This enthralling book starts at the earliest points of the halting journey to an experimental science of the brain, moving to the present era, where we simultaneously have a surfeit of data, and a poverty of far-reaching, intellectually-satisfying, theories of brain function.

The brain is notable by its absence in both the Bible and the Koran. Generations were content to rely on the writings of the ancients, even where they were obviously wrong. And medical science, such as it was, for generations was content to engage in textual analysis, rather than inspect the brain and body, then dissect, draw and describe what was there.

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👋 Here in the BrainPizza Newsletter, I take a fresh look at life through an informed, empirical, neuroscience and psychology lens. I do regular in-depth treatments of topics such as our very human metabolism, George Orwell, AI hype, brain implants, memory, hunger, NIMBYism, thinking, how to write books, and much, much more, as well as occasional listicles, readings, book reviews, and commentaries. You can browse the archives here; if you’d like to get these regular in-depth emails in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

Interesting reflections on minimal brains here:

Wild Information

What's a Brain?

We all have one: three pounds of winkled grey-pink peering out at the world from behind castle walls of bone. It’s the seat of consciousness and dreams. It holds memories, harbors love, shocks with fear, awe, and pain; it works over the raw input of the senses, smoothing the chemic…

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2 years ago · 25 likes · 4 comments · Claire L. Evans

Cobb dates a change in attitude to the late Middle Ages, and to the investigatory willingness of certain Italian academics. One important figure was Mondino de Luzzi, Professor of Medicine and Anatomy at the University of Bologna. Mondino, on writing of the preparations for a human dissection, stated simply that ‘The human corpse, killed through decapitation or hanging, is placed in the supine position’, words conveying an utter indifference to the dignity of the body in death which we do not assume today.

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His book, Into The Grey Zone, can be read on several levels: as an enthralling scientific detective story, as a story of broken minds and brains, or a book that feels incomplete, because the story it tells is not yet scientifically, medically, ethically or philosophically concluded.

Owen presents one of the most remarkable scientific stories of recent decades - the investigation of fractional human consciousness remaining in broken and damaged brains situated in still and unmoving bodies. Owen and his colleagues have shown that a substantial percentage of patients thought to be in a coma (perhaps one in five) are in a ‘grey zone’ somewhere between consciousness and coma.

Such patients are not ‘vegetative’: they are in there somewhere, but what condition they are in is difficult to know. They show some form of (at least minimal) consciousness. And modern brain imaging technologies has allowed communication to be re-established in many such cases.

👋 Here in the BrainPizza Newsletter, I take a fresh look at life through an informed, empirical, neuroscience and psychology lens. I do regular in-depth treatments of topics such as our very human metabolism, George Orwell, AI hype, brain implants, memory, hunger, NIMBYism, thinking, how to write books, and much, much more, as well as occasional listicles, readings, book reviews, and commentaries. You can browse the archives here; if you’d like to get these regular in-depth emails in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

Owen describes using the latest in brain imaging technology to communicate with these seemingly mute, inexpressive, comatose patients. Fragmentary consciousness

Previous Salience Network reviews

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Slow Productivity: Exploring Cal Newport's Philosophy

Newport’s principles: Doing Fewer Things, Working at a Natural Pace, and Obsessing Over Quality1

I've just finished reading Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport. Newport argues that in our frenzy of busyness, we're not taking the needed steps back from the work we have at hand to try to figure out what is truly important about what we’re trying to do.

There's lots to admire in this book, and there are lots of lessons knowledge workers can take away from it.

Newport opens the book with a story about the celebrated American writer John McPhee from nearly 60 years ago. While I'd recommend reading Newport's book for the full story, there's a beautiful phrase employed by Newport to describe McPhee’s creative process – “a languid intentionality” of accumulating detail and information, and then stepping back from the problem to contemplate it from various angles, rather than immediately attacking it head-on.

TL,DR

1. Slow productivity encourages knowledge workers to prioritise deep, meaningful work over the constant busyness of immediate tasks.

2. By embracing slow productivity principles, individuals can cultivate a focused mindset, leading to more innovative problem-solving and higher-quality outputs in their professional work.

3. By slowing down and engaging in focused, distraction-free work, workers can achieve greater productivity and make significant contributions in their fields.

Newport argues that knowledge workers often get caught up in the urgency of immediate tasks like emails and messages, neglecting the critical thinking and creativity required for their roles, leading to the obvious and detrimental effects of multitasking and constant distractions on cognitive performance and creativity.

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Welcome to the Salience Network, a new section on the Brain Pizza substack, exclusively for paid subscribers. The title is a loose pun on the brain’s ‘salience network’ which has the job of monitoring striking or unusual external inputs as well as internal brain events; it has a central role in identifying important biological and cognitive events. Here, you'll find new material beyond the paid and free regular newsletter, all through a psychology and neuroscience lens. This post will be unlocked as a one-off gift for free subscribers in six days time.

These are the people – the functionaries – on whom evil committed at scale depends. Those who ‘go along to get along’, unwilling to question and disobey commands from higher-status authority figures. They are obedient.

Why are they obedient? Is this something peculiar to them as persons?

Will we all fall when confronted with the ‘system’, with ‘authority’?

To kick off this edition of the Salience Network, I'm going to look back on a book published half a century ago by Stanley Milgram (1974), entitled “Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View,” which challenges comforting and self-regarding views of human nature. Milgram worked in what was a ‘golden age’ in social psychology, where marked advances were made in understanding the dynamics of humans behaving when gathered in groups. Just as we see great and wonderful things done by humans working together in directed groups, we also terrible things done by humans working together in directed groups, obedient to the demands of authority.

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