Why Choose This Book? How We Make Decisions by Read Montague. Dutton, 2006 ($24.95)
Your brain is a highly efficient choosing machine, a biological computer designed by evolution to make the best possible choices using the least possible resources.
If you doubt it, just touch the top of your head. The fact that it is only warm and not hot, like the processor in your desktop computer, is testament to your brain’s efficiency. And that we are alive at all is evidence that the choices our brains make are pretty good ones. Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist Read Montague shows how this need for efficient choice has shaped the way our brains work.
Brains—and the organisms they guide—have to make choices that maximize the chances of survival in a harsh environment. And they have to do it with only a fraction of the energy from whatever food the organism can scrounge up that day.
Montague spends most of the book detailing the clever ways the brain has discovered to make effi cient choices, including computing slowly and imprecisely to save energy. Our brains not only need to compute the best available choice (fight or run, hunt or hide); they also need to assign a value to each of those choices—and to the very computations themselves—to avoid wasting energy on computations that would not enhance our likelihood of survival.
He also shows how the reward/pleasure system of the brain, mediated by the neurotransmitter dopamine, is used to critique our mental models of reality. When things go as expected, our background dopamine levels, along with our model of reality, stay the same. Rewards that are bigger or smaller than expected result in more or less dopamine being released and also cause the current model to be revised.
What about our sense of self? It is a simulation, a model we make of ourselves, useful for calculating what “we” should do in a given situation.
But Montague is not reductionist. He thinks that we are more than just the sum of these computations. He says that it is our ability to question our brains’ automatic valuations that gives us true agency, a true self. Without that ability, we would be mere automatons.
On the broader points, Montague does not always convince—for instance, is the “self” that overrides the brain’s valuations merely the result of other valuations? Nevertheless, he has written a fascinating book that answers many interesting questions and raises even more. —Kurt Kleiner
The Downside of Positive Thinking
Never Saw It Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst by Karen A. Cerulo. University of Chicago Press, 2006 ($73)
NASA and the FBI, Karen A. Cerulo believes, were looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. Cerulo, a sociologist at Rutgers University, says it is human nature to look on the sunny side of life and that culture reinforces our optimism. We catalogue the strongest athletes, the most beautiful people, the greatest bargain, but don’t work to identify the abysmal. As a result, she believes we have a blind spot for worst-case scenarios. She says this explains why even experts often pay little attention to warnings of impending disaster, whether it is the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle or the terror attacks of 9/11.
She coins a name for our lopsided view of reality: “positive asymmetry”—we emphasize the best and overlook the worst. She points out that a single “best” hotel chain emerges in Consumer Reports surveys, whereas less popular brands are lumped at the bottom without a “worst.” And books for expecting parents spend far more space on naming baby than on the possibility of stillbirths or birth defects.
Not every facet of American life is dominated by positive asymmetry, Cerulo admits, and she highlights two fields as counterexamples: medicine and computers. Your doctor doesn’t admire your rosy cheeks—she is looking for high blood pressure. And most computer technicians are hired to look for software bugs and expect crashes. Cerulo gives these professionally pessimistic outlooks credit for avoiding two potential crises: the SARS outbreak in Asia that might have become an epidemic; and the Y2K problem, which might have disabled computers at the turn of the millennium.
Ideally, Cerulo maintains, we should strive for balance, keeping the best and worst clearly in sight. If we heed her advice, it is hard to avoid the weakest link in Cerulo’s argument: in some cases, there is no purpose in pursuing the worst. Who is eager to know the worst baseball pitcher, the ugliest person or the nastiest hotel? And will readers buy magazines that aim to review as many bad books as good ones? —Jonathan Beard
A Lab of Her Own
Why Aren’t More Women in Science? Top Researchers Debate the Evidence edited by Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams. American Psychological Association, 2006 ($59.95)
Two years ago then Harvard University president Lawrence Summers set off a firestorm of controversy when he remarked that innate differences between women and men may explain why fewer women succeed at the highest levels of science and math. But the debate following his speech has been “overwhelmingly underinformed by scientific evidence,” lament Cornell University psychologists Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams. “The time for moving beyond slogans and rallying cries seems overdue.”
What solid scientific evidence do we have that could explain why the gender divide at high-end scientific professions is still gaping wide? “Is the lack of women in these fields a consequence of less ability—or simply less interest? Are there innate differences in some kinds of ability that explain the unsettling statistics, or is culture to blame?” To answer those questions, Ceci and Williams asked top researchers in the field to analyze the topic solely on the basis of “robust, empirical evidence.”
The resulting 15 essays present a diverse range of views. The essayists analyze scientific evidence on the topic ranging from biologically based gender differences to a variety of social factors. Besides the often discussed aspects, such as gender stereotypes that result in discrimination or the incompatibility of motherhood and high-powered careers, we also learn about lesser-known factors.
Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck, for example, presents evidence that highly intelligent girls often do not cope as well with setbacks as their male peers. Melissa Hines, a psychologist at City University London, argues that the notion of innate gender differences, even if incorrect, could be a self-fulfilling prophecy because expectation and beliefs influence brain and behavior.
The essays show that the issue is too complex to be explained with just one answer. Complicating the problem is the fact that the different essayists interpret similar data in different ways. For example, Doreen Kimura of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia translates average sex differences in math and science test performances into strong evidence that innate talent differences do exist between boys and girls and are partially to blame for the underrepresentation of women in science and math. Virginia Valian of Hunter College, City University of New York, however, considers sex differences in test performances insignifi cant because they are minute compared with cross-national differences. Females from some countries outperform American males.
Although the book leaves readers well prepared to participate in a debate on the topic, it does not provide an answer to the question it poses. Ceci and Williams conclude: “We challenge you to decide for yourselves: Why aren’t more women in science?” —Nicole Branan
Suffer the Little Children
For many of the children described in this compelling book, bad things come in twos. The first blow for each child is a traumatic event—the death of a loved one, sexual assault, or an early environment deprived of love and stimulation.
The next wave of insults consists of botched attempts to heal them. Blood-spattered children who witnessed the murder of their parents are left to recover on their own. The suspected victims of a satanic cult are forced to confess by having knuckles driven painfully into their ribs, part of a bizarre treatment known as “holding therapy.”
When psychiatrist Bruce D. Perry first entered this world of damaged children, he did not have anything better to offer them. But he soon started to see connections between the broken minds of these youngsters and what he and other neuroscientists were learning about the ways stress could wreak havoc on the developing brains of laboratory animals. With his co-author, journalist Maia Szalavitz, Perry tells the story of how his team used these insights to develop new treatments and founded the Child Trauma Academy in Houston (www.childtrauma.org) to further that research.
Physiological effects of childhood trauma, Perry found, could be severe. The boy referred to in the book’s title, who for most of his six years was locked in a cage, had a brain so damaged that doctors had diagnosed him as having a birth defect. His “brain looked like that of someone with advanced Alzheimer’s disease; his head circumference was so small that he was below the second percentile for children his age.” Studies by Perry’s group and others have found similar damage in children raised without affection or stimulation.
Perry’s highly effective therapy starts by understanding at what point in brain development the child experienced neglect or abuse. Then he tailors treatment to safely stimulate the affected brain areas. Once those regions show a positive response, therapists move on to the second brain region harmed and so on, an approach dubbed “neurosequential.” Children who were never held or rocked as infants, for example, may get massage and music therapy.
These tools may seem modest, given some of the abuse and neglect these children have suffered. And Perry admits that the technique does not always work. Unfortunately, some experiences missed during brain development can never really be fully repaired. As he says of one mother and daughter who were never able to form loving attachments as infants, they “still bear scars from their early childhoods…. Like people who learn a foreign language late in life, Virginia and Laura will never speak the language of love without an accent.” —Phil Cohen
