“Messy” by Tim Harford

This book might be described as a self-help book written by an economist. That is a complement, sort-of. The prose are even more breezy than Harford’s Financial Times articles and the book is helpfully sectioned off into themes. For boosting creativity, Harford suggests, “the combination of gradual improvements and random shocks turns out to be a very effective way to approach a host of difficult problems.” He points out that we, as humans, are always trying to get ever-better at things, but sometimes you have to take a few steps backwards or start over from a lower starting point to get to the eventual higher peaks. In collaborative efforts, Harford suggests that life’s weak ties are sometimes the most fruitful ones. “The more peripheral the contact, the more likely she is to tell you something you don’t know.” He warns to beware when metrics become an end in themselves, instead of a tool. “When we start quantifying and measuring the world, we soon begin to change the world to fit the way we measure it.” Harford also suggests making a conscious embrace of life’s messiness. “Given a tidy option, we tend to take it.” Overall, he suggests making efforts to get out of one’s comfort zone. Often when we believe we are doing our best we are not. We deceive ourselves in a quest for simplicity, ease, and order. “Trying to categorize the world is not as straightforward as we like to believe. Our categories can map to practical real-world cases, or they can be neat and logical, but rarely both at once…. Daily plans are tidy, but life is messy.”

“Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction” by Philip Tetlock

Tetlock’s book is an intersection of psychology and the social sciences, focussing on how humans make predictions and how they can make them better. He explains that predicting the future is a skill you can learn and improve on. The book recounts the behavioral fallacy traps that are most common and the best ways to avoid them. Tetlock states that people who are good predictors are well read, adjust their views often and in small increments, tend to judge proportion and magnitudes well, seek out contrary opinion and will be swayed by it, and use good statistical baselines before being swayed by current events. Most also use Bayesian logic (informally), even if they do not know that term. However, the key to judging predictions in the first place is not giving vague statements open to revisionist interpretation, but, instead, concrete facts that can be absolutely proved or disproved within a given timeframe. That is not as easy as it sounds: most media pundits and prognosticators make careers out of weaseling their way out of such falsifiable predictions with caveats and clarifications.

The predictions studied focus primarily on the realms of geopolitics and economics, but the methods can apply to most of everyday life. Importantly, it finds that prediction is a skill that can be improved upon with hard work and that often the highest IQ people are the worst at making predictions. The takeaway- “try, fail, analyze, adjust, try again.” The research techniques gleaned are easy to apply to both make probability predictions and how to better interact with people and the news everyday. This book shows how to make precise predictions about hard facts and shows why so many talking heads in the news media consistently refuse to do so. The greatest strength of this book is the clarity of mind it forces upon you. So you might be interested in whether there will be a Third Intifada or if there will be a bigger Great Recession. But you should try to predict the probability that 30 Israeli citizens will be murdered by Palestinians in the next five months or whether the Dow Jones will be lower than 12,000 at any point in calendar year 2018. Or whether any IDF tanks will enter Gaza in the next two months or whether the S&P 500 will go down 10% in the next four months. The specifics don't matter, as long as they are specific and testable. Those are the questions you really can answer with clarity, putting your reputation where your mouth is.

“The Little Virtues” by Natalia Ginzburg (translated by Dick Davis)

This collection of essays depicts the early post-WWII career of Ginzburg. The topics span the gamut, from life in Abruzzi living on the run from the fascists to the variety and quality of food in post-war London. Her title essay perhaps best combines her elegant writing style, her wit, her eye for detail, her perceptiveness about human nature, and her passion for life. She advises, “as far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt of danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one’s neighbour and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know. Usually we do just the opposite; we rush to teach them a respect for the little virtues, on which we build our whole system of education. In doing this we are choosing the easiest way, because the little virtues do not involve any actual dangers, indeed they provide shelter from Fortune’s blows.” She has been described as a writer’s writer and the one thing that sustained her through her time in hiding, through her husband’s execution at the hand of the Nazis, and through raising her three children after the war was her vocation. For Ginzburg, it was not a career choice, but her only passion. “I love and understand one thing in the world and that is poetry.”

“Hive Mind” by Garett Jones

This book might have been the most controversial and important book written in the social sciences in 2015. It is controversial because it makes claims primarily based on IQ tests. Garrett Jones states that, while individual IQ is a poor predictor of wealth, on a national level it is highly correlated to growth. He begins by explaining why modern IQ tests are not culturally biased, even predictable by MRI scans of brain mass. Then he goes on to explain the Flynn effect: the steady rise of IQ over time. Finally, he points out that IQ scores tend to predict a nation’s wealth due to networking effects, mimetic human nature, and cooperation in prisoner dilemmas and in O-ring technologies, which all trickle down, making even those with poor IQs in high IQ countries richer and more productive.

However, what is important to remember is that the actual IQ test scores are of minimal importance. What is important is that they serve as proxies for effects that have empirically significant relevance in the real world. These effects are statistically significant. The magnitudes can be quibbled with and debated, but there is no doubt as to their significance. In fact, IQ test scores are a better predictor of a country’s economic success (measured as GDP per capita) than even years of education. The paradox is, however, while IQ tests are a great predictor of a nation’s wealth, these test results predict little to nothing about any individual’s wealth. Why would IQ test results have such a great effect on a nation’s income, while almost no effect on an individual’s? 

First, IQ tests tend to be a good predictor of overall intelligence, the so-called general factor or Di-Vinci effect. The weighted average of a large number of test scores can summarize 40-50% of all differences across people on modern IQ tests. 40-50% is not everything, but when pooled to all of a country’s citizens one gets a pretty good benchmark of general aptitude. I will not get into why modern IQ tests that rely primarily on spacial tasks are not culturally biased, but, sufficed to say, a handful of different tests all produce similar results and they even correlate positively to MRI scans of physical brain size. People have speculated on what factors raise IQ: from a more iodine-rich diet to less lead in the environment. These are interesting sidelights of this book, but not its main thrust. 

What traits did people with higher IQ exhibit? They tended to be more patient, tended to be able to juggle multiple facts in their heads including long chains of events, tended to be able to sift through the noise to pick out pertinent information, tended to be more imaginative (and could foresee longterm results perhaps leading to greater patience), tended to be more “savings” prone, tended to be more open to new experiences, and tended to be socially intelligent (that is they could read other people’s motives and signals early and react accordingly). “People who are more rational are more likely to be aware of just how irrational most people are.”

Why are these traits magnified when looking at countries rather than individuals (a magnification effect that Jones’ research puts at up to 6x)? One clue is provided by modern sociology, which has noted people’s tendency to want to conform to the group. Good (and bad) traits are often mimicked through the imitation channel. For instance, the Veblen effect states that consumer spending habits are driven by social comparisons. If your neighbor is getting a Mercedes or a pool installed in his yard you tend to do the same. If your neighbor is saving for her kids’ college fund, you imitate that behavior also. This applies to imitation in the workforce as well. “Just being placed on a shift with other workers who were 10 percent more productive made a worker 1.5 percent more productive on that shift.” From Prisoner Dilemma games to Harvard Business School role playing, it was not the smartest person that tended to do the best, but the smartest average pair that was able to grow the pie the most, creating win-win situations for both parties. 

Nations with high IQ scores also tend to score highly on political governance issues. They tend to be more free market, open to trade, and socially liberal. The Corruption Perceptions Index correlates strongly with high IQ. People with high IQ tend to be more politically aware and hold politicians to greater account. High IQ countries tend to save more of their income and invest in longer term capital projects. They also tend to put their investments in foreign countries that offer higher returns, not falling for the “home-country bias” that affects most of the world’s investment. Higher IQ test scores are not an end in themselves. But if they result in citizens with higher overall intelligence, as measured by the Di-Vinci effect, that will, more likely than not, result in a more prosperous nation.

“Modern Chinese Warfare 1795-1989” by Bruce Elleman

For those interested in military history, possible contemporary confrontations with the People’s Liberation Army over Taiwan, North Korea, or the South China Sea, those who wish to do business with mainland China, or just those who want to have a better understanding of the “Chinese mind” I recommend Elleman’s book. He reviews every military engagement, internal and external, by the Chinese from the Taiping Rebellion through Tiananmen Square. He shows how internal power struggles, primarily the Manchu effort during the Qing Dynasty to stay on top of the Han majority and the Nationalist/Communist Civil War, shaped the inward looking formation and skillset of the (Han) PLA even today. He also shows how colonial meddling, from the Sino-French war in China’s vassal state of Annam (modern-day Vietnam) through the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979 (when the USSR supplied Vietnam, but did not open a second front in the north), has colored today’s China’s perception of foreign “interference”, whether they be the white devil (Britain, France, America) or the yellow devil (Japan). 

The detail of the military engagements is minute, but can be completely skipped over for the psychological factors, if that is your primary interest. I learned more about the Boxer Rebellion and the Sino-Indian border dispute than I ever learned in Chinese history class at university. Elleman views Chinese leaders through a realist lens that Clausewitz or Kissinger could appreciate, “unlike Europe, where warfare gradually became intertwined with questions of morality, ethics, and international law, in the Chinese way of thinking there was no universal law governing war, since the highest possible military and political goal was to achieve unity.” He also quotes Robert Hart on an eternal “fact” of Chinese mentality, “on the Chinese side there is pride, innate pride- pride of race, pride of intellect, pride of civilization, pride of supremacy; and this inherited pride, in its massive and magnificent setting of blissful ignorance, has been so hurt by the manner of foreign impact that the other good points of Chinese character have, as it were, been stunned and cannot respond; it is not simply a claim for equality, or the demonstration of physical superiority, or the expansion of intercourse under compulsion, or the dictation of treaties, that have hurt that pride- were it only these, time would have healed the wound long ago, but it is something in those treaties which keeps open the raw and prevents healing.” Those doing business with the Chinese today, whether it be military, diplomatic, or commercial, should well remember that the Chinese psyche has the memory of an elephant, stretching back centuries, and it will never forget when the Chinese were for so long the doormats and play toys of colonial powers.

“Promises, Promises” by Adam Phillips

In this collection of essays Phillips contrasts his two loves- psychoanalysis and literature. He states that “the writer, unlike the psychoanalyst, is the person who has not been dominated by someone else’s vocabulary.” Indeed, Phillips seems to envy the freedom of the writer compared to the constraints of the analyst. “The poet is at once the source of profound insight and a rival in terms of the methods for acquiring such insight.” Freud readily saw the similarities between the two fields when he made “the assumption that a piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood.” Freud sees writers as his predecessors. “The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious, what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.” Phillips’ own essays run the gamut from exploring the analysis of Winnicott, Wittels, and Lacan to reviewing literary works from the likes of Pater, Pessoa, and Amis. He also devotes some short pieces to topics as varied as the usefulness of clutter, the London blitz, smiling, eating (or not), the role of jokes in society, and narcissism.  In the end, Phillips sees psychoanalysis as a part of the greater tradition of writing. “There has always been only one category, literature, of which psychoanalysis became a part. I think of Freud as a late romantic writer, and I read psychoanalysis as poetry, so I don’t have to worry about whether it is true or even useful, but only whether it is haunting or moving or intriguing or amusing- whether it is something I can’t help but be interested in.” He concludes, in typical style, by deprecating his own chosen vocation, “why have an analysis when you can read?”

“Augustine: Conversions to Confessions” by Robin Lane Fox

This book is a biography of St. Augustine from birth through his midlife composition of “The Confessions.” Fox, an avowed atheist, nonetheless goes into great theological detail, also describing Augustine’s flirtations with the Epicureans, Pythagoreans, Manichaeans, and Neo-Platonists, following his early years of hedonism and before finally settling into a life of celibate priesthood. The book also details the Church’s schism with the Donatists in North Africa and ends with his time preaching as Bishop of Hippo. It relates Augustine’s contributions to Christian theology from his ideas on faith, God’s grace, and St. Paul’s epistles, to his coining of the term “original sin”. It is a deeply personal telling of his conversion, relying greatly on Augustine’s own sermons, letters, and prayers, while detailing the controversies of the day in the early Christian Church at large.

“War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy’s epic about Russian involvement in the Napoleonic Wars is both grand in ambition and minute in detail. In letting individual characters and intimate family descriptions exposit on the nuances of Russian society at large and realpolitik in war, Tolstoy has weaved a beautifully intricate tale into the fabric of greater social commentary. Tolstoy was no idle observer, but part of a landed gentry that saw its world drastically changing throughout the nineteenth century. A new class of merchants and industrialists was rising, the Tsar’s influence was waning, new Enlightenment ideas and technologies were spreading into Russia from the West, and the question of freedom for the millions of Russian serfs was being entertained. Tolstoy manages to comment on this social upheaval in a non-didactic way, while telling a grand tale about life in Russia’s most opulent aristocratic houses and on the battlefields of Europe, where general’s pretended to hold sway, but it was luck, contingency, and the unnoticed hand of the foot soldier that decided the battles upon which empires would rise or fall.

“A Life Beyond Boundaries” by Benedict Anderson

Anderson was a multi-disciplinary academic, who spent most of his time in the field studying Southeast Asia. His specialities were Indonesia, Siam, and the Philippines. The title of the book refers to the fact that he considered himself a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world. He was born in China to a British woman and an Irishman. After spending WWII stuck in California, he grew up in Ireland, before earning scholarships to Eton and Cambridge. He then began his lifelong passion with Southeast Asia at Cornell. This memoir is witty and expansive in breath. He writes about being banned from Indonesia by Suharto, how he stumbled onto the idea of nationalism’s genesis in his book, “Imagined Boundaries”, while thinking about the role of historical fiction, like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, in shaping narratives, and how he got to meet and translate for the foremost Thai filmmaker, Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul, and Indonesian novelist, Eka Kurniawan, of today. Along the way, he learned Indonesian, Dutch, Javanese, Thai, Spanish, and Tagalog well enough to write in scholarly journals. His life, he confessed, was one shaped by luck and circumstance, but one where he also took advantage and leapt at unique opportunities to push the academic disciplinary boundaries to new directions in which he willed them.

“Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony” by Kevin Laland

Laland seeks to explain how culture evolved among humans, and humans alone, among all the animals on this planet. By culture he means, “the extensive accumulation of shared, learned knowledge, and iterative improvements in technology over time…. What singles out our species is an ability to pool our insights and knowledge, and build on each other’s solutions.” Humans exhibit a high degree of social learning, that is learning derived from copying others. Social learning is cheaper to acquire than trial and error discovery, but is vulnerable to acquiring out of date or not germane techniques or knowledge. Therefore, copying is selected for when asocial learning is costly, when there is uncertainty, and/or when there is dissatisfaction with the status quo. “Individuals could copy the majority behavior, copy the most prestigious individual, or copy the individual exhibiting the most successful behavior…. Individuals could be biased toward copying kin, familiar individuals, or dominants; they could prioritize learning from older, more experienced, or more successful animals; they could watch trends, monitor payoffs to others, or seek out rapidly spreading variants.” The choice structure for copying is nearly unlimited and can vary on a case by case basis. “An animal does not need to be smart to benefit from copying, because a lot of the smart decision making has already been done for it by the copied individuals who have already prefiltered their behavior…. What copying does do is reduce the rate at which behavioral variants are lost. That is because social learning generates multiple copies of a piece of knowledge or behavior, retained across the repertoires of several individuals, so that when an individual dies its knowledge need not die with it.” Along with the development of social learning, humans also developed theory of mind. “In order to imitate effectively, individuals must comprehend the goals and activities of the individual they copy. Comprehension requires the ability to consider alternative interpretations or viewpoints of external objects and to construct alternative scenarios of how to interact with them.” To effectively copy, it is necessary to step out of one’s self and take on the perspective of others. Sociality is another trait that might have been selected for amongst humans- people who are particularly observant of social cues and have tolerance for social groups, particularly kin. 

The great human advance was in cumulative culture. “Humans incontrovertibly possess complex technology that no single individual could invent alone.” Teaching, alone among animals, is widespread across all communities of humans. “If teaching is to be favored, the skill taught should not be so simple that it is easy to be picked up without teaching [by simply copying], but at the same time, not so difficult that few individuals possess the skill and can pass it on,” stymying cultural retention. “Increments in the probability of teaching also occur when the costs of teaching are low or can be offset against the costs of provisioning, when teaching is highly accurate and effective in transmission, and when there is a strong degree of relatedness between tutor and pupil.” Language evolved as a mechanism to increase the efficiency of teaching. “Language is an adaptation, fashioned by natural selection to reduce the costs, increase the accuracy, and expand the domains of teaching.” It initially provided cues to help with imitation and skill acquisition. “Human language is unique, at least among extant species, because only humans constructed a sufficiently diverse, generative, and changeable cultural world that demanded talking about. Once our ancestors evolved a socially transmitted system of symbolic communication, other features of language, such as compositionality, came along for free…. Only in hominins did language, teaching, and cumulative culture coevolve in a runaway, autocatalytic process initiated by selection for strategic and high-fidelity social learning.” 

Humans did not just evolve to take advantage of our environment, we shaped and transformed it to benefit our skillset. “The more an organism controls and regulates its environment and that of its offspring, the greater is the advantage of transmitting cultural information across generations…. Once started, cultural niche construction may also become autocatalytic, with greater culturally generated environmental regulation leading to increasing homogeneity of the social environment as experienced by old and young, which would favor further social learning from parents and other adults.” Humans evolved to better learn languages, but languages also evolved to be better learned. “Infant-directed speech [baby talk] is found in most, but possibly not all, societies, which suggests that it may be a widespread, socially learned tradition…. Children may appear preadapted to decipher the rules of syntax in part because languages have evolved rules that are easy to learn…. Transmission-chain experiments and mathematical models show how languages that are propagated culturally evolve in such a way as to maximize their own transmissibility, becoming easier to learn and more structured over time…. Humans were predisposed to be highly competent manipulators of strings of elements, because many of their ancestors’ tool-manufacturing and tool-using skills, extractive foraging methods, and food-processing techniques had required them to carry out precise sequences of actions.” Gene-culture coevolution has been documented in many regards. From right-handedness, to lactose tolerance, to salt retention, to fat storage, to sickle-cells, to the whites of the eyes, and to reduction of gut size, human culture has interacted with human genes to coevolve over time. “The rapid spread of cultural practice often leads quickly to maximally strong selection of the advantageous genetic variant, which rapidly increases its frequency. Cultural practices typically spread more quickly than genetic mutations, simply because cultural learning typically operates at faster rates than biological evolution.” 

Human populations moving from hunter-gatherers to sedentary agriculturalists also marked the dawn of an explosion in cultural/genetic coevolution. With larger populations, and the resulting greater variations, biological evolution increased ever-faster and natural selection became stronger relative to genetic drift. Culture not only shaped human genetics, but that of domesticated animals as well. “Domestication…. selected for increased yields of animal products, such as milk, but also a variety of other traits, including lowered reactivity to environmental stimuli and a dependence on humans for survival and reproduction. The protection provided by corrals and pens, and selection of animals that were easy to manage, again modified the impact of natural selection on animal breeds…. Those plants and animals tended by humans became increasingly dependent on their keepers.” Some suggest that the earliest city-states in Mesopotamia were actually aggregations of irrigation systems from which defense and trading centers then rose around. This density was integral because “below certain population density thresholds not only is it difficult for new innovations to accumulate, but adaptive cultural knowledge may actually be lost.” Joseph Henrich gives the example of Tasmania, where cut off from mainland Australia, the native population lost skills such as the manufacture of fish nets, spears, and boomerangs over generations. 

Writing was another key step of cultural transmission, as it allowed the memory and history of individuals to pass on beyond their lifetimes and increased the fidelity of the information retained. External memory extended beyond just the written word, however, to include architecture, painting, and dance. Humans extended their cooperation beyond close kin to include strangers in ever-enlarging circles of trust. This was achieved by societal norms. “At some juncture in our history, our ancestors began systematically to correct the behavior of the individuals they taught; in the process, they shifted their society away from reliance on mere conventions and toward governance through norms. People stopped illustrating a way to behave and began insisting on the way to behave…. Norms specify rules of social interaction too, including specification of how people should respond to norm violation. With the advent of norms, hominin social life effectively became transformed from simply living in groups to identifying with the group, abiding by its rules, and privileging in-group members…. For the mechanism of indirect reciprocity to work efficiently it needs gossip, from names to deeds and times and places, too.” By creating successful groups, norm enforcement could affect individual genetic traits. “Humans should be particularly adept at recognizing, representing, and adopting the local norms of their society, as well as notice, condemn, and punish violations of those norms… More “docile” individuals would be at an advantage, to the extent that they would be better placed to benefit from the society’s technologies and less vulnerable to exclusion or punishment. In turn, a population of more docile individuals could then permit the cultural evolution of more sophisticated and effective norms, and allow groups to maintain more reliable cooperation. A similar mechanism could have favored a tendency of individuals to feel shame or guilt when they violate a social norm.” 

Laland makes an intriguing case for how culture and biology coevolved among humans. Through a mechanism that started with copying, moved to active teaching, then to language, and the written word, humans were able to build on past gains, which changed the physiological makeup of our brains and bodies, which further transformed our culture in a spiral that alone among animals allowed for the accumulation of knowledge and skillsets that would be impossible for any one human to master in a single lifetime.

“The Complacent Class” by Tyler Cowen

Cowen contends that today Americans are more content to hold onto their gains, rather than push for major disruption and churn in their lives. As always, he backs this up with some compelling statistics. “During an eighteen-month period in 1971-1972, there were more than 2,500 domestic bombings reported.” Leave aside whether or not that was a good thing and the cherry-picking of timespan, this is, nonetheless, an amazing fact. That’s about five bombings a day for over a year on American soil. Can one imagine living in that type of destructive America today? Never mind the bombers’ motivations. What would be the response of the citizenry and government to that type of sustained anarchy today? More mundanely, “the interstate migration rate has fallen 51 percent below its 1948 to 1971 average and has been falling steadily since the 1980s…. Only about half of the Millennial Generation bothers to get a driver’s license by age eighteen; in 1983, the share of seventeen-year-olds with a license was 69 percent…. The federal budget is on auto-pilot, with only about 20 percent available to be freely allocated, and that number is slated to fall to 10 percent by 2022…. 61 percent of all private sector financial liabilities are guaranteed by the federal government, either explicitly or implicitly. As recent as 1999, this figure was below 50 percent…. In the 1950s, only about 5 percent of workers required a government-issued license to do their jobs, but by 2008, that figure had risen to about 29 percent…. Today, over 80 percent of the value of the S&P 500 is due to intangible assets, including trademarks, patents, brand name reputation, consumer goodwill, and other factors…. Start-ups were 12 to 13 percent of the firms in the economy in the 1980s, but today they are only about 7 to 8 percent…. [Adjusting] for increases in the American working-age population, the United States creates 25 percent fewer triadic patents [US, Europe, and Japan] per person than it did in 1999…. [and] in the late 1980s, 18.9 percent of the employment in the American economy was at firms five years or younger. This average has fallen to 13.5 percent right before the Great Recession; in numerical terms, that is a 29 percent decline over only seventeen years.” These are just a few of the myriad of facts I found compelling, together forming the larger picture that the America of today is a nation content to play it safe. America seems like a country stuck in a rut, scared to move forward. Between NIMBYism (not in my backyard), political gridlock, aging demographics, anti-immigrant attitudes, and increased government regulations the reasons for this stasis spans all walks of American society. We may not like where we are at exactly, but we are unconfident and afraid to change our patterns of life to truly affect change. Even globally, America has become known as a safe-haven to park wealth [in stocks, bonds, and real estate], not as a dynamic economy known for creating it. But, of course, America cannot just stand still and the longer we postpone the day of reckoning the more dramatic the consequences to come.

“Consciousness” by Christof Koch

This book is part memoir, part scientific treatise, and part metaphysical exploration. Koch is a professor of biology and engineering at Cal Tech, who is also well versed in philosophy of mind. He was a protege of Francis Crick, working together on issues of neurobiology and the nature of consciousness over the years. Koch’s ongoing goal is to find the explicit links from the objective world to the subjective one. He terms himself a romantic reductionist- a “reductionist because I seek quantitative explanations for consciousness in the ceaseless and ever-varied activity of billions of tiny nerve cells, each with their tens of thousands of synapses; romantic, because of my insistence that the universe has contrails of meaning that can be deciphered in the sky above us and deep within us. Meaning in the sweep of its cosmic evolution, not necessarily in the lives of the individual organisms within it.” 

Koch seeks to find where exactly in the brain qualia resides. Philosophers of mind define qualia (plural of quale) as raw feelings, the elements that together make up any one conscious experience. A “condition necessary for any one specific conscious sensation is an active and functioning cortico-thalamic complex. This complex includes, first and foremost, the neocortex and the closely allied thalamus underneath it…. Bioelectrical activity in discrete regions of the cerebral cortex and its satellites is essential for the content of conscious experience…. Pyramidal neurons are the workhorses of the cerebral cortex. They account for about four of every five cortical neurons and are the only ones that convey information from one region to other sectors within or outside the cortex, such as the thalamus, the basal ganglia, or the spinal cord…. It is there, in the prefrontal cortex, and especially in its dorsolateral division, that the higher intellectual functions- problem solving, reasoning, and decision making- are located.” 

One of Koch’s primary missions is to dig even deeper into neuroanatomy to minutely map out every single neuron and synaptic connection in the human brain. This is no small task. Koch stresses “the astounding heterogeneity of neurons. The approximately 100,000 neurons packed below each square millimeter of cortex…. are highly heterogenous. They can be distinguished based on their location, the shape and morphology of their dendrites, the architecture of their synapses, their genetic makeup, their electrophysiologic character, and the places to which they send their axions.” Therefore, the first step in this long process of discovery is mapping out the smaller and simpler mouse brain. (Work he is leading with the Allen Institute for Brain Science.) This is fruitful because “neither at the genomic nor at the synaptic, cellular, or connectional levels are there qualitative differences between mice, monkeys, and people.” Scientists usually work on mice and monkeys when human experiments would be too risky or cruel. But Koch has also worked on epileptic patients, who already required brain surgery, as well as many non-invasive studies on vegetative patients and normal human subjects. He most frequently uses an electroencephalograph (EEG) or an fMRI to monitor patients, both awake and in various stages of sleep while conducting his experiments. “It is the cortico-thalamic complex that provides the phenomenal content of dreams.” Most of Koch’s experiments work with vision, particularly when distracted, split, or masked. Even though your eyes are constantly moving rapidly, in what are known as saccades, “it is neurons in the higher reaches of the visual cortex that produce your perception that the world is stationary.” 

Crick and Koch’s foremost supposition is that consciousness evolved as an adaptive success because it allowed for the ability for long range planning. Koch explicitly writes, “the function of consciousness is planning. Patients bereft of part or all of their prefrontal cortex have difficulty planning for the near or the distant future. We took this to imply that the neural correlates of consciousness must include neurons in the prefrontal cortex.” Crick and Koch also speculate that it is vast and varied communication back and forth between neurons in different parts of the brain, so-called neuron loops, which are essential to consciousness. “Clinicians recorded the EEG of two classes of severely brain-injured patients, those that remain unconscious and those that recover at least some measure of awareness. They found that the critical difference is the presence or absence of communication between prefrontal regions and temporal, sensory cortical regions in the back. If such feedback is present, consciousness is preserved.” Although the brain is somewhat pliable, its regions are often fairly specific. “Semir Zeki at University College London coined the term essential node for the portion of the brain that is responsible for a particular conscious attribute. One region of the visual cortex contains an essential node for the perception of color; several such regions are involved in face perception and in the sense of visual movement. Parts of the amygdala are essential to the experience of fear. Damage to any one node leads to loss of the associated perceptual attribute, although other conscious attributes remain.” In an experiment on patients already requiring brain surgery, scientists found “startling selectivity at the level of individual nerve cells…. One hippocampal neuron responded only to seven different photos of the movie star Jennifer Anniston but not to pictures of other blonde women or actresses. Another cell in the hippocampus fired only to the actress Halle Berry, including a cartoon of her and her name spelled out.” Somehow, the brain was recognizing the many different tokens within one singular type (Halle Berry) and grouping them all as alike. Another interesting experiment showed that attention and conscious thought do not occur in tandem. “Action can indeed be faster than thought, with the onset of corrective motor action preceding conscious perception by about a quarter of a second.” 

Koch ends by going on to speculate about the grand nature of consciousness. “I believe that consciousness is a fundamental, an elementary, property of living matter. It can’t be derived from anything else; it is a simple substance.” Koch lends credence to Giulio Tononi’s functionalist idea of consciousness as integrated information. “Any conscious state is extraordinarily informative. In fact, it is so specific that you will never re-experience the exact same feeling- ever!…. Any conscious state is a monad, a unit- it cannot be subdivided into components that are experienced independently.” This duality of  integration and differentiation are what create the conscious system. “The conscious sensation arises from integrated information; the causality flows from the underlying physics of the brain, but not in any easy-to-understand manner. That is because consciousness depends on the system being more than the sum of its parts.” This is all very speculative. Koch admits that it will require years of more research to come to any scientifically acceptable agreement on the true nature of consciousness, exactly where it resides, and exactly how it actually works. That discovery process is what he has made his life’s quest.

“Ultra Society” by Peter Turchin

Turchin is an academic in the burgeoning field of cultural evolution. In this book he seeks to explain how large scale societies eventually out-competed smaller ones. He sees war as the prime mover of societal change. War and competition for resources explains why our ancestors moved from foragers to farmers, even though fixed agriculture was actually detrimental to any single individual’s health and nutrition level. As a group, agricultural societies could out-compete bands of foragers. Another of Turchin’s themes is that while competition between groups leads to novel improvements and progress, competition within groups leads to gross inequalities, which breeds disfunction. This explains why human societies have ebbed and flowed between relatively egalitarian bands, to chiefdoms with hereditary God-Kings, and, finally, to rule-of-law based governments. Perhaps paradoxically, he posits that it was warfare and the threat of warfare that has led humans to be the greatest of all cooperators in the animal kingdom. It is this large-scale cooperation and trust between strangers that, in fact, make humans so unique.