ONE, TWO, THREE, PHI

Abstract

1 5 1 R O N E , T W O , T H R E E , P H I E D I S O N M I Y A W A K I I’ve got an idea – and I’m just spitballing here – but what if I wrote a wandering dream of a book, lavishly illustrated on glossy pages, in which I am me, myself, a working scientist, cast in the mold of Dante Alighieri, except that I don’t write in terza rima. But I’ve got thousands of Virgils as guides. The Virgils are important scientists and of course artists, and I’ll borrow from all of them copiously, with appropriate scholarly citation. Anyway, these Virgils guide me through the matrix of a nervous-system network – which is to say, the human brain, which I study in real life – and then, miraculously . . . Interrupting response to the above proposal: the book could be hell; it probably is hell. Phi (that would be phi, ⌽, not pi, ⌸) is now out for laypersons and scientists to see and judge for themselves. They might find, to author Giulio Tononi’s credit, that his book is not a reader’s purgatory – not entirely. True enough, there’s torture in it (example to follow). Prolix and uneven, it is nevertheless an astonishing foray into what might be called neuroaesthetics. In theory, neuroaestheP h i : A V o y a g e f r o m t h e B r a i n t o t h e S o u l , by Giulio Tononi (Pantheon, 364 pp., $30) 1 5 2 M I Y A W A K I Y tics should be congratulated whenever and wherever attempted: getting scientists to write well about beautiful things, including the brain, is noble. Indeed, Nobel winners in science have been getting into the act recently, and we might expect more trade books in step with the latest science-prize announcements from Stockholm. Recently, for example, we have Eric Kandel’s The Age of Empathy (2012). Kandel’s winning science had to do with how the brain remembers, but his Age is about fin-de-siècle Vienna, about Kandel’s nostalgia for the era, and about how art and science mingled then, like hydrogen and oxygen, to create truly beautiful vapor. Even the co√ee klatches in that Vienna (as Kandel describes ) were ethereal. A certain Berta Zuckerkandel, wife of a local anatomist, threw the best soirées by far. ‘‘On my divan, Austria comes alive,’’ she once announced, probably with a demure smile. In aesthetic critical terms, Kandel’s Age confines itself to discussing Viennese portrait artists of the time. By comparison, Giulio Tononi is boundary-less and gratuitously encyclopedic. If memory serves, the only thing that Tononi doesn’t discuss is Viennese portraiture of the fin de siècle. Who is Tononi? I flip through my nonelectronic files to pull a manila folder marked, with Sharpie pen, ‘‘Tononi, G.’’ I find in it, to my embarrassment, only one Xeroxed article, from the 4 December 1998 issue of Science, titled ‘‘Consciousness and Complexity .’’ Tononi’s co-author is Gerald Edelman, a Nobel laureate like Kandel (though Edelman got his prize twenty-eight years before Kandel, for work on the immune system, not the brain). There’s one sentence in my lone Science article – a single phrase, in fact – to suggest that Tononi has spent a sizable chunk of his life working on just one thing. Here’s the sentence, and I’d ask the reader to consider what single phrase or clause in it might make for a career: ‘‘It can be shown that high values of complexity reflect the coexistence of a high degree of functional specialization and functional integration within a system, as appears to be the case for systems such as the brain.’’ The answer is not ‘‘It can be shown,’’ but you’re warm. ‘‘High values of complexity’’ makes me scratch my head vigorously , to the point of disregarding all that comes thereafter. Can one put a ‘‘value’’ on complexity? What are the units – cups or quarts? If you did make a measurement, who would care? The O N...