30 second brain

Poking around at http://www.anilseth.com/, I came across and bought a book called '30 second brain', one of a series published by the Ivy Press of Lewes, whose site at http://www.ivypress.co.uk/ shows them to have an engagingly eclectic list.

As a bit of book production, unusual not to say odd, with the boards faced with what looks like brown packing paper, with some of the illustrations having what looks like brown packing paper as the background and with most of the right hand pages being taking up with rather odd illustrations, only rather loosely related to the text on the left hand pages and not usually very helpful - although some are, like that on page 99, reproduced left, which neatly illustrates one of the many tricks of human colour vision - all three greens being printed in the same colour.

The core of the book is fifty neatly presented, one page summaries of interesting topics in neuroscience, for example 'The Bayesian brain', 'The alien hand syndrome' and 'The ageing brain', and the rather implausible story is that you can consume the inner core of such a page in 30 seconds, hence the title. The diet is varied with a number of two page spreads telling us about an important person in the field and, for each of the seven chapters, a helpful two page glossary.

By way of a short example, I offer the factlet that schizophrenics, unlike the rest of us, can tickle themselves.

By way of a long example, I offer a story about a few of the people who appear to be in a deep, possibly irreversible coma. To all intents and purposes dead.

One then tells them that they are to be asked some questions, of the sort that want a yes/no answer. And to answer yes by thinking of a tennis match and to answer no by thinking of a nettle. It seems that with the right sort of brain inspection equipment one can communicate with at least some comatose people on this basis.

In another experiment, normal conscious subjects are given a small number of options, for example circle, square and triangle, and they are asked to think about one of them. Again, with the right sort of brain inspection equipment one can see which option the subject has chosen.

This is all a bit slow, low bandwidth in the jargon, but maybe in time we will be able to do better. Maybe the list of options could be the letters of the alphabet, and the subjects will be able to think out arbitrary words to be read by the computer. Maybe some person-computer pairs would be able to do this at speeds of the same order as that, for example, of reading braille. I associate to the prison cell wall tapping technique of Koestler's 'Darkness at Noon'. And morse code, with both of these rather clumsy techniques being pretty much like reading and writing to adepts.

But the question more interesting to me is, is the first subject conscious? I think my answer is maybe. Maybe someone who is in a coma but not conscious could do this. Not enough information. I associate to the sleep learning wheezes which one has in  Huxley's ‘Brave New World’ and which have been tried, with some limited success, in real life - although I suspect that http://www.sleeplearning.com/ overstates the case.

In sum, a good read or a good dip for someone like myself with some basic science and a smattering of prior knowledge; a lucky find. Lots of good stuff to build into lectures for A-level students or first year undergraduates.