Skip to main content

Of Sound Mind - Nina Kraus ***

Like most genres, popular science goes through phases - for the last couple of years, neuroscience has been the in thing, to the extent that I tend to think 'not another brain book' when I see one - but for someone who has always sung, the idea of finding out more about the relationship between the brain and sound, especially music, was attractive. 

Nina Kraus is certainly enthusiastic about her topic and generally the book is well-pitched (appropriate given the musical connotations) and readable. However, Kraus does occasionally fall for a classic academic's failing of making use of unnecessary jargon. For example, she defines two terms 'afferent' and 'efferent', apparently adjectives for direction of travel. Kraus even points out how easily confused they are - so why use them? This isn't a textbook - there's no need to load the reader with all the jargon.

Some sections worked particularly well for me. The chapters on language and sound were very interesting, as were those on noise and ageing. Kraus demonstrates well how sustained background noise - even at relatively low levels - can have a negative impact on achievements. The positive outcomes of being an active musician are also of interest. I use the term 'active' here, as Kraus emphasises that listening to music is good, but to gain the benefits she mentions you have to play an instrument or sing, not just listen. Those benefits are in having an improvement in your 'sound mind', something Kraus defines as 'sound, what our brains do with it, and also what this does to us.' It seems that 'Music does an exceptional job of engaging [the cognitive, motor, reward and sensory] systems, providing effective avenues for learning through sound.'

As is almost always the case in neuroscience books, there is too much text given over to labelling bits of the brain and describing their role. By the time I'm half way through these sections I've already forgotten what all those labels mean - science shouldn't be about learning labels. In at least one case, too, there is evidence of the author being too close to the subject - we are told about hair cells in ear, but it's not mentioned that they aren't actually hairs.

A particularly poor aspect of the book are the illustrations, which look like they belong in a self-published effort. Many of them fall into one or other of the two most common problems with DIY illustrations - they either don't add anything to the text or they are so small and/or murky that it's impossible to make out what it is that they are illustrating.

Overall, I repeatedly found it hard to find any solid meaning in the content of the book. When defining the sound mind, for example, Kraus comments 'I think the sound mind is a force behind a continuum from the past to the present and into the future.' That's alright, then. Time and again, this kind of vague waffly comment made me struggle to follow what was intended. I'm sure some will love it, but for me Of Sound Mind could have been better.

Hardback: 
Bookshop.org

  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

In Seach of Sea Dragons - Matthew Myerscough ****

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting.  Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...
Post a Comment
Read more

Robot-Proof - Vivienne Ming ****

As Vivienne Ming makes apparent, there seem largely to be two views of AI's pros and cons, both of which are almost certainly wrong. It's either doom-saying 'It'll destroy life as we know it' or Pollyanna-ish 'It'll do all the boring work and we can all be wonderfully creative and live lives of leisure.' Instead, Ming gives us a clear analysis of the likely trajectory for the workplace, particularly for the IT industry. She describes three 'equally flawed, intellectually lazy strategies' to deal with the impact of AI. The first is substitution and deprofessionalisation, using AI to allow cheaper 'AI-augmented technicians' to replace more expensive professionals, producing more low wage jobs and fewer mid-range. This does save money but leaves a company at risk of being easily outcompeted. The second is what Ming describes as the '"A-Player" Hunger Games', the approach favoured by Silicon Valley. This sees the growing rif...
Post a Comment
Read more