Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Here's a fun, Gladwellian-type read by Jonah Lehrer. The chapter on the French chef Ecoffier and the discovery of the taste sensation of "umami" is especially well done.

Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer

In this technology-driven age, it’s tempting to believe that science can solve every mystery. After all, science has cured countless diseases and even sent humans into space. But as Jonah Lehrer argues in this sparkling debut, science is not the only path to knowledge. In fact, when it comes to understanding the brain, art got there first.
Taking a group of artists — a painter, a poet, a chef, a composer, and a handful of novelists — Lehrer shows how each one discovered an essential truth about the mind that science is only now rediscovering. We learn, for example, how Proust first revealed the fallibility of memory; how George Eliot discovered the brain’s malleability; how the French chef Escoffier discovered umami (the fifth taste); how Cézanne worked out the subtleties of vision; and how Gertrude Stein exposed the deep structure of language — a full half-century before the work of Noam Chomsky and other linguists. It’s the ultimate tale of art trumping science.
More broadly, Lehrer shows that there’s a cost to reducing everything to atoms and acronyms and genes. Measurement is not the same as understanding, and art knows this better than science does. An ingenious blend of biography, criticism, and first-rate science writing, Proust Was a Neuroscientist urges science and art to listen more closely to each other, for willing minds can combine the best of both, to brilliant effect.

Emotions Revealed



It's said people with Autism Spectrum Disorders such as Asperger's have a hard time reading expressions.


I first encountered Paul Ekman in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink (see the link below to read his article). After reading about his life's work, I went out and bought an actual Ekman book:


Emotions Revealed, Second Edition: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life by Paul Ekman

"A tour de force. If you read this book, you'll never look at other people in quite the same way again."--Malcolm Gladwell

Renowned psychologist Paul Ekman explains the roots of our emotions--anger, fear, disgust, sadness, and happiness--and shows how they cascade across our faces, providing clear signals to those who can identify the clues. As featured in Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller Blink, Ekman's Facial Action Coding System offers intense training in recognizing feelings in spouses, children, colleagues, even strangers on the street.

In Emotions Revealed, Ekman distills decades of research into a practical, mind-opening, and life-changing guide to reading the emotions of those around us. He answers such questions as: How does our body signal to others whether we are slightly sad or anguished, peeved or enraged? Can we learn to distinguish between a polite smile and the genuine thing? Can we ever truly control our emotions? Packed with unique exercises and photographs, and a new chapter on emotions and lying that encompasses security and terrorism as well as gut decisions, Emotions Revealed is an indispensable resource for navigating our emotional world.

http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_08_05_a_face.htm

The Emotional Brain by Joseph LeDoux

Where do emotions come from? That's the topic of this in-depth book written by neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux. While not as breezy as the Gladwellian inspired science books of recent years, this is a very thorough look at a complex topic and it details how the research is being done in the lab. I'm a bit more than halfway through it, and I only read a chapter or two at a sitting. This was another one of my "Clearance Section" finds, and it does not disappoint.

"What happens in our brains to make us feel fear, love, hate, anger, joy? Do we control our emotions, or do they control us? Do animals have emotions? How can traumatic experiences in early childhood influence adult behavior, even though we have no conscious memory of them? In The Emotional Brain, Joseph LeDoux investigates the origins of human emotions and explains that many exist as part of complex neural systems that evolved to enable us to survive.

One of the principal researchers profiled in Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence, LeDoux is a leading authority in the field of neural science. In this provocative book, he explores the brain mechanisms underlying our emotions -- mechanisms that are only now being revealed."

Should I Stay or Should I Go?: The Impulse Factor

Thanks to the success of Malcolm Gladwell, there are now scores and scorces of popular psycholgy science books that are fun to read and easy to understand. I'm blazing through this one now. Sometimes I will read two or three of these titles, jumping from one to another if I get bored.

From the ever-popular Amazon, "In his work as research and development director at cutting-edge think tank TalentSmart, Nick Tasler realized that the recent discovery by scientists of a potential-seeking gene could have a remarkable impact on how we understand decision making. Those who have this gene – about one quarter of the population – are endowed with impulsive tendencies that can lead to fast and decisive action or to foolish choices. The cautious majority that Tasler calls risk managers can make carefully considered decisions or become hopelessly lost in the fog of details. Now The Impulse Factor offers a unique online opportunity to analyze their own decision-making style and harness it to improve their everyday lives. With examples from business, psychology, and Tasler’s own research at TalentSmart, the book also vividly illustrates how susceptible we are to the events around us and how our reactions often run contrary to our best interests. By combining his research with real-world examples of extreme decision making, Tasler teaches listeners how to thrive when faced with difficult choices."
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Malcolm Gladwell's Masterworks

Three outstanding popular science books by Malcolm Gladwell, who has spawned a whole style of writing, emulated by so many others.

Of Complexity and Tipping Points: Uncertainty and the “Low Seratonin” Model

Continuing on with another entry in my OCD-themed blogging, with reports from Shadow Syndromes, by John Ratey M.D. and Catherine Johnson, Ph.D., I will now share some of their key points about the complex relationship between the brain and medication (also known as drugs).

As the authors put it, “The first point to absorb as we set about attempting to influence the course of our own biology is that the brain is infinitely complex. It is a widely accepted view among neuroscientists that the brain is the most complex system in the known universe. A quart-sized mass of tissue, the brain contains roughly 100 billion neurons, each and every one of those 100 billion neurons possessing an average of 10,000 links to other neurons. For all practical purposes, the brain is infinite.” Cue the awe-inspiring Carl Sagan voiceover.

Sadly, as usual, it seems there is no sure one-stop cure using a pharmacological magic bullet. It turns out, the oft-cited, simple-to-explain explanation of a “low” serotonin/(neourotransmitter of your choice) level is, as I felt all along in my OCD-rattled brain, actually extraordinarily complex, more complex than I, like you, was told. It seems there are unlucky 13 or more different kinds of serotonin receptors found in animals, while it is still unknown how many more serotonin receptors we humans possess. Whatever the number, each and every one of these receptors exists within each synapse and when a “serotonin-raising” medication hits the synapse, each different serotonin receptor is affected in a different way. Some receptors alter electrical transmission in response to the drug, other receptors alter chemical transmission, and so on.

Continuing with this intellectual buzz-kill of the simple solution, “But the real story of serotonin levels isn’t told by even the individual synapses being affected, because each and every synapse is always affected in turn by the neurons lying ‘downstream.’ ‘Downstream’ neurons are neurons lying past the neuron being treated by the SSRI – the neurons being ‘fed into’ by the neuron responding to the drug. The downstream neuron may feedback into the upstream neuron and actually decrease serotonin release – or the downstream neuron’s feedback may increase serotonin release further – we simply do not know, at least yet (written in 1997).”

But wait -- that’s not all -- you also get this further ungainly wrinkle, “Then you have to take the cascade of enzymes that make up the serotonin molecule into account: these enzymes may be influenced by the feedback loop as well, and the enzymes are in turn affected by ever smaller hormones like peptides and the chemistry that guides them, and we have yet to even mention genes and cell functioning.”

In short, the workings of the serotonin system are unknown. The scientists at Eli Lilly, manufacturer of Prozac, simply do not know what Prozac does to the brain downstream. They know what it does in the synapse; they do not know what the cascade of feedback loops and genetic mechanisms this synaptic change sets off.

A cascade effect is set off.  Any treatments of any kind will produce effects unique to each individual. No doctor, no psychiatrist can predict what affect this pill, or this “talking cure,” will have upon this person’s biology. The clinician can only rely on statistical averages: how many patients with this cluster of issues typically respond to a particular treatment? After that it is simply a matter of trying the treatment and seeing what happens. (Perhaps to soften this unsettling new from OCD’s two fellow travelers, Mr. Uncertainty and Mr. Risk, the authors parenthetically add: In fact, the majority of patients who choose to take up medication do end up experiencing very real and significant improvement. At least half, and probability more, of all patients who consult a psychiatrist will find the help they need). Of course that means that nearly half don’t, adds Mr. Glass Half-Empty, glumly.

A discussion of cascades, non-linear phenomena, complexity, the popular Chaos metaphor of “the butterfly effect,” and self-organizing emergence, and ensues. This is enlivened with illustrations from Malcolm Gladwell’s popular Tipping Point book.

So, the disturbing news is that the science behind the drugs is so complex, that like the weather, it is nigh-impossible to get precise, predictable forecasts about will happen when you take any neurotransmitter-enhancing medication. Minuscule changes at one location can percolate through the system so as to bring about major effects somewhere else.

The hopeful news the authors ask us to take away is that it is possible to have a positive “tipping point” as well as a negative one. It’s not a one-way street like entropy. You might be able to “tip” from the serious classic version of a disorder to a shadow syndrome, which while not perfect, will certainly bring about a welcome higher quality of life. As Mr. Gladwell put it, “it is the nature of nonlinear phenomena that sometimes the most modest of changes can bring about enormous effects.”

The authors’ musings on complexity conclude with, “Thus the notion that things might naturally come together – might naturally, inevitably and suddenly cohere; this is something new under the sun. It is such a novel concept that some complexologists believe a fifth fundamental force (in addition to gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak forces that govern the atom) will be discovered to exist in nature. We are looking to tip up; we are hoping to reach that magic moment when life and love ‘self-organize’ into something splendid. That is the hope.”

Ah yes, uncertainty, risk, exposure, and hope – “Welcome back my OCD friends, to the show that never ends.”