The mind's complexity respected

An Anatomy of Thought: The Origin and Machinery of the Mindedited by Ian GlynnOxford University Press, 2000. £25.00 (viii + 456 pages)ISBN 0 297 82002 8The evidence of recent years suggests a sure-fire recipe for writing a block-buster on the mind. One's background should be in cosmology, astrophysics or mathematics, and the text should project mystery, because that is the way to win respect. On no account should the book touch on neuroscience. This would be the kiss of death, and guarantee a miserable sales record. Judged against that warped yardstick, Ian Glynn's book may score badly with the general public. But it will enjoy support in professional circles, and no neuroscientist's bookshelf should be without a copy.Preliminary inspection reveals a surprise because pictures of nucleic acids are not common in books on this subject. Why go down to such a microscopic scale? But it transpires that Glynn has an additional and uncompromising agenda. ‘At a time when the British Treasury feels that Charles Darwin is too controversial a figure to appear on a bank note’, he observes, ‘a potential American Presidential candidate advocates the compulsory teaching of creationism in American schools, and more than a quarter of first-year medical students at a major Australian university reject the theory of evolution by natural selection’. If the supernatural is to be exorcised from matters mental, therefore, it must be expunged first from matters molecular, from which all else springs. Glynn masterfully relates how self-organization can account for biology's basic phenomena, without invoking anything mystical, and thereby sets the stage for his central debate: does similar bootstrapping underlie what we call the mind?Common sense is the worst enemy of those who tackle the mind–body problem. For as Glynn archly observes, it is the view even philosophers adopt when they are not plying their trade. It undid the now-maligned Descartes. ‘Common sense is the most widely shared commodity in the world’, he opined, ‘for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it’. Including Descartes himself, who considered the facts and opted for dualism. We routinely denigrate that concept, but continue to flirt with it. How many of us appreciate the real implications of the question: where is my ‘me-ness’?Glynn has a marvellous narrative style. His account of the individual efforts of Darwin, Wallace and Mendel reads like a detective novel, that story reaching its climax when Darwin and Mendel narrowly miss contacting each other. Mendel possessed a copy of The Origin of the Species 1xSee all References, and even annotated it, but he did not write to Darwin. Conversely, copies of Mendel's key publication were sent to both the Royal Society and the Linnean Society in London, but Darwin never read it. There is enough drama here to attract the talents of Michael Frayn and Tom Stoppard. Later, when discussing the visual system, Glynn is able to reap the benefit of his book's fine evolutionary foundation; he can aptly cite John Mollon's suggestion that ‘…our trichromatic colour vision … is a device invented by certain fruiting trees in order to propagate themselves’ 2xMollon, J.D. : 127–150See all References. Before that, when finally getting down to describing the nervous system, Glynn hopes that by giving the historical background, he will have helped ‘…readers who know little of science to appreciate the extraordinary achievement that lies behind our present understanding’. He succeeds admirably.This book is perhaps at its best when anticipating where to slow down and give the reader more than the usual amount of detail. And this concern for the uninitiated is no more evident than in the section on Edwin Land's retinex theory. In the first chapter, after noting that one laughs at those who believe the earth is flat, Glynn wonders how many would accept the idea of black paper observed by sunlight reflecting more light than white paper observed by moonlight. This is an excellent example of the failure of intuition. So he devotes four pages to Land's work and not only conveys the brilliance of the theory but also teaches us not to take things at face value. This is pedagogy at its very best.Only once does Glynn's scholarship falter. Reading his coverage of neural networks, one could get the impression that this subject was established primarily through the efforts of a small group of collaborators, who account for half the entries in the bibliography. This is misleading. The back-propagation algorithm, for example, was simultaneously developed by several independent researchers, and the ones cited were not even the first to publish this much-used prescription. Likewise, justice cannot be done to the subject of face recognition by connectionist techniques if the independent efforts of Igor Aleksander and Teuvo Kohonen are ignored. But this blemish does not detract from the book's value, because it appears in a section that may prove to be relatively unimportant; Francis Crick once referred to work on neural networks as a relatively lowbrow activity.The crunch comes in the final discussion of consciousness, of course, and here we find the author exercising caution. He gives the word, in turn, to such prominent figures as Dennett, Searle and Block and because there is no glossary, he is not forced to essay a definition. Given that consciousness is now regarded as one of the last three or four major mysteries confronting science, Glynn can hardly be criticised for his reticence. On the contrary, it is entirely in keeping with the careful approach that pervades his text that he should close by nailing his colours firmly to the fence. It is a pity that we do not see similar prudence in the behaviour of that unnamed American politician.