An intense lesson in the neuroscience of getting around.
The latest knowledge on how we find our way.
Kemp, a molecular biologist specializing in neurodegenerative diseases, admits that he gets lost in his native city. So he admires virtuoso navigators, like his wife, who always know where they are. This short book delivers an expert education in how the brain guides us. As the author shows, it’s not a matter of intelligence; plenty of smart people lose their way. The key is memory, largely centralized in the hippocampus, a small structure deep inside the skull atop the brainstem that’s literally packed with cells vital to our sense of direction. Licensed London cab drivers, who must memorize every one of the city’s 25,000 streets, possess a hippocampus much larger than London bus drivers, who only memorize a single route. The first symptom of Alzheimer’s is not memory loss but inability to navigate. “Essentially,” writes Kemp, “navigation is…a seamless combination of sensory memory, and short-term and long-term memories spliced together, interpolated and intertwined with one another by the hippocampus and other related brain structures.” Early knowledge on the subject arose from studies of rats and mazes, and the Einstein of rat navigation was Edward Tolman. According to Kemp, Tolman’s 1948 paper, “Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men,” is a work that "should sit alongside other great scientific discoveries of the twentieth century.” Tolman’s rats did not memorize a series of turns to achieve their goal; rather, they built a cognitive map of the maze, which is not topologically accurate but superb for choosing a precise route. Except for two illustrations, Kemp relies on prose to explain a complex process involving dozens of structures and specialized neurons throughout the brain. Readers with a well-developed hippocampus will have an easier time, but everyone will appreciate the author’s stories of how some Indigenous cultures learn their territory (they get lost, too) and concluding sections on how to become a better navigator and how to behave if lost in the wild.
An intense lesson in the neuroscience of getting around.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-324-00538-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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SEEN & HEARD
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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