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: $25.95
Buy New: $11.97
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Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 138462
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 7.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 0674024788
Dewey Decimal Number: 612.82
EAN: 9780674024786
ASIN: 0674024788
Publication Date: March 31, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: THIS ITEM IS UNUSED AND IN GOOD CONDITION. IT MAY HAVE SLIGHT SHELFWEAR BUT OTHERWISE IT IS FINE.
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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 19 more reviews...
 Entertaining Overview of the Brain July 4, 2008
1 out of 2 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.
Good "challenging" book July 3, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
If you want to know how the human brain has evolved to bring us to who we are, this is a good book for a start. One caveat. The author, David J. Linden, Professor of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University and one of the top brain scientists in America, says "I'll strive to make it fun, but I'm not going to "take all the science out."
What he meant by that is that he leaves lots of technical terms and information in for those who can wade through it without being put off. But most of the book can be navigated even by a person (like me) without a lot of recent scientific education. But the scientific detail makes it a tough read in places.
The chapter on "The Inelegant Design of the Brain" does a good job of convincing the reader that the brain is an hugely inefficient organ that nevertheless creates the marvelous human experience we share. It becomes obvious in "Building a Brain with Yesterday's Parts" that the brain was built over a long time, with one hunk added on top of another until there was a great deal of redundancy and lots of tissue that slows it down compared to your computer. By the time you finish "Some Assembly Required" you will probably understand how all those parts fit together to bring you your experience, and "Sensation and Emotion" will connect your five senses with the emotional interpretation that makes them important to you.
Then Dr. Linden goes on to "Learning, Memory and Human Individuality," "Love and Sex," "Sleeping and Dreaming," and a balanced explanation of "The Religious Impulse." None of this is very controversial in the way that he presents it, and it is up-to-date brain science that every educated person needs to understand.
Finally in "The Unintelligent Design of the Brain" Dr. Linden goes after the "Scientific Creationism" movement and anti-evolution thinkers who insist on "Intelligent Design" in the universe. I think he comes out well, and devastates their arguments in a dozen pages. You might not agree. Read him and see.
This is the best layman's book I've found to bring together all current knowledge of how the brain works to make us human, even though he admits he leaves out some very important areas (language, brain aging and disease, psychoactive drugs, hypnosis, and the placebo effect). You'll have to look elsewhere for information on those. Or perhaps Dr. Linden will write a second edition to fold them into his next up-to-date explanation of the brain. I hope he gets a better editor for the next edition. Some of the scientific detail he leaves in is just too cumbersome--and probably unnecessary for telling his story. Fortunately there's a great deal here that does not demand scientific training of the reader.
 Our mental ice cream cone April 7, 2008
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
The greatest fear among those who reject Charles Darwin's "Dangerous Idea" is the implications the concept holds for human beings. Our brain, they often claim, demonstrates how far we are from the other animals. It must have been designed by "divine intelligence". Not so, says David Linden. Our brain is something cobbled together over millions of years, parts and functions being added over time to produce that kilogramme of matter in our heads. He likens the building-up process to a multi-scoop ice cream cone. In this finely written overview, he explains the brain's structure and functions, relating them to earlier sources with clarity and wit.
The bottom of the ice-cream cone is the brainstem, an ancient structure controlling much of the body's major systems like heartbeat and breathing. Many of the body's communication with the rest of the brain pass through this part. Above the brainstem is the cerebellum, the first "scoop". The cerebellum acts as a signal filter, inhibiting "expected" sensations like your clothing against your skin. When something detectable as not part of "normal" conditions arises, the cerebellum passes those signals to the rest of the brain. That's when the real action begins. Above the cerebellum lies the midbrain, which is the first recipient of visual and sound signals. In some animals, such as frogs, he notes, this is the primary sensory area. Our midbrain, Linden declares, is symbolic of what he calls "brain kludge". It's an archaic region retained from earlier ancestral creatures for very limited processes. Moving upward and forward we encounter two elements, the thalamus and hypothalamus, the former being a major relay station for signals within and to and from the brain. Near these two is the amygdala, the centre of fear and aggression - the "flight or fight" controller that is an obvious holdover from early times.
If there is a "human" area in our brains, it is the cortex. In dealing with its role, the author takes us through how neuronal cells are structured and operate. They are, he notes, a flawed example of "design". Brains are often compared to computers, but the network of neuronal cells is a patchwork of bad connections, leaking signals and is depressingly slow. Copper wire is several orders of magnitude better at passing information. Describing somebody as being "quick minded" reveals we don't really know what's going on in there. There are, Linden reminds us, 100 billion neurons residing in the brain, with 500 trillion synapses - the contact point for brain signals - connecting them. But the distribution is unequal with contact points ranging from 0 to 200 000. No wonder some thoughts "go astray" and "memory fails"!
Knowledge of the brain rests heavily on those who have suffered injury or lesions in particular areas. Today, these are identified by electronic scanners, but no account of the brain would be complete without the early 19th Century story of Phineas Gage. A steel rod through his skull failed to kill him, but his personality was changed forever. Linden recounts the studies initiated by this accident, and goes on to describe the roots of other behaviour traits. He discusses vision, hearing, sleep and dreaming, and, of course, sex. Studies performed on what happens in the brain during orgasm make almost hilarious reading. Even Linden is left wondering just how the subjects coped. His explanation of why humans seem to bond better than other creatures, even our primate cousins is of particular interest. Although the word "love" appears in the subtitle, there's little mention of it in the text. It's not really related to how the brain works. You are cautioned not to jump to Chapter Six before reading the introductory material.
Linden's chapter on why humans have religion is necessarily thin. Little work has been done on this topic. Even what has been done is rudimentary and sketchy. He compares some representative ideas about gods and spirits, noting that there is some uniformity among them. He dismisses any suggestion of a "god part of the brain" or genes prompting for "faith". Instead, he says, there is a tendency for the brain, seen in other mental functions such as vision, to seek "coherent, gap-free stories". The brain "fills in" when it isn't receiving continuous information. There are many forms of this "filling-in", as some patients have exhibited, which Linden refers to as "confabulation". This isn't a form of "making up" stories, since the individuals truly believe what they are saying. They simply have no way of knowing the tale isn't true. It was a surprise to this reviewer that no mention of sensory deprivation studies dealing with this topic was introduced by the author.
Finally, as all writers of science in the US seem compelled to do, Linden responds the rising challenge of "intelligent design". The simple answer is that the notion is a weak attempt to explain what is either unknown or poorly understood. Why US scientists or science journalists must descend to sparring with this elusive concept is both astonishing and worrying. Many astute thinkers and writers have demolished "ID". Why does it need yet another post-mortem? Linden does as good a job as any at demonstrating the falsity of proponents like Behe, Dembski and Johnson. In doing so, he concludes with an appeal for more work to build on what is known about the brain and its evolutionary foundation. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
Fun reading March 27, 2008
The Accidental Mind is a very interesting book with a lot of information on why we behave the way we do. It explains how the brain evolved and how genetics, the brain's structure and the way the brain works, affects our behavior. Kind of like Matt Ridley's Nature via Nurture only not solely focused on genetics. It has fun info (not as much as nature via Nurture) and his explanations are very clear. I enjoyed the book. The only thing I didn't like is a quasi religious insistence on the fact thar the brain's less than perfect evolution and functioning is proof positive of there being no God. This makes the book seem biased. Trying to convince people of the existence or lack of thereof of God is futile, and in my opinion, weakens the book. People either have faith and believe God is omnipotent, and thus could choose any way to brings human to our current state of development (including random evolution), or they don't and won't be convinced by the intelligent design advocates or creationists, any more than Theists reading Linden's book will be convinced by his arguments.
Great read on an interesting topic March 3, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
David J. Linden has written a highly accessible book on brain function and evolution. Taking his cue from Max Delbruck, ("Imagine that your audience has zero knowledge but infinite intelligence") Linden has managed to present the material in a way that should appeal to both a lay and an academic readership.
The book can be summarized as follows:
1) Evolution is a tinkerer, not an engineer. The brain's design is inelegant because the brain is never re-designed from the bottom-up - it is an anachronistic contraption in which the more recent phylogenetic acquisitions are layered on top of ancient ones.
2) The brain's control systems (e.g., the cerebellar comparator mechanism which subtracts expected sensorimotor sensations from actually perceived sensations) are permanently on - even if their `ON' condition is maladaptive in a given situation.
3) The brain's component parts (the neurons) are sub-optimal processors which have not changed much since they first evolved (e.g., they are leaky electrical conductors, they are metabolically inefficient, they have short signaling ranges). Therefore, in order to achieve the sorts of computational complexity of which human beings are capable, the neurons need to come in large numbers and to be patterned in the appropriate ways (on average, the human brain contains about a 100 billion neurons and 500 trillion synaptic connections).
Linden then follows the implications of these three guiding principles. For instance, it follows from Principle 3 that the human genome cannot possibly specify the brain's intricate wiring diagram. Instead the genome specifies only a rough-and-ready kind of brain map and enables experience to modify the fine structure. The same cellular and molecular mechanisms are co-opted for feats of learning and memory.
For a reader unfamiliar with the basics of brain function this book can serve as an excellent primer as it reviews the fundamentals of neural structure, function and neuroembryogenesis in a very approachable and light style. More sophisticated readers may appreciate some of the arcane facts that Linden mentions in the book, the way that he synthesizes the available data, as well as the way in which he writes about some speculative topics (the brain bases of the religious impulse). All in all, a rather engaging little book.
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