Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals About How We Become Who We Are

by Stanley Myer, Terrence J Sejnowski

Overview

This exciting, timely book combines cutting-edge findings in neuroscience with examples from history and recent headlines to offer new insights into who we are. Introducing the new science of cultural biology, born of advances in brain imaging, computer modeling, and genetics, Drs. Quartz and Sejnowski demystify the dynamic engagement between brain and world that makes us something far beyond the sum of our parts.

The authors show how our humanity unfolds in precise stages as brain and world engage on increasingly complex levels. Their discussion embraces shaping forces as ancient as climate change over millennia and events as recent as the terrorism and heroism of September 11 and offers intriguing answers to some of our most enduring questions, including why we live together, love, kill -- and sometimes lay down our lives for others.

The answers, it turns out, are surprising and paradoxical: many of the noblest aspects of human nature -- altruism, love, courage, and creativity -- are rooted in brain systems so ancient that we share them with insects, and these systems form the basis as well of some of our darkest destructive traits. The authors also overturn popular views of how brains develop. We're not the simple product of animal urges, "selfish" genes, or nature versus nurture. We survive by creating an ingenious web of ideas for making sense of our world -- a symbolic reality called culture. This we endow to later generations as our blueprint for survival.

Using compelling examples from history and contemporary life, the authors show how engagement with the world excites brain chemistry, which drives further engagement, which encourages the development of cultural complexity. They also share provocative ideas on how human development may be affected by changes in our culture. Their insights, grounded in science and far-reaching in their implications, are riveting reading for anyone interested in our past, present, and future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062028662
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	12/14/2010
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Steven R. Quartz, Ph.D., is director of the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology and an associate professor in the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Computation and Neural Systems Program. He was a fellow of the Sloan Center for Theoretical Neurobiology at the Salk Institute and a recipient of the National Science Foundation's CAREER award, its most prestigious award for young faculty. He lives in Topanga, California.
Terrence J. Sejnowski, Ph.D., is regarded as the world's foremost theoretical brain scientist. His demonstration of NETtalk, a neural network that learned to read English words, helped spark the 1980s neural network revolution for which he received the IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award in 2002. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University before studying neurobiology at Harvard University School of Medicine. He is an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute. At the University of California at San Diego he is a professor of biology, physics, and neurosciences and directs the Institute for Neural Computation. He has published more than two hundred scientific articles and has been featured in the national media. He lives in Solana Beach, California.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Our Brains, Ourselves

The point of view taken here is neither a "biological" one nor a "sociological" one if that would mean separating these two aspects from each other.

-- Erich Fromm, The Sane Society

There's something disturbing about holding a human brain in your hands. It feels almost sacrilegious, as though you're violating some basic taboo. Even among medical students who think nothing of eating lunch beside the cadaver they're dissecting, you can feel their uneasiness when it comes time to remove the brain. Over the electric whir of a bone saw penetrating the skull just above the ears, someone inevitably tries to ease the strain with a joke.

Cutting away the tangle of fibers holding the brain in place is slow, delicate work, increasing the tension in the room. And when the brain is finally eased out, a sickening, sucking sound breaks the silence as air rushes in to fill the void left behind.

Holding this person's brain, turning it in your hands, you try to block the clichéd image of Hamlet pondering Yorick's skull, but it still floods your mind. You find yourself asking similar questions: What did this brain once think; what secret dreams did it hold; what memories are locked forever deep in its folds? Staring at it, you also can't blot out the thought that you are bound for a similar fate. One day all your hopes and thoughts -- all that you are -- will be reduced to a three-pound clump of silent cells that was once a person.

This book is about the first insights a new kind of brain science isgiving us into what makes us who we are. Somehow, your sense of being someone unique -- a thinking, feeling person -- emerges from the workings of the most complex object in the known universe: your brain. If someone close to you has ever suffered a brain injury or disease, you know that the connection between the brain and who you are is all too real. Consider Irene's story.

She had been denying the signs for a year. Then one day she had trouble finding her way home from her office, her daily commute for the last twenty years. Finally arriving home, shaken and confused, she couldn't deny it any longer. Something was happening to her, and it terrified her. Her husband, Bill, had suspected something was wrong a few weeks earlier when they'd gone out for dinner because Irene said she had forgotten to make it. When they returned home, he had found the dinner she had prepared waiting for them at the table. Trying to protect her pride, he quickly cleared it away without her seeing. But after this latest incident they both realized they couldn't deny the signs anymore.

Many doctors and tests later, Irene's worst fears were confirmed: Alzheimer's disease. Her doctor tried to explain what was probably happening in her brain. Something about plaques, tangles, and dying brain cells. But he couldn't offer much hope for treatment. As Irene's condition worsened, she would have the occasional clear day, only to break down in tears at the realization of what was happening to her. She was losing control to a disease that was attacking more than her body. It was slowly stealing her away from herself. Bill recounts how hard it was to sit by her bedside day after day when she no longer recognized him or even knew her own name, helpless to fight a disease that slowly robbed her of who she was until she was no more.

As Irene's tragedy makes painfully clear, who you are hangs in a delicate balancing act inside your brain. And although its breakdown brings unspeakable horrors, your strongest feelings of elation and even love likewise spring from your brain's intricate workings. The chemical soup inside your head gives rise to your deepest feelings, to your capacity to wonder, even to the grief that makes you human. Not all brain disorders bring the sort of tragedy that afflicted Irene. Some alter the texture our brains give to our everyday life, even making some patients curiously appreciative of the changes brought on by a stroke. Consider the strange case of a Swiss political journalist. At the age of forty-eight, Klaus suffered a stroke, a rupture in the blood supply to his brain. But as he recovered in the hospital he seemed little concerned with his condition. Instead, he fixated on the hospital food, which he complained about bitterly. Now you might not think too much of that, since hospital food is pretty miserable stuff. That's what his doctor, Marianne Regard, thought at the time, too. She asked Klaus to keep a diary, and it revealed a strange change in him. Before his stroke, Klaus had always been one who ate to live. After his stroke, he lived to eat. This wasn't just bingeing on Big Macs, though. He didn't even gain weight. Instead, he had a newfound preoccupation, bordering on an obsession, with gourmet food. Damage to his brain had transformed the experience of gourmet food into one of pure rapture. Klaus even quit his job as a political journalist to become a fine-dining columnist. Since Klaus's case eight years ago, Dr. Regard has found many more cases of what's now known as "gourmand syndrome." Injury somewhere in the right frontal part of the brain can turn some people into fine-food lovers of the highest order.

As this strange brain condition suggests, every nuance of yourself, the very fabric of your experience, ultimately arises from the machinations of your brain. The brain houses your humanity. Without it, you would be as heartless and cold as a robot, an automaton for which life might have goals but would have no meaning.

Among the astounding diversity of brains in nature, ours seems capable of many unique capacities. As far as we know, our brains are the only ones to generate a sense of who we are. Our brains create a life history ...

Liars, Lovers, and Heroes. Copyright © by Steven Quartz. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Preface	xiii
1	Our Brains, Ourselves	1
2	Making Connections	21
3	How to Make a Human: The 1.6 Percent Solution	32
4	Life on the Far Shore: Crossing the Mental Rubicon	61
5	Between Thought and Feeling: The Mystery of Emotions	88
6	Becoming You: Genes, Parenting, and Personality	123
7	Friend, Lover, Citizen: The Mystery of Life Together	148
8	The Killer Within: From the Solitary Killer to the Killing Crowd	189
9	Inside Intelligence: Rethinking What Makes Us Smart	216
10	The Search for Happiness	252
	Afterword: After September 11	278
	Notes	285
	Index	329

What People are Saying About This

Sandra Blakeslee

“An evocative solution to a classic problem: which is more important in shaping the human brain, nature or nurture?”

V. S. Ramachandran

“A superb book … a breath of fresh air.”

Editorial Reviews

According to Quartz and Sejnowski, we aren't what we eat; we're what we encounter. Describing the new science of cultural biology, these two renowned neuroscientists explain how immersion in culture excites our brain chemistry and activates deeper engagement, which further shapes our culture and, we hope, ensures our prospects for species survival. Liars, Lovers and Heroes probes Homo sapiens' deepest nature, offering provocative ideas about how changing our culture may affect human development.

bn.com

Why do humans fall in love, create art, make war? Quartz, director of the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Cal Tech, and Sejnowski, director of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute, argue that these and other capabilities are the result of biology and culture working together. Challenging the view that human brains are hardwired for certain behaviors, they believe instead that "[y]our experience with the world literally helps build your brain." In this wide-ranging and relatively nontechnical overview, the authors show how the human brain evolved to maximize flexibility, enabling us to thrive in a wide variety of circumstances. They discuss intelligence and learning, emotions, motivation, violence, and the importance of social bonds, linking cutting-edge neuroscience with social history and popular culture. Starting each chapter with an intriguing case history and spinning off into fascinating, if sometimes sketchily developed, presentations of related material, the book reads a bit like a made-for-TV serial documentary that concedes to short attention spans by highlighting the dramatic. As a result, some topics among them the discussion of violence receive useful but less than thorough treatment. Quartz and Sejnowski conclude with a thought-provoking chapter on the challenges of postmodern culture and globalization, suggesting that the findings of cultural biology can point the way toward creating societies that better meet our basic needs for positive social engagement. Their views, engagingly presented if sometimes controversial, will open up a hitherto specialized subject for a wider audience. (Nov. 12) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

What makes us human? A combination of genes and developmental programs interacting with an environment that shapes the brain across the life span, declare two California neuroscientists.

Dubbing their study of these complex interactions "cultural biology," Quartz (director of Caltech’s Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab) and Sejnowski (director of the Salk Institute’s Computational Neurobiology Lab) condemn evolutionary psychology’s argument that we are cast adrift in modern society with our old hunter-gatherer savannah lifestyle. Neither naturists nor nurturists, the authors defend their not-unreasonable thesis by pointing to a detailed geological record showing rapid climate change. This called for maximum flexibility in adaptation, they contend, and probably helped build bigger brains, tools, and a habit of living in groups. Quartz and Sejnowski describe an infant’s survival mechanisms as an "internal guidance system" that will endure even as that individual’s "user’s guide to life" comes online as a result of the sociocultural shaping of the slow-to-mature prefrontal cortex and its anterior cingulate. These brain parts are key to planning, judging, and decision-making and are also linked to emotion and motivation. A derailment in these areas, specifically a hyperarousal of the orbitofrontal cortex, may be responsible for the mass suicide of cultists, group violence, and killings by high-school misfits, the authors conjecture. While they admit that the brain is more complex than we can fathom, they are ready to discourse on learning, love, intelligence, personality, and happiness, often pointing to anatomical pathways and neurochemicals as clues: low serotonin in depression andsuicide, oxytocin in love, and so on. They are also quite prescriptive in later chapters. What should we to do to achieve "successful aging" and rescue American society from increasing depression and isolation? Leave the TV and Net, go out and work in the community.

Smart authors with a lot of hot stuff to report on, but they should cool it a bit.

Kirkus Reviews

"An entertaining and startling survey of what it means to be human."

Discover Magazine

A superb book … a breath of fresh air.

V. S. Ramachandran

An evocative solution to a classic problem: which is more important in shaping the human brain, nature or nurture?

Sandra Blakeslee

An entertaining and startling survey of what it means to be human.

Discover magazine