"In Physics in Mind, eminent biophysicist Werner R. Loewenstein seeks answers to these perplexing questions in the mechanisms of physics. Bringing information theory---the idea that all information can be quantified and encoded in bits---to bear on recent advances in the neurosciences, Loewenstein reveals inside the brain a web of immense computational power capable of rendering a coherent representation of the world outside."--Provided by publisher.
Dr. Loewenstein was born in 1926 in Spangenberg, Germany. His family escaped Hitler’s Germany in 1939, emigrating to Chile. He had a keen interest in science and became a world-renowned biophysicist after immigrating into the United States.
Dr. Loewenstein received a B.Sc. (physics), B.Sc. (biology) in 1945, and Ph.D. (physiology) in 1950 from the University of Chile. From 1951 to 1957 he worked at the University of Chile, first as an instructor, and then as an associate professor of physiology. In 1954 he joined the University of California in Los Angeles as a resident zoologist. In 1957 Dr. Loewenstein was a professor of physiology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University and from 1967 to 1971 he served as the Director of the Laboratory of Cell Physics. He moved to Florida in 1971 to take a position as professor of physiology and biophysics and department chairman at the University of Miami School of Medicine.
In 1994 Dr. Loewenstein and his wife, Dr. Birgit Rose Loewenstein, established the Laboratory of Cell Communication at the MBL, devoted to the study of intercellular communication. Their research focused on the cell-to-cell channel, a membrane channel built into the junctions between cells. Dr. Loewenstein became a member of the MBL Corporation in 1961 and served on the MBL Investment Committee in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He was named a MBL Society Emeritus member in 2011.
His recent book, Physics in Mind, was chosen by Physics World Magazine as the 2013 Best Book of Physics. Dr. Loewenstein traveled the world as an invited speaker at international scientific conferences, and loved to take sailing trips on his cutter Pequod. He is survived by his wife of 43 years, Birgit Rose Loewenstein of Sedona, son Stewart of Denver, daughter Claudia of Dallas, and four grandchildren.
Loewenstein writes in the preface that his book is "written for the general reader" and that no "specialized knowledge of biology, physics, or information theory is assumed in advance."
But that's just bologna. This isn't "popular" science. This is serious science.
Maybe if I was a smarter cookie I'd have grasped more than I did, which was about 60% of this book. But I really think that an undergraduate level survey course reviewing cell biology, physics, evolutionary theory, mathematics, and anatomy & physiology would have been a great prep. Don't get me wrong--Loewenstein never talks down to the reader. He just assumes that the reader is as smart as he is. And he's unbelievably smart.
But he's not just smart; he's got a great sense of humor, too. He personifies evolution (she's a lady, of course!) and cognitive molecules (they're little demons!), drops in dry jokes and literary allusions (Agatha Christie's Belgium detective Hercule Poirot and Samuel Coleridge are just a couple of names Loewenstein mentions [although could you really write a brain book without mentioning Poirot and his little gray cells?]), and uses lovely figurative language throughout to describe cells, neuronal activity, consciousness, and awareness. His writing makes me yearn to understand more of what he's writing about.
I would like to take a couple of science and mathematics courses at my college before revisiting this book in a few years. And then, I might get 75% of it.
This book was highly disappointing. Many reviews say that the problem is the science is difficult. Actually, the problem is simply that the author is a bad writer who thinks he is a poet, and who has chosen to write flowery, obfuscating prose rather than clear, illuminating summaries of the science involved.
Several sections stand out as being particularly bad. One, entitiled "An algorithm is no substitute for a demon," apparently, after consulting the references, is intended to address flaws in intelligent design. Even after re-reading this section several times, it is not all apparent what in the world Lowenstein is talking about, and my best guess has him naively pointing out that intelligent design is impossible because it requires an external designer (which is the whole point of intelligent design as a creationism substitute).
In between, there were scattered sections where the book starts to talk about interesting things - but just when you think the author will go into detail on these, he begins to wax away poetically.
Not a light read but absolutely with the effort. I came across this book as I was looking for background reading for Rhythms of Brain. This book does a great job of clarifying the role of Quantum mechanics in biology, providing key insights into the current research and the current movers in the field. I'll have to come back for another pass in a year or two but have gained a new way of seeing sensory perception from this book.
This is one of those books, like The Elegant Universe or Godel Escher Bach, that I know I'm going to have to read three or four times to even come close to comprehending the majority of it. It's like a tough mudder for your brain, but in a good way.
Not your standard pop sci entry. Not that I don't appreciate a challenge, but the author might have led a bit more gently here and there, closed a technical gap or two, pandered a bit more vigorously to his rapt lay readership. OK, I won't mince words: this was a tough read. Like another reviewer on this page who supplied the percentage yield on her grasp of its contents, I'd put my own around 75% +/- a 24% margin of error. For all that I failed to make crystal clear sense of, though, there's a trove of fascinating material in this book I did, and Loewenstein -- if not always the most lucid of guides -- is certainly an insightful one. I could have done without a lot of his more ticky verbalisms: his tiresome metaphors (enough paying thermodynamic "pied pipers" already!) and colorful flourishes (which may be the sole basis for the book having qualified as a work of popular science). But I can live with them. For mind/brain/consciousness/physics/computation junkies, this is a very interesting read.
Extremely hard to read and follow. Despite being fairly technical I found it very very hard to understand, despite the authors initial claim that knowledge of science would not be required. I wouldn't recommend this book to ANYONE.
This book is challenging, and the challenge is made even greater by the fact that literally none of the diagrams available in the physical copy is provided to audiobook listeners. That being said, even with the diagrams, some of which can be yoinked via judicious use of the preview options on Amazon or Google Play, this book leverages intricate subject matter concepts from molecular biology, neurophysiology, and quantum mechanics, making grasping the totality of Lowenstein's logic difficult for people who are unfamiliar with 1 or more of these subjects.
The gist of the book (I think) leverages heavily the concept of Maxwell's demon, the metaphorical agent that is able to reduce entropy within a system by performing measurement within it and partitioning/sieving components of the system based on type or characteristic. This gudanken experiment was originally posed as a potential paradox or contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics but was eventually shown to be an incomplete analysis of the situation. In effect, entropy does increase because of the finite nature of memory inside the "demon", meaning that eventually, it will have to erase parts of its memory to continue operation. The erasure will generate heat, and that will increase thermodynamic entropy.
The concrete example of this would be a hard drive. Lowenstein takes this idea and extends it to nature, arguing from an information viewpoint that the structure that elementary micro and macro-molecules take in three dimensional space is akin to the demon concept, those shapes and structures assumed by protein and other molecules are akin to computer encodings written in three dimensional space (whereas standard computer instruction is two dimensional), and that the function many of these molecules engage in is to minimize the Shannon entropy within their local system.
Further, natural selection has twice acted on these molecules and systems of molecules to exploit quantum mechanical phenomena, first photosynthesis, and later the subsystems supporting vision. Lowenstein unfolds this concept in great detail, much of the book focuses on exact molecule-to-molecule interactions he believes played key roles in this evolving process as well as their associated pathways (or information channels). If one is not familiar at all with this biochemistry though (like myself) you are effectively SOL, and will probably grok only the surface narrative of what Lowenstein is constructing, and this is all before he goes through the notion of consciousness and its associated evolution.
The original intent for getting this book was to see if it somehow shed greater light onto the notion of measurement in QM, and how it is connected to consciousness (if at all). Lowenstein briefly discusses this point towards the end of the book by summarizing the ideas of Wigner and Penrose but seems to come to a negative conclusion on that point. The text is more a book on biology than physics. Though it didn't provide the insight I was looking for, it was very insightful. I would probably recommend not getting this one on audio if you want to understand it decently.
My one issue with Lowenstein's argument is less to do with him, and more to do with arguments surrounding selection in general, in that they seem to he entirely teleological or "just so" reasons with respect to the path selection pressures take within a system. Either way, a specialist may be more apt at dismissing these ideas or praising them authoritatively. From an outsider though, the book is well written, the logic is clear and involved, and the concept is fascinating. Recommended for those who don't mind some work in their passive reading.
Fascinating, though slow going for a non-physics person.
Like many of his ilk, he wants to prove that "it all comes down to physics" ontologically and otherwise; but he is not as reductionist as one might expect, given his physics background. He takes as his exemplar the concept of Evolution with a capital E, and tries to explain how "she" developed life from the foundations of the cosmos.
He does a pretty good job of it, though his wry comments and metaphors are occasionally a bit obscure or, worse, cliched. Nonetheless, I learned much from this book and appreciated thinking about evolution and consciousness from a physics perspective.
A warning, though, if you are a reader who gets upset about experiments on animals. Loewenstein may not have done experiments on animals himself (he cites the work of others), but his argument relies on quite a bit of animal experimentation, mostly involving the eye or brain.
Quote: "No specialized knowledge of biology, physics, or information theory is assumed in advance. With the general reader in mind, ..." Good luck with that. This book is heavy on biology/physics (including quantum theory), "general" reader will be lost quite fast. Overall it's dry scientific book with few humorous lines between historical and biologic facts. Still can be 'entertaining' for ones who'd like to get alternative view on brain.
Interesting content and very difficult. The author's style is nice and refreshing, and makes it easier to absorb the dense content. I was kinda expecting a boring physics book, but this is not that.
I particularly liked the parts about quantum computing. This has sparked an interest in learning more about current efforts to construct a quantum computer.
Perhaps the best quantum computing elucidation I've seen, especially in terms of the potential role in consciousness. Also a stunning tour through evolution from an information computing perspective, including the meaning of epigenetics for it.
Exercise in overcomplicating; picking up a random edition of Brain and Cognition journal was a much better use of time. Clearly, the noise to signal ratio wasn't acceptable to this grumpy over dopaminated brain 😉
While certainly going beyond what I think "the average layman" could understand, this book offers an excellent detailed view of how the nervous system works. Sprinkled with quite a few aha moments in between the detailed descriptions, those moments are what I think gives this book a well deserved four star rating.
Okay, I dropped out of school at age 15. But the physics teacher asked the headmaster to let me do more advanced physics without doing the 14,15 year old science. I scored a high 90's on a physics text even though I had not taken science at all for two years. The headmaster wouldn't listen, I left school and started a long and industrious career with drugs and jail. This book, and I promise you, I have not read one physics paper or document before in my life, is well written and flows nicely. It gradually introduces ideas and concepts. Unfortunately I randomly opened at page 256 and was hooked. For various reasons, 256 is a good number to me. As is 65536.6. I even drive a six cylinder car, with, you guessed it a 4 litre displacement - 666.6cc on each of the six cylinders!
Okay okay. Page 256. Awesome. When I was 12 I was programming and hacking games and was working on compression technologies and was frustrated by the limitations of binary. I thought "if only there was a way to get 0,1 and 2)" This thought went further to "0,1 and NON 0 or 1".
Then it was forgotten and I invented the oval piston engine (thirty years too late, thanks HONDA) and a number of other inventions that had already been invented. Also explain E.S.P and other things via brain waves, without realising a few base facts first. The base facts are all in this book.
This book is better than N.A for me!
Hand it to some other promising youngster who turned out to be homeless bums and change the world.
The most up-to-date and comprehensive interweaving of cosmology and neurobiology that one could hope to find. Our sun provides the protons fromm which we suckle--we and all life on earth. High up on the biological totem pole as we are, we don't do the sucking ourselves, but enlist into service molecules that have a knack for using information from those elementary particles efficiently--a knack not many molecules on earth possess. Prominent here are the chlorophylls of plants and the carotenes of bacteria. These are pigment molecules, and they are quite pretty--the clorophylls are green, and the carotenes, yellow. There bright color catches our eyes, but what really matters lies hidden inside them, in their electron clouds. There around the carbon chains or carbon rings, a set of electrons is crucially poised to absorb the photon energy quantum. The electrons lie in wait for that quantum, so to speak.
I liked this book quite a lot. It was the right amount of detail for a high-level overview, though the author kept making statements about information theory that really weren't rigorous enough. I learned quite a bit about many different topics while reading this book, and was able to get a better view of the entire evolutionary journey of the universe, of biological organisms, and of the brain. In particular, I gained a lot of knowledge on detailed biological mechanisms in sensing and signaling.
The last part of the book seems a bit out of date though, since it was written in 2013 and didn't include any discussion on artificial neural nets. I also didn't buy a lot of the talk of quantum decoherence in the last two chapters. I don't think it's as important to conscious information processing as the author does, and he didn't really convince me otherwise. An updated version of this book with more information on the current state of artificial intelligence would be very nice.
Physicists like symmetry. So, can time go backwards?
Newtonian physics is totally predictable. We know where our spaceships are going in distant galaxies.
Quantum mechanics is mind-boggling complex, so a statistical analysis is needed. Which means a lose of some information. So, perhaps, if we watch long enough, then we might see time go backwards.
That was chapter 1. The next few chapters were about communication through a cell membrane. Lots of chemistry. But, it did provide a way for one cell to communicate with another. Axons, dendrites, etc.
But, bottom line, the detail was too much, the context, why does this bit matter, was too often missing, and the phrases from other venues just didn't work often enough.
This was extremely rich in information, and provided good insight into how the the brain functions as both a quantum computer and as a digital computer. Sadly, Lowenstein wanted to highlight his writing style as much as his vast knowledge of quantum physics and biophysics, and the reader pays the penalty for the former. Had he been more straightforward and academic in his physical and biophysical explications rather than stylistic and even teleological, it would have been much easier to digest the points he tried to make. Hopefully, someone, maybe even Lowenstein himself, will one day attempt a type of study notes version of this book that abandons all of the complicating metaphors and archaic language which would be more suitable in a novel than in a science book.
An interesting take on the brain and the senses, from a biophysics point of view. Be warned: this is not a high school level book - the author is assuming some basic comfort level with physics and biology (at least, he seems to be - I'm assuming by "no specialized knowledge" in the introduction, he means you don't have to have majored in the subject.) I found the personification of evolution a little off-putting, but the idea that Maxwell's demon abounds in biological processes was rather charming. I'm a bit sorry that I got this from a library, as I have the feeling I need to read through it a second time to properly digest it all.
bit disappointed that this book didn't push a bit more aggressively into a theory of quantum processing in the brain, but you know, things backed by actual science is good too. The book gets into the nitty gritty of how different sensors — for touch, light, smell, etc work and how they pass on information. I was fascinated and it was fun to read something radically different wrt how in depth it goes.
In the preface, the author assures us that this book is meant for a general reader with no specialized knowledge in either biology or physics. This is a bold-faced lie. I have an undergraduate degree in physics, and almost every physics book I've read meant for the "general reader" has been very easy for me. This book, on the other hand, more assumes you have a graduate-level education in physics and at least a good understanding of biology.
I was very thankful for my recent study of biology and quantum mechanics while reading this book. As an electrical engineer I think I'd have had a tough time of it without the physics & bio recently. There was a lot of interesting information shared but I had a hard time with some of the animal testing described in acquiring the sensory knowledge etc.
This was an extremely eye opening book. It really clarified how amazing we are, how our makeup is not even close to being understood completely, and the unsolved mysteries he outlines just leave me filled with wonder and awe at what is yet to come! A thoroughly informative, and highly enjoyable read, I recommend it to any inquisitive and curious scientists out there.
Great book for the basics of information transmission in living organisms. The book did have a weak ending regarding more complex information transmission and especially how we explain consciousness.