ruff's Full Review: Tor Nrretranders - The User Illusion: Cutting Cons...
First things first: You are a Lie.
Moving on:
Your brain is made up of two distinct hemispheres that cooperate to produce most of the mental and physical behavior you associate with you. The left side of your brain is primarily linguistic and analytical. The right is primarily creative and spatial. The two share information through various connections, but mostly through the corpus callosum, a thick bridge between hemispheres located in the midbrain.
Now, some people don't have functioning corpora callosa. During the early part of this century, medical doctors discovered that by surgically cutting the corpus callosum, it was possible to prevent seizures from spreading from one hemisphere to another. Nowadays we tend to use drugs instead of brain surgery, but that's how it was done in the olden days. The people who received this surgery had, in essence, two brains.
Experiments on these patients have shown that when the right side of the brain carries out a physical action, without explaining it to the left side, the left side will nonetheless try to make sense of the action. For example, suppose the right hemisphere is told to point to a shovel, and the left hemisphere is distracted by thoughts of chickens. If the left side of the brain is then asked why the right side is pointing to a shovel, it will come up with a wrong but perfectly sensible theory: "You need a shovel to clean a chicken shed."
That is to say, the left hemisphere will develop a theory in a desperate attempt to make sense of the world around it. Even when the theory is a lie.
The User Illusion, a complicated book by Danish science writer Tor Nørretranders, is an example of the left hemisphere's theory-making. Let's be clear, I am not saying that Nørretranders’ book is a fanciful lie. It probably isn't. But it is a remarkable effort to organize... well, everything using a single theory.
That theory is based on the work of Claude Shannon, who invented something called Information Theory. Information Theory basically says that all communication can be broken down into yes/no information called a bit. (This is the same bit in your modem speed; 56kbps means 56,000 bits--yes/no's--per second. Shannon was a telephone engineer.)
People are only capable of consciously sensing between 4 and fifty bits per second, says Nørretranders. However, our eyes, skin, ears, and nose can sense millions if not billions of bits per second.
So where'd all of that information go?
According to Nørretranders, the information was processed without your knowledge. In fact, shocking experiments done by Benjamin Libet during brain surgery have shown that consciousness is not responsible for much human behavior. Consciousness only pretends to be in charge. We are fundamentally different creatures than we think we are, he argues. Consciousness lies.
A disturbing conclusion like that demands extreme amounts of experimental support, and Nørretranders is definitely up to the challenge. His explanation is rooted in a dizzying amount of research carried out by physicists, biologists, mathematicians, engineers, physiologists, and psychologists.
As a professional writer, he is able to write sensible explanations for everything from thermodynamics, which occupies the first few chapters of The User Illusion, to neuroscience, to the ever important information theory. Illustrations are provided to explain many of the headier concepts, such as Maxwell's Demon (a theoretical problem in thermodynamics) and the different areas of the brain.
When he focuses on the science of consciousness, his case is captivating. But Nørretranders loses some credibility when he moves to the more philosophical aspects of his theory, which are based on more controversial theories, like Jaynes' speculation about a bicameral mind--that the ancient Greeks were not conscious people. Nørretranders expands on this, making the switch from unconsciousness to consciousness the cause of the switch from polytheism to monotheism. These philosophical extensions of Nørretranders' thesis are thoughtful, but personally, I wouldn't bet my life that he's right.
This book is not pink, and it doesn't have an attractive couple embracing on the cover, but anyone with a high school diploma and a love of learning can still follow along and receive a stronger appreciation of the contributions science can make to our understanding of ourselves. Nørretranders' writing is exciting, engaging, humorous, and at times deeply poetic. But, best of all, it's excellently organized.
His left hemisphere must be exhausted.
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Ruff's notes:
-Credit should be given to translator Jonathan Syndenham, who managed to make this book read like it was written in English.
-Relatedly, it is refreshing to see a Nørretranders talk about eastern European scientists who don't receive much recognition in the US.
-The book looks really nice, too. It's silver with futuristic techno-orange highlights.
-The chicken/shovel example comes from an actual experiment described in the book.
-The User Illusion is also full of cool science info that normal people rarely get to hear about. Do you have any idea how cool it is to be able to namedrop Turing and Gödel, and explain how their proofs make the universe scientifically unknowable? Dude, people think I'm smart now.
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