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The Cerebral Symphony: Seashore Reflections on the Structure of Consciousness
Set amidst the Woods Hole research colony on Cape Cod. Daniel C. Dennett said, Thinking along with Calvin is sheer delight. This book has the most vivid and lucid explanations of brain function I have seen, and his discussions of evolution place him in the same league with Stephen Gould and Richard Dawkins as elegant expositors in the life sciences.
420 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1989
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About the author
William H. Calvin
39 books36 followersWilliam H. Calvin, Ph.D., is a theoretical neurobiologist, Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the author of a dozen books, mostly for general readers, about brains and evolution.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 19, 2023
Calvin spent a summer at the Marine Biology Lab in Woods Hole to share insights with other scientists. His format is to interleave his experiences there with his thoughts about consciousness. He meditates upon a cormorant choosing what to do next, what consciousness is and how it works. He seems to agree with Daniel Dennett's idea that our conscious mental experience is composed of many different activities of the brain, like a symphony. "What's going on in mind isn't really a symphony but is more like a whole rehearsal hall of various melodies being practiced and composed; it is our ability to focus attention upon one well-shaped scenario that allows us to hear a cerebral symphony amid all the fantasy." "Consciousness is a term we seem to apply to choosing between alternative scenarios for what we might do next. Monitoring the success of a strategy is something that prefrontal cortex seems to do for us. Another prefrontal function is helping get sequences in the right order for the premotor cortex to execute." Prefrontal functions seem to include abstract and creative thinking, fluency of thought and language, affective responses and the capacity for emotional attachments, social judgment, volition and drive, and selective attention. "It is our ability to choose between alternative scenarios that constitutes our free will -- though, of course, our choices are only as good as our imagination in constructing a wide range of candidate scenarios. In my view, which not everyone shares, the central problem of human consciousness depends on this ability to imagine.... ".
A lot of new information (for me) is presented when Calvin explains how neurons seem to accomplish an action such as throwing an object. Many repetitions of throwing is required to train many neurons to work together redundantly to achieve precision. These neurons are modifiable by new experiences. Apparently the brain is much more complex than I had imagined. His descriptions are not very technical and very accessible.
Calvin makes some interesting observations:
"When you perceive intelligently, as you sometimes do, you always perceive a function, never an object in the...physical sense."
"Memories are sometimes more modifiable than we imagine. Indeed, each time we recall something, we have an opportunity to modify that memory."
"Similarly, in planning what to say next, we plan ahead no more than about a half-dozen words; while we're pronouncing those words, we make up the rest of the sentence, one reason that it is said that we usually don't know how a sentence is going to end when we start it. "
"Song is the noblest, the most intimate, the most complete manner of self-expression known to mankind, and in the last analysis self-expression is the great thing for which mankind is ever searching."
"Animals that cannot adapt to new environments will not survive the incessant fluctuations of climate. Judicial systems that cannot grow and change with our society's evolving problems will become rigid anachronisms that promote social earthquakes."
I read this book twice and intend to read it again. Dr William Calvin is a neurophysiologist and professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. He also authored 'How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now'. Hopefully I will be able to read that book too.
A lot of new information (for me) is presented when Calvin explains how neurons seem to accomplish an action such as throwing an object. Many repetitions of throwing is required to train many neurons to work together redundantly to achieve precision. These neurons are modifiable by new experiences. Apparently the brain is much more complex than I had imagined. His descriptions are not very technical and very accessible.
Calvin makes some interesting observations:
"When you perceive intelligently, as you sometimes do, you always perceive a function, never an object in the...physical sense."
"Memories are sometimes more modifiable than we imagine. Indeed, each time we recall something, we have an opportunity to modify that memory."
"Similarly, in planning what to say next, we plan ahead no more than about a half-dozen words; while we're pronouncing those words, we make up the rest of the sentence, one reason that it is said that we usually don't know how a sentence is going to end when we start it. "
"Song is the noblest, the most intimate, the most complete manner of self-expression known to mankind, and in the last analysis self-expression is the great thing for which mankind is ever searching."
"Animals that cannot adapt to new environments will not survive the incessant fluctuations of climate. Judicial systems that cannot grow and change with our society's evolving problems will become rigid anachronisms that promote social earthquakes."
I read this book twice and intend to read it again. Dr William Calvin is a neurophysiologist and professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. He also authored 'How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now'. Hopefully I will be able to read that book too.
November 10, 2008
Starting each chapter with observations from real life (most or all dealing with the behavior of a cormorant living near WHOI), Calvin describes possible mechanical explanations for how the operation of the human brain results in the consciousness that we all know and love.
He starts with the problem an early hominid had: how to combine the rock in his hand with that rabbit scampering by to produce a prehistoric version of hasenpfeffer. Having learned that he could kill an animal with a rock to the head, the problem was that the animal would rarely agree to stand still for this procedure, and he therefore had to throw the rock and hit the rabbit.
Clearly, by trial and error, just as we learned to throw a baseball as children, he learned this valuable skill. Calvin explains this by suggesting that each time he threw the rock, the variables from the encounter (distance to the rabbit, weight of the rock, muscular effort expended, etc) were "memorized", along with the result (too far, not far enough, off to the left, hit myself in the knee, etc.) A set of these configurations that were deemed successful were stored for future reference. The next time a rabbit comes by, in order to throw the rock effectively, a whole set of these configurations is compared to the current situation (Calvin gives a mechanical picture of how the brain could do this), and the "muscular program" that was used for the situation most like the current one is then used as a pattern to direct the throwing motion of the arm this time.
The saved setups that we use to cope with later situations Calvin refers to as scenarios; unsurprisingly, the more scenarios we have to choose from, the better our later judgement is expected to be.
He then goes on to suggest that the same neural machinery that was developed for this task was later adapted for more and more tasks that we perform today, from speech and visual pattern recognition to creative writing. These higher functions are groomed and exercised by going one step further, and spinning new scenarios by combining old ones, combinations based on links between concepts stored in our brains and that may or may not seem rational if we examine them consciously. When we choose to go with one of these scenarios built from seemingly unrelated concepts, it might produce results which we then consider to be insights or quantum leaps in our thinking.
And, the neat bow on the top of the whole package is that this whole process of selecting and comparing scenarios is not available to our conscious, but that consciousness is actually an emergent property of the selection of the winning scenario!
He starts with the problem an early hominid had: how to combine the rock in his hand with that rabbit scampering by to produce a prehistoric version of hasenpfeffer. Having learned that he could kill an animal with a rock to the head, the problem was that the animal would rarely agree to stand still for this procedure, and he therefore had to throw the rock and hit the rabbit.
Clearly, by trial and error, just as we learned to throw a baseball as children, he learned this valuable skill. Calvin explains this by suggesting that each time he threw the rock, the variables from the encounter (distance to the rabbit, weight of the rock, muscular effort expended, etc) were "memorized", along with the result (too far, not far enough, off to the left, hit myself in the knee, etc.) A set of these configurations that were deemed successful were stored for future reference. The next time a rabbit comes by, in order to throw the rock effectively, a whole set of these configurations is compared to the current situation (Calvin gives a mechanical picture of how the brain could do this), and the "muscular program" that was used for the situation most like the current one is then used as a pattern to direct the throwing motion of the arm this time.
The saved setups that we use to cope with later situations Calvin refers to as scenarios; unsurprisingly, the more scenarios we have to choose from, the better our later judgement is expected to be.
He then goes on to suggest that the same neural machinery that was developed for this task was later adapted for more and more tasks that we perform today, from speech and visual pattern recognition to creative writing. These higher functions are groomed and exercised by going one step further, and spinning new scenarios by combining old ones, combinations based on links between concepts stored in our brains and that may or may not seem rational if we examine them consciously. When we choose to go with one of these scenarios built from seemingly unrelated concepts, it might produce results which we then consider to be insights or quantum leaps in our thinking.
And, the neat bow on the top of the whole package is that this whole process of selecting and comparing scenarios is not available to our conscious, but that consciousness is actually an emergent property of the selection of the winning scenario!
July 17, 2015
This was a fairly straightforward, easy to read book on a materialist theory of mind and its relationship to consciousness. The author makes several good cases that consciousness functions like a "Darwin Machine" choosing from among a number of various processing modules, ultimately choosing the most fit word/action/schema/etc for the task at hand. While I'm not really sold on this idea or the others he defends in the book, he does make the ideas as simple and easy to understand as possible, I think. For me, a big part of the problem with trying to nail down 'consciousness' is that we are forced to use our imperfect language in the process - which leads to both miscommunication of an idea as well as the tendency for the communicator to become slavish to the words he uses and metaphors he employs. But, even with these inherent difficulties of the science-consciousness genre, still a good read.
May 11, 2014
Dude hangs out by the beach in New England and looks at animals and thinks about brains all day -- where do I sign up? Turns out there's a metaphorical "symphony" of activity going on all the time; consciousness is merely the emphasis of one tune over another. It reminded me of Charles Ives' Symphony No. 4 to mind, with its cacophonous back-and-forth phasing between separate themes.
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March 16, 2009Want to get really deep about the workings of the maind/brain? This one is great. An amazing writer.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews