William H. Calvin

"The earth's climate does great flip-flops every few thousand years. Our ancestors lived through hundreds of such abrupt episodes since the more gradual Ice Ages began two and a half million years ago - but abrupt cooling produced a population bottleneck each time, one that eliminated most of their relatives. We are the improbable descendants of those who survived - and later thrived." "William H. Calvin's A Brain for All Seasons argues that such cycles of cool, crash, and burn powered the pump for the enormous increase in brain size and complexity in human beings. Driven by the imperative to adapt within a generation to "whiplash" climate changes where only grass did well for a while, our ancestors learned to cooperate and innovate in hunting large grazing animals." "Calvin's book is structured as a travelogue that takes us around the globe and back in time, up to the present when, because of the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the ocean current that sends warmer waters into the North Atlantic could abruptly shut down. If that happens again, much of the earth could be plunged into a deep chill within a few years."--BOOK JACKET.

This book tries to fathom how our inner life evolves from one second to the next, as we steer ourselves from one topic to another, as we create and reject alternatives. It's not just a little person inside the head doing all this, though it's natural to assume that anything fancy requires an even fancier designer. Ever since Darwin, however, we've known that elegant things can also emerge (indeed, self-organize) from "simpler" beginnings. And, says theoretical. Neurophysiologist William H. Calvin, the bootstrapping of new ideas works much like the immune response or the evolution of a new animal species - except that the brain can turn the darwinian crank a lot faster, on the time scale of thought and action. Few proposals achieve a perfect ten when judged against our memories, but we can subconsciously try out variations, using many brain regions. Eventually, as quality improves, we become conscious of our new invention. Drawing on anthropology, evolutionary biology, linguistics, and the neurosciences, Calvin also considers how a more intelligent brain developed using slow biological improvements over the last few million years. Long ago, evolving jack-of-all-trades versatility was encouraged by abrupt climate changes. Now, evolving intelligence uses a nonbiological track: augmenting human intelligence and building intelligent machines. In his concluding chapter, Calvin cautions about. Arms races in intelligence. Just as the Red Queen explained to Alice in Wonderland, you might have to keep running to stay in the same place.

The Cerebral Code proposes a bold new theory for how Darwin's evolutionary processes could operate in the brain, improving ideas on the time scale of thought and action. Jung said that dreaming goes on continuously but you can't see it when you're awake, just as you can't see the stars in the daylight because it is too bright. Calvin's is a theory for what goes on, hidden from view by the glare of waking mental operations, that produces our peculiarly human consciousness and versatile intelligence. Shuffled memories, no better than the jumble of our nighttime dreams, can evolve subconsciously into something of quality, such as a sentence to speak aloud. The "interoffice mail" circuits of the cerebral cortex are nicely suited for this job because they're good copying machines, able to clone the firing pattern within a hundred-element hexagonal column. That pattern, Calvin says, is the "cerebral code" representing an object or idea, the cortical-level equivalent of a gene or meme. Transposed to a hundred-key piano, this pattern would be a melody - a characteristic tune for each word of your vocabulary and each face you remember. Newly cloned patterns are tacked onto a temporary mosaic, much like a choir recruiting additional singers during the "Hallelujah Chorus." But cloning may "blunder slightly" or overlap several patterns - and that variation makes us creative. Like dueling choirs, variant hexagonal mosaics compete with one another for territory in the association cortex, their successes biased by memorized environments and sensory inputs. Unlike selectionist theories of mind, Calvin's mosaics can fully implement all six essential ingredients of Darwin's evolutionary algorithm, repeatedly turning the quality crank as we figure out what to say next. Even the optional ingredients known to speed up evolution (sex, island settings, climate change) have cortical equivalents that help us think up a quick comeback during conversation. Mosaics also supply "audit trail" structures needed for universal grammar, helping you understand nested phrases such as "I think I saw him leave to go home." And, as a chapter title proclaims, mosaics are a "A Machine for Metaphor." Even analogies can compete to generate a stratum of concepts, that are inexpressible except by roundabout, inadequate means - as when we know things of which we cannot speak.

In a series of highly charged encounters before, after, and during neurosurgery, an epileptic patient, Neil; his surgeon, George Ojemann; and neuroscientist William Calvin explore the intricate landscape of the brain, and in so doing, reveal the mystery of human memory, thought, and language. With novelistic detail, Conversations with Neil's Brain tells the story of a man offered the promise of surgery that can end his seizures. But with the opportunity for such a dramatic cure comes risk. The surgeon must remove a portion of Neil's temporal lobe, and if the instrument is off, the mistake could alter or erase essential parts of Neil. To avoid causing such irreparable harm, George Ojemann must develop a detailed map of the individual patient's brain, a map that identifies each specific region responsible for each highly specific function - the kind of map that can be developed only by probing for responses from the patient while he is awake and able to communicate, but while his cerebral cortex is exposed. Conversations with Neil's Brain takes us inside the operating room and allows us to be part of this eerie process of discovery, using it to provide a unique window on human consciousness and the nature of human identity. As we begin to understand, one region of cortex determines Neil's ability to follow a joke to the punchline; another determines his ability to recognize a face. A slip in one direction might damage Neil's ability to read, but not his ability to write. A different slip could wipe out Neil's ability to speak Spanish (his second language) but not his native English. Another could leave him able to identify an animal as an elephant, but never able to remember that its name was Babar. . The mapping of Neil's brain brings to life as never before the astounding specificity by which the brain operates, making clear why reading, learning, memory, and decision making are so complex, and why such afflictions as learning disabilities, mental disorders, Alzheimer's, and strokes are so baffling. In the context of this surgical drama, it also provides an intensely compelling read.

Calvin journeys around the world to show how drastic and frequent climatic changes affected our ancient ancestors in dramatic, life- altering ways--that in matching wits with the undependable prehistoric climate, early humans first developed the capacities for society, culture, and ethics.

Evolution and the mind's highest function, consciousness, and how it arises from the brain's ordinary nerve cells.

"A proper lingua ex machina would be a language machine capable of nesting phrases and clauses inside one another, complete with evolutionary pedigree. Such circuitry for structured thought might also facilitate creative shaping up of quality (figuring out what to do with the leftovers in the refrigerator), contingency planning, procedural games, logic, and even music. And enhancing structural thought might give intelligence a big boost. Solve the cerebral circuitry for syntax, and you might solve them all." "William Calvin and Derek Bickerton offer three ways for getting from ape behaviors to syntax. They focus on the transition from simple word association in short sentences (proto-language) to longer recursively structural sentences (requiring syntax). They are after invention via sidesteps (Darwinian conversions of function), not straight-line gradual improvements."--BOOK JACKET.