Month: May 2009

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking just from the title: another book about psychology, decision making, and behavioral economics. And yeah, that’s pretty much right. Author Jonah Lehrer clomps around at the intersection of rationality street and emotional avenue, trying to figure out what kinds of traffic is best suited for each byway. And like those other books, this is all placed well within the context of every day (or at least plausible) problems: how do fire fighters and airline pilots react to emergencies? How do you make a better television soap opera or game show? Do smarter people make better quarterbacks? Which stock should you invest in? Do you need rationality or irrationality to get really, really good at poker?

And like the authors of those other books, he constructs models of the human mind to explain why it behaves as it does, especially when it behaves badly and/or irrationally. He even uses some of the exact same situations and examples as those other books. So it’s more of that, but there’s a little bit of a twist.

Specifically, Lehrer is a neoroscientist instead of your typical psychologist, and so he looks at a lot of the same questions as I’ve seen in books like Sway and Predictably Irrational but he takes cracks at them with a different set of tools. For example, while a behavioral economist or plan-Jane psychologist would use terms like “subconscious” or “incidental coding of frequency information” to describe how people figure out which decks are stacked in their favor in a simple card drawing game, Lehrer uses terms like “neurons” and “dopamine releases” to explain the same thing. This is an approach more grounded in biology and biochemistry than it is sociology and economics. And what’s really fascinating to me is that both sets of scientists are right; they’re just using different models and paradigms to investigate the same stuff and it’s great to see where they compliment each other.

And independent of which branch of the great tree of science upon which Lehrer perches, I really liked his writing style. The writing is crisp and to the point, yet it doesn’t talk down to you. Every lesson and mental exercise is couched in terms of some fascinating context, like those fire fighters, airline pilots, poker players, stock brokers, and athletes I mentioned. It’s good popular science writing, which seems to be somewhat hard to come by.

This novel by Dan Simmons about Sir John Franklen’s doomed expedition to the Artic is kind of hard to describe. I guess “historical horror” would come closest.

Most of the book is a straight up (though surely dramatized) retelling of how the crews of the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus get stuck in the ice while trying to search for a shortcut to the Orient through the Arctic circle. You’ve got all the threats you might expect: the freezing cold, starvation, disease, mutiny, cannibalism, and the like. And Simmons does a pretty good job at making this all exciting in a classic adventure story kind of way. This is true even though the most cursory history lesson on the subject tells us that the expedition (which was quite real) had no known survivors. Two ships trapped in the ice of the Arctic and isolated from rescue by miles and years is a heck of a setup.

But apparently Simmons didn’t think that was quite enough, since the rest of the plot involves the men’s being stalked by some kind of supernatural killing machine on the ice. It’s a giant bear spirit monster …thing. So between scenes you might expect to see on a Discovery Channel special you get “gotcha” moments like those out of a horror movie book where the creature will pop up out of nowhere and bite someone’s face off.

On balance it was a pretty good book, if a bit long. The setting is cool (har har), novel (har har again) and interesting enough to keep my attention long enough, and Simmons does a great job of making many of the characters –every one of which is based on a real member of the expedition– deep and detailed so that the human drama shows through. Would the book have been sufficient (or even better) without the whole supernatural terror angle? Hard to say, but I think it could have been.

What I will say for sure is that the book falls flat on its face for a good long stretch towards the end when Simmons resorts to a stilted and lame literary technique for exposition, presumably because he didn’t want to leave a few mysteries totally unsolved. But his solution breaks so much from the style of the rest of the novel that it leaves you going “Huh? WTF?”

Still, on balance it’s a pretty good book just for the quasi-historical stuff.

The full title here is Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century. Author Lauren Slater reviews 10 famous experiments from the various niches of psychology and attempts to understand them and their participants in new ways. It’s really not very good.

And that’s too bad, because these psychological experiments and the scientists involved with them are gold mines of fascinating stories –they’re famous for a reason. Examples include getting average Joes to shock other people to death, imprisoning babies in boxes constructed to shape their psyches, turning rhesus monkeys into antisocial lunatics, faking your way into a psychiatric hospital on flimsy pretenses, crowds of people watching impassively as their neighbor is stabbed to death, and inserting false memories into the minds of people who should know better.

This is crazy, fascinating, outrageous stuff! Slater devotes a chapter to each set of experiments and attempts to delve deeper into the concepts that each one left in the landscape of psychology. She usually does this by writing about the people underneath the lab coats, including their personalities, their drives, their flaws, and their humanity. Unfortunately when she’s short on information Slater had an annoying habit of just making details up, along the lines of “I imagined him blah blah blah” or “Did he look at this spectacle and blah blah blah?” Its an entirely ineffective literary technique that really only serves to yank you out of whatever flow you might have gotten into to be reminded that we’re resorting to conjecture in an attempt at spicing things up a bit and to live up to the dust jacket’s doubtful premise that there are great mysteries here to be revealed through personal research and fact checking.

In fact, this brings me to my major problem with the book: the author’s writing style. The prose is so purple, sloppy, and florid, so full of itself and laden with pointless metaphores and descriptors that it strains credibility for something claiming to be non-fiction. She also has a flair for the dramatic, as when she breathlessly drew parallels between Stanley Milgram’s subjects administering painful shock and his own doctors trying to revive him with defibulators.

It’s just not well done. It’s great source material (or at least I think so), but Slater just can’t hold a candle to better science writers like Bill Bryson or Mary Roach.

Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett is the first of his Diskworld novels to make me go “Meh…” The idea is that an evil spirit breaks loose and starts putting ideas in people’s heads about how to make motion pictures, or “clicks.”. It’s got enough good lines, jokes, and parodies to make it entertaining, but the whole Hollywood lampoon seems so out of place on the Diskworld that I found it really distracting and jarring.
Indeed, Pratchett seems to anticipate this reaction in his readers and gives us this kind of half-hearted explanation near the beginning of the book:

…at least nine-tenths of all the original reality ever created lies outside the multiverse, and since the multiverse by definition includes absolutely everything that is anything, this puts a bit of a strain on things.

In other words, “I’m feeling a bit boxed in by this genre I’m working because it prevents me from using some of these ideas I’ve got.” He goes on:

Outside the boundaries of the universe lie the raw realities, the could-have-beens, the might-bes, the never-weres, the wild ideas, all being created and uncreated chaotically like elements in fermenting supernovas.

Just occasionally where the walls of the worlds have worn a bit thin, they can leak in.

Or, “So I’m going to do it anyway. Just roll with it.”

And to be sure, it’s not hard to roll with it. We get to see Victor Tugelbend, professional wizardry student at Unseen University turned “Holy Wood” actor and accidental savior of the Disk. We get to see the trolls a bit more fleshed out (so to speak) as a race, and Pratchett has a lot of fun playing off their stony nature. And, perhaps best of all, we get Gaspode the Wonder Dog, a flea-bitten mutt possessed of speech and above average intelligence, but no good way of making many people recognize it. Gaspode the Wonder Dog is awesome. I want to get a dog just so I can name him “Gaspode.”

And of course as you might expect we get tons of clever parodies of classic Hollywood movies, some of which rely on hundreds of pages of setup. In particular there was a bit at the end that sublimely mashed up King Kong and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.

So, I’d probably rank this near the bottom of the Diskworld books that I’ve read so far, but that certainly doesn’t mean that it’s not good. It’s just not AS good. And, as usual, it’s pretty quotable:

He gave Gaspode a long, slow stare, which was like challenging a centipede to an arse-kicking contest.

She was a beefy young woman and, whatever piece of music she was playing, it was definitely losing.

By and large, the only skill the alchemists of Ankh-Morpork had discovered so far was the ability to turn gold into less gold.

Azhural raised his staff. “It’s fifteen hundred miles to Ankh-Morpork,” he said. “We’ve got three hundred and sixty-three elephants, fifty carts of forage, the monsoon’s about to break and we’re wearing… we’re wearing… sort of things, like glass, only dark… dark glass things on our eyes…[It’s a Blue’s Brothers reference]