrate. He has an easy style, tackles a very big subject, and comes at it from many angles. It’s interesting. Best of all, his work can be discussed, refuted, and improved upon. That’s where he was leading us all along.

There is something very sexy and energizing about the topic itself. We all like to think of a moment or two when we had a creative breakthrough. Some people have a lot more of them than others. Some actually take their moments to the bank. What does it take, and do we have it?

I grew up in a time when it seemed prudent to be cautious about talking about one’s great ideas. This book says that in fact, we’d do better to share our ideas as much as possible, since interactions improve the product and/or chance of success. Our great idea might lead someone else to make the breakthrough product or service, but hopefully our interactions with others will fine tune our idea to better serve its purpose.

Lehrer’s main point is that interactions and collaboration are essential to a flowering of inspiration and innovation. Companies that force interaction by their layout, or studies collaborated by several authors in frequent face-to-face interactions, intensify the creative atmosphere and may more often develop a product that will be widely accepted. On a larger scale, cities force face-to-face interactions among all kinds of people we wouldn’t ordinarily run into in our daily routines, and thus foster a creative atmosphere that cannot be replicated.

Lehrer takes a stab at a subject bound to create some controversy. He posits that Shakespeare was a great playwright, but his particular genius was only possible at the time when he wrote: playwriting was flourishing, and there was much Shakespeare learned (and stole) from his contemporaries and from enthusiastic audiences. But Shakespeare usually improved upon the ideas he appropriated. From here Lehrer makes a case that copyright laws in the U.S. should be loosened so that people can improve upon out-of-date patents or patents that slightly missed their target audiences.

Finally, he deals with failure. Every creative person fails. It’s part of the process. If eighty percent of success is just showing up, the rest is perseverance. “Art is work” and breakthroughs often come when we give our brains a rest from rigor and give it time to process all it has taken in. The rigor is first, the idea second, the solution last. But in the end, there may still be a little bit of magic.


You can buy this book here: Tweet

The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary by Andrew Westoll

Years ago I lived a long time in a populous third-world country. I remember saying to a friend living in the U.S. that a focus on animal rights seemed a distraction in view of human living conditions around the globe. She gave me a look I can still see to this day and have thought about many times since. "Why are we more important than every other living species?" and "What would our lives be like without other species?" she could have asked. There is no doubt in my mind that we must be more mindful of species living on the planet around us and treat each with great care and respect. That is also the theme of this fine documentary about research chimps living out their final days on a farm in Canada.

Westoll was a scientist first, but changed his focus to writing later in his career. He urges us to look at the evidence and acknowledge that we have a duty to restrict testing of animals in the name of science. And he urges us to insist Congress pass the Great Ape Protection Act (GAPA) which has been on the roster for discussion and passage for years now. Once again we lag behind other Western nations who long ago restricted the use of primates for research. Apparently studies using primates have determined that primates are sufficiently different from humans as not to be of great use in providing useful information for medical use. But the studies continue, Westoll suggests, perhaps because they are so lucrative to the grantees receiving federal monies.

In the meantime, social animals of great intelligence and emotional range are subjected to lives of captivity and the cruelties of isolation; are introduced to disease and treated with disregard. This story tells us mostly of what it is like to live with the animals now, their research days behind them (several were smuggled out of research facilities by sympathetic caregiver scientists). One is struck anew how little we know, and how barbaric we seem. Surely the rights demanded by groups of the disenfranchized over the years should have taught us how cruel and thoughtless we seemed before finally recognizing the rights of different groups (the poor, women, blacks). This is not a screed, nor a diatribe. It is a man reflecting on meeting some unusual characters who have a history, and with our help, a future.

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer

Fascinating. The introduction has this author in a flight simulator in Canada. The first chapter discusses Tom Brady of the Patriots making a Superbowl decision. Lehrer goes on to discuss the problems one man had making decisions after the "emotional" portion of his brain was impaired.

While some of the examples Lehrer chooses to illuminate his thesis are familiar from other books on psychology and neuroscience, many are new and absorbing. I came away with insights on how we make decisions under stress, and how psychology experiments are devised to test decision-making.

Lehrer discusses his work: Jonah Lehrer at Powell's.