Traditionally served up as a de rigueur melange of graceful acknowledgments with linked mea
culpa, author's prejudices and bon mots, caveat emptor warnings to professional colleagues,
and the usual succinct scintillating sentence summarizing the book, planted by the author in
the hope that it will be picked up by an overworked book reviewer facing a deadline. Not to
ETHOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
Tracing right-handedness back through the centuries from the invention of writing to how
mothers carry babies on the left side. With a brief digression on pacifying babies, as practiced
by pediatric neurologists, and how the left-sided sound of the maternal heartbeat quiets
infants. Did right-handedness all start with a mother with pacified infant, throwing stones
with her right hand to hunt rabbits?
As T S. Eliot intoned, "A CAT IS NOT A DOG.'As it is hardly a working animal, whatever
caused the domestication of the cat? Perhaps it learned to mimic human babies, even
though not looking anything like a baby? This chapter illustrates the 'instinct' level of brain
organization, what Konrad Lorenz called innate action patterns and the stimuli which
trigger them. A tale of evolution, nonpoisonous snakes impersonating poisonous ones, and
what prompts people to respond to a cuddly baby. The reader is prompted to perform a
similar ethological analysis of the dog's success in pleasing people.
The usual presumption is that the first human tool-users were male, but it certainly isn't turning out that
way as ethologists study primates in their natural habitats: the starring roles usually seem to be played
by females. Chimpanzees crack open nuts using rock hammers-- and with considerable foresight and
sophistication. But the males only engage in the simplest kinds of shell cracking, with females practicing
the two more sophisticated techniques and flaking stones in the process. And even termite fishing, that
classic example of chimpanzee toolmaking, turns out to be largely a female preoccupation.
The hominid brain has enlarged threefold in the last few million years and, along the way, acquired
specializations for language, handedness, and even music. What were the selection pressures which
shaped this rapid evolution? An examination of one-handed throwing of stones at prey and how this
cultural practice could have led to the enlargement of the brain-and provided the foundations for
A possible origin for empathy lies in the skills used for sizing up another person, as when bargaining
in an oriental bazaar. The human brain has a special area for recognizing faces, even for evaluating
the emotions revealed in another person's facial expressions. Which presumably proved useful in
detecting when another was going to cheat rather than cooperate. But the evolution of cooperation
itself is much harder to understand, because it requires that an animal forgo immediate advantage
for a chancy long-term gain. Now Axelrod and Hamilton have shown, using game theory, a simple
'tit for tat' limited cooperation strategy that could have evolved even in a world of me-first types: it
relies strongly upon recognizing others as individuals. Is this the origin of cooperation?
What will happen in some future year when an ancient computer is dug up by an archaeologist, but the
instruction manual is missing? An introduction to how neurobiologists investigate the brain and its
hierarchies-and some cautions about 'the physicist's fallacy.'
A real summit meeting of neurobiologists-atop Mount Scopus, with alternating views of
Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. With expeditions to the mine fields of the Golan Heights in
search of the elusive leech, to the depths of the Red Sea to see the molluscan "Spanish
Dancer"-and then the true hazards (Thanksgiving viruses and Christmas bureaucracies).
Over 99 percent of the nerve cells in the eyes reading this sentence are functioning without using nerve impulses.
Yet the nerve impulse (a stereotyped voltage 'spike' set off when a threshold voltage is exceeded, rather like pulling
the trigger on a gun) has engrained our thinking about the way nerve cells compute for over a hundred years. The
new view of the common currency of the nerve cell: variable volts, not unlike the variable balance of a bank
The secret of this seagoing slug's success is that it tastes bad, its major known predator is the neurobiologist, who
prizes it for the knowledge its small brain yields about learning. A classic neurobiology story, analogous to
studying small-town sociology where everyone knows one another rather than anonymous big city masses. It
explores how the interconnections between nerve cells change with learning.
Does the vocal left brain dominate the poor artistic right brain? Or does the popularization of
left-brain dominance involve the "worst kind of mixed metaphor, the kind that mixes up
metaphor with reality"? An examination of lateralization and a modest proposal for a splashy
new best-seller guaranteed to make the book clubs salivate: Cooking on the Right Side of the
Brain, for the new holistic school of cooking which avoids mixing ingredients in sequential order
(left brain, an obvious no-no) by dumping everything into the mixing bowl simultaneously.
WHEN THINGS GO WRONG
Tic douloureux is a benign disorder producing excruciating lightninglike pains in the face. Yet unlike
most chronic pains, it is almost always curable. Told as a medical detective story, this is a tale
resplendent with the classic clues of the mystery thriller.
From dyslexic child to university professor, from university president to governor and then president
of the United States. But between being a Princeton professor and the president who attempted to
shape the Paris peace conference and the League of Nations, he suffered one stroke after another-and
seemingly recovered from them all. But the gradual personality changes apparent before Paris were
dramatically augmented by the influenza attack which interrupted the conference, and President Wilson was never the same thereafter. His major stroke five months later, while he attempted to persuade
the Senate to ratify the treaty, left him not merely paralyzed on his left side, but unable to understand
that he was disabled. Even if the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had been in effect
then, it seems unlikely that the Cabinet could have declared him disabled because Wilson would have
fired them first, just as he actually fired his secretary of state for discussing the disability with the
One thing that schizophrenia isn't: it isn't split personalities like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It is a
disease of young adults, largely inherited, which is often characterized by hallucinations which the
sufferer may have difficulty distinguishing from reality. But until we understand nighttime dreams
better, we are unlikely to fully appreciate how the brain normally maintains our grip on reality.
The evolutionary usefulness of pain following injury is examined.
But evolution has not effectively protected us from useless pain: the pain of otherwise
harmless neuralgias, the pain of cancer. A progress report on pain clinics, peptide
hormones, research teams, and the sorry state of research funds.
Does language make use of the same 'holding buffer' neural circuits as does the rapid motor
sequencer evolved for rock throwing? When rearranging a complicated sentence into the deep
linguistic structure emphasizing actor-action-object, are we making use of primitive throwing
circuits? A short excursion into linguistics, that meeting ground of the humanities and the
Working from the bottom up, neurobiology focuses on membranes, nerve cells, circuits,
modular collections of circuits exemplified by the hypercolumn-but then what next? Working
from the top down, we can distinguish linguistics, instinct and memory, hemispheric
organization, cortical maps, but then . . . ? How do modular super-hypercolumns generate
grammar, store the word 'rabbit,'recognize a fuzzy animal as a rabbit, pronounce the word
'rabbit'-or set about throwing a stone at a rabbit? What are the in-between levels of the
hierarchy of the brain? An examination of the natural physiological subdivisions of language
specializations of the human brain, together with male/female and IQ differences. The history
of language physiology seems increasingly reductionistic as quite specialized patches of
cerebral cortex are discovered, but they all surely work together in a committee-if we can only
figure out how. And now there is some information on how they are orchestrated.
Every culture has its own creation myth relating the origins of humankind, invariably starring
its own people, and the scientific culture is no exception. Neoteny, that phylogenetic trend
which makes adults look more and more like juveniles, says something about possible genetic
mechanisms. But the original problem, way back before brains started enlarging, was that
there were not enough babies to comfortably maintain the population level. The solution to
this problem of ecological economics involved upright posture and carrying, pair-bonding and
nonprocreative sex. From this ancestor, somewhat different from modern-day great apes, the
great brain boom began. A speculative scenario for our ancestors, but, unlike our usual
creation myth with the unusually clever in the starring roll, it suggests that our intelligence was
an offshoot of a more mundane development in hunting and hammering .