Alchemy of Mind

ALCHEMY OF MIND:
THE MARVEL AND MYSTERY OF THE BRAIN
by Diane Ackerman, Scribner, 2004

OUTLINE OF BOOK'S FACTS & IDEAS

QUOTE

"Memory as mindglow!"

PART 1 --- MIRACLE WATERS --- Evolution (p1-36)

Imagining the brain

The unconscious: how it collaborates with the conscious mind

PART 2 --- SWEET DREAMS OF REASON --- The physical brain (p36-74)

"plasticity"

"spread spectrum"

"imagine/see"

PART 3 --- PAVILIONS OF DESIRE --- Memory (p75-119)

PART 4 --- NEVER A DULL MOMENT --- The "Self" and other Fictions (p121-171)

Introducing the Self!

How we think of ourself; the multiple facets of a self

PART 5 --- THE WORLD IS BREAKING SOMEONE ELSE'S HEART --- Emotions (p173-199)

PART 6 --- THE COLOR OF SAYING --- Language (p201-129)

PART 7 --- THE WILDERNESS WITHIN --- The world we share (p121-171)

ALCHEMICAL SYMBOLS (p250)

NOTES, ADDENDA, AND AFTERTHOUGHTS (p261-280)

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY (p281-286)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (p287)

INDEX (p289-300)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR (p301)

BOOK'S DESCRIPTION & REVIEWS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR = Diane Ackerman is a naturalist and poet and the author of ten books of literary nonfiction, including A Natural History of the Senses, A Natural History of Love, and Cultivating Delight. Also the author of six volumes of poetry and several nonfiction children's books, she contributes to The New York Times, Discover, National Geographic, Parade, and many other publications. Ackerman lives in Ithaca, New York.

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION = Does the mind reflect or dictate what the body sees and feels? What is the language of emotion? Is memory a function of our imaginations? Are we all just out of our minds?

In this ambitious and enlightening work, Diane Ackerman combines an artist's eye with a scientist's erudition to illuminate the magic and mysteries of the human brain. With An Alchemy of Mind, she offers an unprecedented exploration of the mental fantasia in which we spend our days. In addition to explaining memory, thought, emotion, dreams, and language acquisition, Ackerman reports on the latest discoveries in neuroscience and addresses such controversial subjects as the effects of trauma, nature versus nurture, and male versus female brains. In prose that is not simply accessible but also beautiful and electric, Ackerman distills the hard, objective truths of science in order to yield vivid, anecdotal explanations about a range of existential questions regarding consciousness and the nature of identity.

FROM PUBLISHERS WEEKLY = Ackerman's latest foray (after Cultivating Delight) is ostensibly about the "crowded chemistry lab" of the human brain, but fans of her writings on the natural world will find many familiar pleasures. All is not pastoral sweetness; every passage on genteel matters like tending her backyard roses has its rougher counterpart, for example, the recollection of a life-threatening accident during a Japanese bird-watching expedition. By grounding the scientific information firmly in her own experience of discovery, Ackerman invites readers to share in her learning and writing processes. The common thread she spies running through the tangible world of the evolving brain and the intangible world of emotion and memory is the "sleight of mind" that provides us with a self-identity through which we experience the world in a unified yet complexly fragmented way. It's no surprise that the section of the book dealing with language should concentrate so intently on metaphors; they cascade down every page like waterfalls. Ackerman's prose is equally sensuous on the literal plane, enabling her to turn an afternoon snack into a lesson on neurochemistry that swiftly dovetails with a discussion of the varying speeds of thought without ever risking distraction. Even brain buffs used to a more detached approach should be won over by her uniquely personal perspective. -- Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

FROM BOOKMARKS MAGAZINE = Alchemy, Ackerman explains, seeks to turn metal into gold; so does the human mind, albeit more successfully than alchemy, create a “self.” Known as the modern-day poet of the natural world, Ackerman explores nature and human nature from her highly original and literary perspective. Some critics complain that she journeys through well-trodden neuroscience research. Yet there’s no doubt that she spins a highly imaginative and sensory book on the brain’s vast capabilities. That she writes more as a poet than a scientist is perhaps her greatest contribution; still, she often succumbs to pretty but weak metaphors that “give a reader precisely the wrong idea about how nature works” (Washington Post). Yet overall, Alchemy is a lucid, fascinating synthesis of the brain and all it creates. -- Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

FROM BOOKLIST = *Starred Review* The human psyche fascinates revered naturalist and poet Ackerman as much as any other aspect of the grand carnival of life, hence this agile, involving, and uniquely far-ranging and insightful inquiry into "how the brain becomes the mind." As always, Ackerman is positively scintillating, thanks to the intensity of her observations, the imaginativeness of her interpretations of both natural phenomena and science, the splendor of her distinctive prose, and her flair for making her discoveries personal, relevant, and resonant. Erudite and playful, Ackerman explores the differences between the right and left brains and the brains of men and women, and cogently explains the chemistry of the "microscopic hubbub" generated inside our heads as neurons speak "an electrochemical lingo all their own." She explicates memory, ponders the jumble of genetics and circumstances that engender personalities, delineates the mechanics and impact of emotions, and reveals how profoundly malleable and adaptive the brain is. Most movingly, Ackerman marvels over our creativity, especially our facilities for language, story, and metaphor. She writes, "One of the most surprising facts about human beings is that we seem to require a poetic version of life," the very gift Ackerman bestows upon her rapt and illuminated readers. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association.

REVIEWS = "Ackerman [is] our poetic chronicler of the natural world." -- Chicago Tribune

"[A] lovely...arresting...discourse on brain science." -- Entertainment Weekly

"Partly close observation, partly free association, Ackerman's paean turns the inside of our heads into...[something] gorgeous, tender, jewelled." -- The New York Times Book Review

"A love song to the brain...combines flights of lyricism and autobiographical reflection with a cooler, more cerebral amalgam of science, anthropology, psychology, history, and literature." -- Francine Prose, More magazine

"Evocative and meaningful." -- Carl Zimmer, The Washington Post

From The Washington Post = On the one hand, there is the mind: a web of faculties aware of itself and the universe, capable of learning a new piano sonata or recalling a spring snowstorm 40 years ago. On the other hand, the brain: a three-pound blob. For thousands of years, few people saw a connection between the two. In 1652, the English philosopher Henry More flatly stated that the brain "shows no more capacity for thought than a cake of suet or a bowl of curds." Today, of course, it's clear that the brain is far more than goop. Electricity and neurotransmitters shuttle among its billions of neurons, producing our passions, reasoning and consciousness. Yet most of us still have trouble feeling a link between the details of the brain -- its oligodendrites, its nodes of Ranvier, its alpha-2A noradrenergic receptors -- and our own existence.

In recent years this chasm has attracted a corps of bridge-builders. They have packed shelves with books that try to link neuroscience to every aspect of our lives. The latest addition is An Alchemy of Mind, by Diane Ackerman. In some ways Ackerman's book is not much different from the rest. She surveys the same well-traveled territories, with chapters on topics such as consciousness, language and the mental differences between the sexes. If you keep up with brain research news in The Washington Post, there won't be many scientific surprises for you here. But Ackerman is unusual in that she writes not as a scientist or a science journalist. Instead, she's a poet (albeit a poet with a remarkable appetite for journals with names like Cerebrum). And it's as a poet that she shows her greatest strengths in writing on the brain, as well as her greatest weaknesses.

Ackerman knows that poetry and fiction are full of profound insights into the workings of the mind. She knows how to pluck a passage out of Proust, Shakespeare or Virginia Woolf to illustrate a point. In some cases she chooses instead to lyrically recall an experience of her own (such as her personal experience with the blending of sensation known as synesthesia). But she also knows that literature can illuminate that mind in a different way. The mark of a great author is the ability to bootstrap language to higher levels of meaning with the help of symbols, metaphors and figures of speech. And the brain, at its most basic level of information-processing, depends on a similar sort of poetic bootstrapping. It doesn't passively reproduce the sensations that enter its neurons as into a pinhole camera. Instead, it grabs a limited number of details and then builds around them an elaborate hypothesis about the world. "We are all unwitting poets," Ackerman says.

Ackerman spends much of the book turning her metaphor-making neurons back on themselves to find captivating ways to describe how the brain works. Heaven knows neuroscience could use an infusion of poetry. When scientists (and science writers) try to describe the brain to the public, they are too easily satisfied with feeble metaphors. Receptors are locks, for example, and neurotransmitters are keys. Yet keys and locks are rigid, as Ackerman points out, while receptors and neurotransmitters are yielding and floppy. Someone needs to find a new metaphor, and she offers some that are both evocative and meaningful, as when she refers to short-term memory as a "mental scratch pad." But too often she offers mud instead of light.

"Most children don't remember much before the age of two or three," she informs us, "because the cortex develops slowly and the brain hasn't activated its thinking cap yet." Thinking cap? What exactly does that mean? You can scour an entire neurology textbook and still not be able to answer that question. Describing how music is encoded in memory, Ackerman writes about neurons producing proteins "which then return to the synapse where the music was being processed and glue that music to the site." A miniature jukebox now dangles from a nerve, making us none the wiser.

A bad metaphor can do more than just befuddle. It can give a reader precisely the wrong idea about how nature works. Those who hope to learn the basics about the brain in An Alchemy of Mind will sometimes be misled by pretty-sounding language. Ackerman informs us, for example, that our ancestors were faced with the paradox of getting a big human brain out of a mother's narrow birth canal. "The solution we found was to give birth earlier," she declares, as if our ancestors convened a meeting where they voted to redesign their genome. Still, Ackerman deserves credit for taking on what is an important mission -- a mission that is, at least for the moment, doomed to failure.

She's right when she says that "no image English offers -- say, of dominoes, ricochets, echoes, or ripples -- can capture how in the brain everything affects everything else all at once, or how our everythingness always lingers in mind as we engage the everythingness of everyone else." Despite the shortcomings of our ideas and our language, we must keep searching for new ways to express the workings of the brain. It is in those images, more and more, that we see ourselves. -- Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission.

CHAPTER 13 = WHAT IS A MEMORY?

"What sort of future is coming up from behind I don't really know. But the past, spread out ahead, dominates everything in sight." Quote by Robert M. Pirsig (from his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)

Like tiny islands on the horizon, they can vanish in rough seas. Even in calm weather, their coral gradually erodes, pickled by salt and heat. Yet they form the shoals of a life. Some offer safe lagoons and murmuring trees. Others crawl with pirates and reptiles. Together, they connect a self with the mainland and society. Plot their trail and a mercurial past becomes visible.

Memories feel geological in their repose, solid and true, the bedrock of consciousness. They may include knowing that it's hard to lead a cow down steps, or how the indri-indri of Madagascar got its name, or the time you accidentally grabbed a strange man's hand in a crowd (thinking it was your friend's), or how you felt hitting a home run in Little League, or your first car (a used VW that rattled like an old dinette set), or a grisly murder you just read about that made you rethink capital punishment, or an unconscious detailed operating guide to the body that manages each cell's tiny factory.

Memories inform our actions, keep us company, and give us our noisy, ever-chattering sense of self. Because we're moody giants, every day we subtly revise who we think we are. Part of the android's tragedy in the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner is that he possesses a long, self-defining chain of memories. Though ruthless and lacking empathy, and technically not a person, he can remember. Played by Rutger Hauer, he contains a self who witnessed marvels on Earth and Mars and fears losing his unique mental jazz in death.

Without memories we wouldn't know who we are, how we once were, who we'd like to be in the memorable future. We are the sum of our memories. They provide a continuous private sense of one's self. Change your memory and you change your identity. Then shouldn't we try to bank good memories, ones that will define us as we wish to be?

I'm surprised by how many people do just that. Even tour companies advertise: "Bring home wonderful memories." Here we are, a happy family taking a Disney cruise, documented on film. But memory isn't like a camcorder, computer, or storage bin. Memory is more restless, more creative, and it's not one of anything. Each memory is a plural event, an ensemble of synchronized neurons, some side by side, others relatively far apart.

Everyone will always remember where they were on September 11, 2001, or when men first walked on the moon. Shared memories bind us to loved ones, neighbors, our contemporaries. The sort of memory I'm talking about now isn't essential for survival, and yet it pleases us, it enriches everyday life. So couples relive romantic memories, families watch home movies, and friends "catch up" with each other, as if they've lagged behind on a trail. Sifting memory for saliences to report, they reveal how vital pieces of their identity have changed. Aging, we tailor memories to fit our evolving silhouette, and as life's vocabulary changes, memories change to fathom the new order. Lose your memory, and you may drift in an alien world.

Mind you, memories are kidnappable. Radio, television, and the print media purvey shared national memories that can usurp a personal past. All the "why's" can change. A world of artificial memory, as the British neuroscientist Steven Rose points out, "means that whereas all living species have a past, only humans have a history." And, at that, it tends to be the history of the well to do. Thanks to the compound eye of the media, millions of people are spoon-fed the same images, slogans, history, myths. What happens to individual memories then? Some rebels refuse that programming, or they prefer their own group's ideologies.

But most people do adopt values and interpretations of events from the media, their neighbors, or a favorite tyrant. Official history changes with each era's values, which can sometimes be perverse, what Jung described as a large-scale psychic ailment. "An epoch," he said, in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, "is like an individual; it has its own limitations of conscious outlook, and therefore requires a compensatory adjustment...that which everyone blindly craves and expects -- whether this attainment results in good or evil, the healing of an epoch or its destruction." Still, though no one is an island, most are peninsulas. Our lives wouldn't make sense without personal memories pinned like butterflies against the velvet backdrop of social history.

Scientists sometimes talk about "flashbulb" memories so intense they instantly brand the mind. Photography provided something different: push-button memories that revolutionized our sense of self and family, which we often remember in eye-gulps, as snapshots. Walt Whitman, in his journals, jotted down the name of each of his lovers and sometimes what they did for a living, as though he might one day forget his moments of loving and being loved. But I think he would have preferred photographs of those dear ones to help recall the liquid mosaic of each face.

Picture yourself younger, and what image forms? Most likely it's a static image, a snapshot someone took. Memories can pile up and become mind clutter; it's easier to store them in albums. We remember our poses. Each photograph is a magic lamp rubbed by the mind. When we're in the mood, we can savor a photograph while sensations burst free. Right now, for example, I'm holding a photograph of a pungent king penguin rookery in Antarctica, and I remember the noisy clamor like a combination of harmonica and oncoming train. I remember how inhaling glacial cold felt like pulling a scarf through my nostrils. I remember that, in such thin air, glare became a color.

Whenever we look at a photo, we add nuances, and that inevitably edits it. It may pale. It may acquire a thick lacquer of emotion. The next sentence may sound a little bizarre because English grammar isn't congenial to time mirages, however: photographs tell us who we now think we once were. Photography, like most art, stores moments of heightened emotion and awareness like small pieces of neutron star. Years later, a memory's color-rodeo may have faded, or may remain vivid enough to make the pulse buck again. Each response adds another layer until the memory is encrusted with new feelings, below which the original event evaporates. Imagine a jeweled knife. First you change the handle, then you change the blade. Is it the same knife?

We tend to think of memories as monuments we once forged and may find intact beneath the weedy growth of years. But, in a real sense, memories are tied to and describe the present. Formed in an idiosyncratic way when they happened, they're also true to the moment of recall, including how you feel, all you've experienced, and new values, passions, and vulnerability. One never steps into the same stream of consciousness twice. All the mischief and mayhem of a life influences how one restyles a memory.

A memory is more atmospheric than accurate, more an evolving fiction than a sacred text. And thank heavens. If rude, shameful, or brutal memories can't be expunged, they can at least be diluted. So is nothing permanent and fixed in life?

By definition life is a fickle noun, an event in progress. Still, we cling to philosophical railings, religious icons, pillars of belief. We forget on purpose that Earth is rolling at 1,000 miles an hour, and, at the same time, falling elliptically around our sun, while the sun is swinging through the Milky Way, and the Milky Way migrating along with countless other galaxies in a universe about 13.7 billion years old. An event is such a little piece of time and space, leaving only a mindglow behind like the tail of a shooting star. For lack of a better word, we call that scintillation memory. -- Copyright © 2004 by Diane Ackerman

Instantly return to: LIST OF BRAIN BOOKS