by David J. Linden
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Product Description
You've probably seen it before: a human brain dramatically lit from the side, the camera circling it like a helicopter shot of Stonehenge, and a modulated baritone voice exalting the brain's elegant design in reverent tones. To which this book says: Pure nonsense. In a work at once deeply learned and wonderfully accessible, the neuroscientist David Linden counters the widespread assumption that the brain is a paragon of design--and in its place gives us a compelling explanation of how the brain's serendipitous evolution has resulted in nothing short of our humanity. A guide to the strange and often illogical world of neural function, The Accidental Mind shows how the brain is not an optimized, general-purpose problem-solving machine, but rather a weird agglomeration of ad-hoc solutions that have been piled on through millions of years of evolutionary history. Moreover, Linden tells us how the constraints of evolved brain design have ultimately led to almost every transcendent human foible: our long childhoods, our extensive memory capacity, our search for love and long-term relationships, our need to create compelling narrative, and, ultimately, the universal cultural impulse to create both religious and scientific explanations. With forays into evolutionary biology, this analysis of mental function answers some of our most common questions about how we've come to be who we are. (20070601)
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 Clearly written, but not provocative, 2008-11-26
The "Accidental Mind" is really a series of essays on different subjects of interest to Linden. He makes the point in two chapters that evolution does not produce optimal solutions, just good ones, since evolution proceeds by building on what already exists rather than redesigning from scratch. This is well known. All the essays relate to the brain, and while some get into biochemical details, others do not and are easy to read. Linden is a well informed researcher and writes very clearly, even in the chapters which are more detailed. He is also careful to distinguish what is known, theorized and unknown.
Here are a few of the things which were new to me. The firing of most neurons is probabilistic, so that reaching an excitatory threshold is not guaranteed to result in the neuron firing (Interestingly, several modern mathematical optimization algorithms have copied this probabilistic feature). Genes apparently influence personality more than they do intelligence (I assumed it was the other way around). Neuron firing can influence gene expression. There is a distinct separation of sensory and emotional pathways. Prozac and similar drugs impede neurotransmitter transporters, thereby causing the neurotransmitters to remain in the synapses longer.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Messy Sometimes But Important Summary of Scientific Basis of Psychology, 2008-10-14
Because the human brain has evolved over millions of years, evolving to meet the particular and immediate challenges of its age the brain is redundant, clunky, and inefficient. It has two auditory and visual systems, modern ones tacked onto ancient ones. Neurons, the basic processors of thought, travel across leaky and slow conduits, and they fail to spark 70 percent of the time.
To compensate the brain has developed two main strategies. It compensates for its inefficiency with sheer quantity (billions of neurons), and instead of allowing genes to imprint everything about it the brain relies partly on external stimuli to grow. The brain dedicates much of itself to retaining these external stimuli, which then become memories in our system. For these millions of memories to become useful building blocks of our individuality we transform these memories into narratives and store them according to our emotional response to them -- something that is best done while sleeping, and thus we dream.
The brain must fit through the uterus so a baby's brain is very immature, and indeed the process of childhood is long and extensive, and requires co-operation between mother and father -- demands that are unique to humans in the animal kingdom. And to remedy this evolution has given us the unique human trait of love, which permits for the long-term relationships necessary to raise a child into adulthood.
That is a synopsis of Professor David Linden's book "The Accidental Mind," and this synopsis comes from a chart on page 244 of the 254-page book. Considering that David Linden relies a lot on biochemistry to make his arguments and many of his arguments are sophisticated anyway this synopsis should have come at the very beginning.
Indeed, the organization of the book is a very curious thing, and seems like what Professor Linden says about the brain: it looks like it was designed well but when you look closer it's mess.
The first five chapters are well-constructed, and advance methodically and meticulously the author's main argument: that the brain is a kludge, something that doesn't make any sense from a design and engineering perspective but somehow manages to work and adapt to new challenges anyway. What's particularly helpful in these chapters is the short summary at the end plus an explanation of how each chapter builds on each other. Then the book loses its linear narrative, and the following chapters on love and sex, sleeping and dreaming, and believing in God all seem like independent magazine articles.
But the book's strengths more than compensate for its main weakness of organization. It is a crisply-written, well-argued book that summarizes the current scientific basis behind psychology. It tells us that while we know of the existence of mirror neurons (which allow for empathy) in chimpanzees scientists, contrary to popular perception, have yet located them in humans. More important, there's really no scientific basis behind the zeal to educate young children because that's the best time to educate them. Scientists know that deprivation and poverty will impair young children's mental development but Professor Linden wonders if external stimuli to promote learning are like vitamins: you need a certain dosage but too much won't do you any good.
Most important Professor Linden reminds us that there's so much more that we don't know about the human brain, and what we actually do know is only a small fraction. Thus, it's a very important companion to popular authors such as Steven Pinker and his "How the Mind Works" because while Pinker enthusiastically theorizes on just about everything about the human condition and speculates we are close to understanding everything Professor Linden takes a much more nuanced and grounded approach. Still, sometimes, even though he admits we just don't know (for example, on the chapter why we dream) he just can't help but speculate himself. And when he talks about why humans believe in God he lacks the concrete scientific evidence of his previous chapters, and it's not all that convincing.
Well, Professor Linden is only human, and as any neurologist, psychologist, writer, or anyone for that matter can tell you, the needs to dream and to explain are uniquely human.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Entertaining Overview of the Brain, 2008-07-04
A fun dip into various parts of the brain. The topics range from the chemistry of dendrite/axon interaction to higher level concepts like love and religion.
An interesting read.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Good "challenging" book, 2008-07-03
If you want to know how the human brain has evolved to bring us to who we are, this is a good book for a start. One caveat. The author, David J. Linden, Professor of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University and one of the top brain scientists in America, says "I'll strive to make it fun, but I'm not going to "take all the science out."
What he meant by that is that he leaves lots of technical terms and information in for those who can wade through it without being put off. But most of the book can be navigated even by a person (like me) without a lot of recent scientific education. But the scientific detail makes it a tough read in places.
The chapter on "The Inelegant Design of the Brain" does a good job of convincing the reader that the brain is an hugely inefficient organ that nevertheless creates the marvelous human experience we share. It becomes obvious in "Building a Brain with Yesterday's Parts" that the brain was built over a long time, with one hunk added on top of another until there was a great deal of redundancy and lots of tissue that slows it down compared to your computer. By the time you finish "Some Assembly Required" you will probably understand how all those parts fit together to bring you your experience, and "Sensation and Emotion" will connect your five senses with the emotional interpretation that makes them important to you.
Then Dr. Linden goes on to "Learning, Memory and Human Individuality," "Love and Sex," "Sleeping and Dreaming," and a balanced explanation of "The Religious Impulse." None of this is very controversial in the way that he presents it, and it is up-to-date brain science that every educated person needs to understand.
Finally in "The Unintelligent Design of the Brain" Dr. Linden goes after the "Scientific Creationism" movement and anti-evolution thinkers who insist on "Intelligent Design" in the universe. I think he comes out well, and devastates their arguments in a dozen pages. You might not agree. Read him and see.
This is the best layman's book I've found to bring together all current knowledge of how the brain works to make us human, even though he admits he leaves out some very important areas (language, brain aging and disease, psychoactive drugs, hypnosis, and the placebo effect). You'll have to look elsewhere for information on those. Or perhaps Dr. Linden will write a second edition to fold them into his next up-to-date explanation of the brain. I hope he gets a better editor for the next edition. Some of the scientific detail he leaves in is just too cumbersome--and probably unnecessary for telling his story. Fortunately there's a great deal here that does not demand scientific training of the reader.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
 Our mental ice cream cone, 2008-04-07
The greatest fear among those who reject Charles Darwin's "Dangerous Idea" is the implications the concept holds for human beings. Our brain, they often claim, demonstrates how far we are from the other animals. It must have been designed by "divine intelligence". Not so, says David Linden. Our brain is something cobbled together over millions of years, parts and functions being added over time to produce that kilogramme of matter in our heads. He likens the building-up process to a multi-scoop ice cream cone. In this finely written overview, he explains the brain's structure and functions, relating them to earlier sources with clarity and wit.
The bottom of the ice-cream cone is the brainstem, an ancient structure controlling much of the body's major systems like heartbeat and breathing. Many of the body's communication with the rest of the brain pass through this part. Above the brainstem is the cerebellum, the first "scoop". The cerebellum acts as a signal filter, inhibiting "expected" sensations like your clothing against your skin. When something detectable as not part of "normal" conditions arises, the cerebellum passes those signals to the rest of the brain. That's when the real action begins. Above the cerebellum lies the midbrain, which is the first recipient of visual and sound signals. In some animals, such as frogs, he notes, this is the primary sensory area. Our midbrain, Linden declares, is symbolic of what he calls "brain kludge". It's an archaic region retained from earlier ancestral creatures for very limited processes. Moving upward and forward we encounter two elements, the thalamus and hypothalamus, the former being a major relay station for signals within and to and from the brain. Near these two is the amygdala, the centre of fear and aggression - the "flight or fight" controller that is an obvious holdover from early times.
If there is a "human" area in our brains, it is the cortex. In dealing with its role, the author takes us through how neuronal cells are structured and operate. They are, he notes, a flawed example of "design". Brains are often compared to computers, but the network of neuronal cells is a patchwork of bad connections, leaking signals and is depressingly slow. Copper wire is several orders of magnitude better at passing information. Describing somebody as being "quick minded" reveals we don't really know what's going on in there. There are, Linden reminds us, 100 billion neurons residing in the brain, with 500 trillion synapses - the contact point for brain signals - connecting them. But the distribution is unequal with contact points ranging from 0 to 200 000. No wonder some thoughts "go astray" and "memory fails"!
Knowledge of the brain rests heavily on those who have suffered injury or lesions in particular areas. Today, these are identified by electronic scanners, but no account of the brain would be complete without the early 19th Century story of Phineas Gage. A steel rod through his skull failed to kill him, but his personality was changed forever. Linden recounts the studies initiated by this accident, and goes on to describe the roots of other behaviour traits. He discusses vision, hearing, sleep and dreaming, and, of course, sex. Studies performed on what happens in the brain during orgasm make almost hilarious reading. Even Linden is left wondering just how the subjects coped. His explanation of why humans seem to bond better than other creatures, even our primate cousins is of particular interest. Although the word "love" appears in the subtitle, there's little mention of it in the text. It's not really related to how the brain works. You are cautioned not to jump to Chapter Six before reading the introductory material.
Linden's chapter on why humans have religion is necessarily thin. Little work has been done on this topic. Even what has been done is rudimentary and sketchy. He compares some representative ideas about gods and spirits, noting that there is some uniformity among them. He dismisses any suggestion of a "god part of the brain" or genes prompting for "faith". Instead, he says, there is a tendency for the brain, seen in other mental functions such as vision, to seek "coherent, gap-free stories". The brain "fills in" when it isn't receiving continuous information. There are many forms of this "filling-in", as some patients have exhibited, which Linden refers to as "confabulation". This isn't a form of "making up" stories, since the individuals truly believe what they are saying. They simply have no way of knowing the tale isn't true. It was a surprise to this reviewer that no mention of sensory deprivation studies dealing with this topic was introduced by the author.
Finally, as all writers of science in the US seem compelled to do, Linden responds the rising challenge of "intelligent design". The simple answer is that the notion is a weak attempt to explain what is either unknown or poorly understood. Why US scientists or science journalists must descend to sparring with this elusive concept is both astonishing and worrying. Many astute thinkers and writers have demolished "ID". Why does it need yet another post-mortem? Linden does as good a job as any at demonstrating the falsity of proponents like Behe, Dembski and Johnson. In doing so, he concludes with an appeal for more work to build on what is known about the brain and its evolutionary foundation. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
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