Newsletter
Not brain regions, brain networks and other things
February 14, 2025
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
Last week I was supposed to do this week’s article, and got distracted by a cool feature of the study of language regions of the brain. Anyway, I updated last week’s article to stand alone, and this week’s article is what it should have been. If you read last weeks’ you can skip the intro to this weeks’ and just dive right in.
Not brain regions, brain networks
Excerpt: Brain regions are often oversimplified in popular discourse. The amygdala isn’t just the fear centre, and the prefrontal cortex isn’t solely the ‘smart’ bit. This silly approach to talking about the brain hides the really cool stuff. So let’s talk about those instead.
Main idea: Brain networks are groups of brain regions that work together. There are only a handful of interesting ones, but you can actually use them to understand human behaviour.
Introducing “How the System Works,” a series on the hidden mechanisms that support modern life. As Mann points out, “No poets celebrate the sewage treatment plants that prevent them from dying of dysentery.” Lots of illuminating insights in the first essay, for example:
Today more than 1 percent of the world’s industrial energy is devoted to making ammonia fertilizer. “That 1 percent,” the futurist Ramez Naam says, “roughly doubles the amount of food the world can grow.”
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Breakfast for Eight Billion. This is the first in the essay from Mann’s ‘how the system works’. I’ll save it again because it’s really fascinating. Look:
In the 1970s, much of South and East Asia were plagued by hunger. By the twenty-first century, Asians had an average of 30 percent more calories in their diet. Millions upon millions of families had more food, and with that came so much else. Seoul and Shanghai, Jaipur and Jakarta; shining skyscrapers, pricey hotels, traffic-choked streets blazing with neon: all are built atop a foundation of laboratory-bred rice … All this progress came at a cost. Farming 2.0 has transformed human life, but it has also wreaked environmental havoc.
Make a good reading list for a course somewhere.
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C.D.C. Posts, Then Deletes, Data on Bird Flu Spread Between Cats and People. A concern about the handling about COVID, or an error?
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The recent fertility slowdown in the U.S. is not primarily due to higher female incomes. If it’s not that women are getting better, is it because men are getting worse?
It’s only economists and men worrying about this though. For women, it’s very good news. For example:
Her point is essentially this: certain philosophical problems seem important only because of the kinds of lives lived by the philosophers who thought about them. With Descartes still firmly in her crosshairs, Midgley points to the example of the so-called ‘problem of other minds’ – the epistemic problem of working out whether we can really know that anyone other than ourselves exists. Midgley argues that someone who has been pregnant, ie, had another someone living inside them, would never consider this an important question worthy of deep, philosophical contemplation. She writes:
I wonder whether they would have said the same if they [philosophers like Descartes] had been frequently pregnant and suckling, if they had been constantly faced with questions like, ‘What have you been eating to make him ill?’, constantly experiencing that strange physical sympathy between child and parent … if in a word they had got used to the idea that their bodies were by no means exclusively their own? That, I suggest, is typical human experience. But you don’t get it in examples in the textbooks. It is supposed to be an irrational topic.
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It’s very skimmable, but I liked the idea:
For me, the reading culture that our practice would be counter to, as I thought about my session in advance, was as much that of school, of college, as of the internet … The reading we’d be doing would be utterly non-instrumental. There would be no papers, no grades, no credits or transcripts, and thus none of the habits and affects that come with them. The students wouldn’t be competing with each other, nor would they be stressed or fearful. They wouldn’t be doing the minimum, or trying to “figure out what the teacher is looking for”, or asking whether this was going to be on the test. I wouldn’t have to wheedle them or humor them or pressure them to do the reading. The program wasn’t going to get them anything except the experience of doing the program. They would be there for that …
for me, deep reading means first of all close reading: the scrupulous examination of the text for patterns of language and image, narrative structures and strategies, manipulations of generic expectations, formal balances and juxtapositions, allusions, concealments, ambiguities, and anything else you can find, then the further attempt to interpret them.
And so on. Interesting. Wonder what a ‘deep reading’ of the usual YA fiction suspects would illuminate.
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,