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THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD, June 10, 2004

A review of An Alchemy of the Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the
Brain, by Diane Ackerman.

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 An Alchemy of Mind 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.

Copyright 2004 Carl Zimmer