Mind Hacks is a very good blog if you're interested in psychology, neurology and all the fields in between. And why wouldn't you be? These are perhaps the fields that relate most directly to ourselves.
Since I've been enjoying their blog so much, I felt I owed it to bloggers Tom Stafford and Matt Webb to read their book of the same name. I haven't finished it, but I feel pretty confident at this point that it isn't going to disappoint.
The title of the book may be the worst thing about it. It sounds as if some sort of mental trickery or behavior modification is on the menu, or that this is going to be an unusually techie self-help book. In fact, this is something quite different, and better: a user's manual for your brain, written in terms accessible to laymen.
The book is even structured like a manual, divided into reference-style sections, each one concerning a different 'sub-system' of the brain. As for the 'hacks', they consist of various techniques (and, often, web applets) that one can use to demonstrate a particular nuance of the sub-system in question. For instance, in a discussion of visual attention focusing, one can take a series of tests to attempt to 'track' objects that are moving in increasingly difficult-to-follow ways.
The book might resonate most with those who, like me, hail from the IT profession. At least one of the authors has an IT background, and the working of the brain is frequently contrasted to the working of a digital computer.
To be specific: the brain works nothing like a computer.
Fundamentally, a computer processes information by breaking it down into its smallest possible components. For instance, when a computer plays a recording of violin music, it doesn't do so by vibrating a string within it. Instead it takes the smooth curve of the sound wave and slices it into thousands of points, which it stores. The points are then played back, so close together that the human ear interprets them as continuous sound.
But they're not. And this idea of breaking a whole thing into pieces to manipulate it or simulate it is the underlying philosophy of any digital computer. The advantage of this, in our sound wave example, is that the computer has fine-grain information about every bit of the violin piece that it can consistently reproduce, or manipulate with predictable results.
Consistency is another fundamental design goal for a digital computer. We want a computer to reach the same result when we execute a command twice. Given x inputs, we should always get outputs. When we don't (or it seems that we don't, due to the complexity of our modern machines), we get very frustrated!
The human brain, on the other hand, has no such fetish for consistency and so has no need to try to reduce things to bits and bytes. Its design shows a clear preference for handling inputs as organically and intuitively as possible. Unlike a digital circuit, whose internal design bears no resemblance to external function, the brain frequently maps things out in a way that resembles their spatial orientation in the external world.
For instance, sounds detected first by your right ear activate cells closer to that ear. Elsewhere, input from your eyes is processed fairly closely to input from your mouth but very far from input from your feet. Another example of this analog design is that all of these inputs are processed faster or slower depending on how strong the stimulus is (now this would be great for computers - imagine that banging repeatedly on a key because you really wanted something to happen actually made it happen faster!).
Nowhere is the divide between digital hardware and analog wetware clearer, perhaps, than in the visual system. Take a photo with your digital camera, and the image that comes through the lens is divided up into millions of pixels, essentially a bit with a location and a color attached. The idea is to reproduce a flat image consistently and at a resolution that tricks the eye into not seeing individual pixels.
The human camera, on the other hand, works quite differently. First, it doesn't have a constant resolution across your entire field of vision. It is very high res in the center, and very low res heading out into the periphery. There is even a small blind spot located at one point. The eye makes up for these inconsistencies by constantly making tiny movements to 'capture' more of the image in front of it. During each movement the eye is also blind. There is no flat image here. The 'picture' you see of the world is a composite, one that is being constantly updated in real time.
The way vision is processed in the brain takes us still farther afield from the digital camera. The brain has no interest in producing a 'photograph'. Who would look at it? Instead it sends the visual input to several different parts of the brain to extract many different pieces of specific information: is anything threatening coming towards me? What are the important objects in my field of vision? Is anything moving or changing? Do I recognize anything interesting? Is there a car, an animal, a person? and even, Do I see any familiar faces?
One of the interesting things about the sub-systems of the brain is that where a digital computer is generalized to 'do anything' they are extremely specific. There is indeed a whole visual sub-system that deals with face recognition, and damage to it can result in face blindness, for example.
There are dozens of fascinating vignettes about the brain in Mind Hacks, and I can't even begin to cover all of them, but let me end with one small example: the attention system.
The brain seems to have two ways of counting - normal, number-incrementing counting, which is slow. And a separate system which is able to count small numbers virtually instantaneously. Usually the number has to be less than five.
That's a bit odd, isn't it? Why should we be able to instantaneously tell that there are four objects in front of us, but have to do extra thinking should we add a fifth? Well, the theory is that our 'attention system', the part of our brain that lets us focus our mental resources on certain things, can track up to four objects at a time. So counting up to four is already handled by this special object tracking system, but if you have more than five objects you have to shunt the counting over to another, non-specialized system.
This attention tracking system is actually pretty sophisticated. You can 'keep an eye' on about four moving objects in your field of view - simultaneously. The objects can even be temporarily obscured or surrounded by other, similar objects and you will not easily lose track of them. This focus comes at a cost, though: an intense focus on these objects may make you 'blind' to other, very obvious things that are also in your field of view, like, in one famous example, a man in a gorilla suit in the middle of a basketball game.
While I highly recommend V.S. Ramachandran's Phantoms in the Brain for those interested in how we're wired, Mind Hacks might make a good foundational book to tackle first. While it doesn't probe quite as deeply into the oddities of human concsciousness as Ramachandran's book does, it does give an excellent job of laying out what we know about how our brain perceives the world around us.
It definitely does not do so digitally.
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