A Brain for Numbers: Andreas Nieder ***

In dramas it's not usual for someone dumping a partner to say 'It's not you, it's me,' - and that's how I felt about this book. I'm sure some readers would find it really interesting, but it didn't work for me.

I think the main problem is that that I'm interested in maths, but not so much in how human and animal brains handle numbers. So I found the opening and closing chapters, which deal with the nature of numbers (specifically zero in that closing chapter) I enjoyed, but the vast majority of the book explores the design of experiments to try to understand how animals perceive numbers (or don't), what we can learn from them, and how animals' and our brains react to numbers.

As soon as I see a map of the brain, I'm afraid I turn off - there's an element of Richard Feynman's famous complaint about biology students wasting their time learning the names of all the bits in a cat's nervous system. However, if you are interested in how the brain responds to numbers (we're talking specifically whole counting numbers here), then I've no doubt the book would prove more interesting.

I don't think it helped that there's some quite heavyweight language used, which my eyes tend to bounce off. After a while I struggle to keep going when this is the case. I've just opened the book at random and the first sentence I came across was 'This study showed stable neural representations of sequential numerosities [sic] across visual and auditory modalities.'

For the right audience - I suspect biology students wanting to explore this area further - this is undoubtedly a great book. But it didn't do it for me.

Hardback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically? Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...

Search This Blog