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The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God | 
 enlarge | Author: David J. Linden
Publisher: Belknap Press
Category: Book
List Price: $17.95
Buy New: $10.85
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Rating:  28 reviews
Sales Rank: 17410
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 6.9 x 0.8
ISBN: 0674030583
Dewey Decimal Number: 612
EAN: 9780674030589
ASIN: 0674030583
Publication Date: December 15, 2008 (New: Last 30 Days)
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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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| Customer Reviews: Read 23 more reviews...
 Our Brains Are Who We Are January 1, 2009
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Ever wonder why we have dreams; a longer childhood than any other species; recreational sex and long-term pair bonding; other things? Read David Linden's "The Accidental Mind." It's a fascinating exploration of the human brain from one of the leading neuro-scientists in the country.
Our brains are actually not paragons of good engineering, according to Linden. They're more like Rube Goldberg contraptions. For example, the parts of the brain that control lower-level functions are essentially no different from those of rats or frogs. Our brains just have more stuff piled on top. Linden compares the brain to an ice-cream cone, and the bigger parts of our brains that distinguish us from other animals are just more "scoops" piled on top of the lower scoops through our evolutionary history. In addition, primitive functions persist in parts of our brain, giving rise to interesting phenomena such as blindsight. Further, one problem with our brains is that we have evolved functions that are useful in some situations but can be counter-productive in others. For example, the escalation of shoving matches in schoolyards and bars is not all about social dynamics. Indeed, a large part of it is neurological. When you initiate a movement, you tend not to pay attention to the sensations from that movement; you generally don't notice your clothes rubbing up against you when you walk. The cerebellum sends inhibition signals so that the body doesn't feel sensations from self-initiated movements as much. The reason why is that due to our evolutionary history, it's more advantageous to notice a touch from an outside source than from yourself. I'll let Linden describe it- "The cerebellum uses these signals to predict the sensations that are likely to result from this motion. Then the cerebellum sends inhibitory signals to other brain regions to subtract the `expected' sensations from the `total' sensations and thereby change the way they feel to you." (p. 10) In other words, when shoving back, you will try to match the perceived force, but you will always overcompensate by shoving harder than the inhibitory signals. This can become counter-productive. Incidentally, the cerebellum inhibitory signals is also why you can't tickle yourself.
Interestingly, we don't have sex, dreams, long childhoods, and all the rest in spite of our klugish brain design, but because of it. Brain activity is controlled by the firing of neurons and dendrils and synapses. I'll let you read the book to get all the juicy details, but the bottom line is that neuronal activity is actually very inefficient. So to get a brain that can function like ours can, we need lots of neurons firing at once, and that can only happen with a large brain and a large skull. But the number of neurons and synapses is so large it cannot all be specified in the genome- it must come through experience. So our species has neuronal plasticity that can be molded through experience. Hence, our long childhoods. With most other mammals, the male will leave right after mating to find another female. With humans, however, it is advantageous for a female to find a long-term mate, since children cannot fend for themselves for a considerably longer time than other mammals. To have this long-term pair bonding, concealed ovulation developed. "Males tend to buy into this arrangement for two reasons. One is that if the male plays along he can be confident of paternity: he won't be wasting his resources supporting the offspring of another male. Another is that he, and the female, will enjoy the bonding that comes from frequent sex. This bonding and reward is enough to keep humans having sex even when conception is impossible (during pregnancy or even after menopause)." (pp. 149-150)
One important part of building experience is memory. You go through the world with the help of memories of previous experiences. But we need a way to organize and cross-reference this memory for it to be useful. That's where sleep comes in. According to Linden, the best research in the field indicates that the cycles of REM and non-REM sleep help memory to be organized and cross-references, a function that is best done without competing sensory bombardment. Dreams are a result of the bizarre combination of brain functions during sleep- the emotional parts of the brain (amygdala, anterior cortex) are heightened, while the part of the brain that is responsible for logic and decisions (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) is "turned off." And all of this while the left-brain narrative structure is still on. Linden speculates that religion may have partly originated with some form of dream recollection.
There's lots more that Linden discusses that I could mention- the nature/nurture debate, gender-based brain differences, homosexuality, and the future of brain research. Suffice it to say that this will be a fascinating book for anyone to read. I believe that understanding why we are the way we are will give us a firmer ground for addressing the problems in our world. A reader who wants to understand that could hardly do better than to read this.
Entertainment Excellence with Interesting Science December 29, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The prologue begins, "The Best Thing about being a brain researcher is that, in a very small number of situations, you can appear to have the power of mind reading. Take cocktail parties. Chardonnay in hand, your host makes one of those introductions where he feels compelled to state your occupation.... [Then I say] `You're about to ask if it's true that we only use 10 percent of our brain, aren't you?'"
So, the author is A-list on the cocktail party circuit, and perhaps that accounts for his ability to weave a fascinating tale that is this book. Oh, yes, he is a distinguished scientist as well, so there are some dashes of new science that are fun to know. It is science with an Attitude.
Here's what the author says he tries to do, which is dead-on for a review of this book: "I will be your guide to this strange and often illogical world of neural function ... pointing out the most unusual and counterintuitive aspects of brain and neural design.... I will try to convince you that the constraints of quirky, evolved brain design have ultimately led to many transcendent and unique human characteristics: our long childhoods, our extensive memory capacity (... the substrate upon which our individuality is created by experience), our search for long-term love relationships, our need to create compelling narrative and, ultimately, the universal cultural impulse to create religious explanations.
"Along the way, I will briefly review the biology background you will need to understand the things I am guessing you most want to know about the brain and behavior. You know, the good stuff: emotion, illusion, memory, dreams, love and sex, and, of course, freaky twin stories." [The author knows well what is the "good stuff."]
There is much more. A stunning plus for the book is the illustrations, all of them original, excellent to behold, and some of them an entrancing story in their own right. Evidently, someone found a talented creator, as the illustrations just have to be examples of Intelligent Design.
Did you know that non-REM sleep appears to have evolved as early as the fly, about 500 million years ago? REM sleep is found only in warm-blooded species, including the most primitive surviving mammals, such as the platypus. Appears to be absent in reptiles and amphibians. Why do mammals need REM sleep and reptiles do not? The book has some interesting speculation and interesting experiments showing plausible reasons that are not true.
Did you know dolphins are among those needing the least REM sleep (at under 12 minutes)? Book says they sleep 10 hours total. Makes me wonder if they swim in their sleep to surface to breathe. Horses only sleep 3 hours total. Ferrets do 6 hours of REM and the platypus does a fabulous 8 hours of REM. Wonder what dreams play thru its brain?
The book has a web site for more info, AccidentalMind.org.
Hope you enjoy the book as much as I did.
 Clearly written, but not provocative November 26, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
Messy Sometimes But Important Summary of Scientific Basis of Psychology October 14, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
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.
Entertaining Overview of the Brain July 4, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
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.
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