'An Alchemy of Mind': Circuits
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/books/review/29WARNERL.html?pagewanted=all&position=
By MARINA WARNER
Published: August 29, 2004
IN parts of southern Europe, rhapsody was women's work, especially at
a funeral. Not quite a state poet, not quite an official mourner, the
rhapsode would hymn the deeds and quality of the departed, producing
rhetorical flourishes of eulogy and elegy, mixing them with savory
fragments from the individual's life and character. Diane Ackerman's
subject in ''An Alchemy of Mind'' isn't a single person and isn't
altogether dead, but she hymns the human brain over its long evolution
(from the beginning, with the excretions of blue-green algae) to the
current pageant of functions pictured by PET scans, M.R.I.'s and other
visualizing tools. The brain is the protagonist of the story she
tells, full of moods and vagaries, plots and dangers, mischief and
virtue; it has associates and relations among species from crystals to
crocodiles; its past is murky and yet colorful, and its activities are
all-absorbing. The author revels in some of them, in list-making,
pattern-building, word association and grappling with sense. ''The
erotics of definition making is a special human pleasure,'' she
writes, and leads a writer into the pleasures of ''deep play.'' So,
she offers definitions thick and fast: ''Consciousness is the great
poem of matter''; ''Human beings are sloshing sacks of chemicals on
the move''; or ''The brain is a pattern-mad supposing machine.''
AN ALCHEMY OF MIND
The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain.
By Diane Ackerman.
300 pp. Scribner. $25.
Diane Ackerman
http://news.google.com/news?q=%20%22Diane%20Ackerman%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=gn
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Diane+Ackerman%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&tab=nw&sa=N
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Diane+Ackerman%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&output=search&cat=gwd/Top
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_epq=Diane%20Ackerman&safe=images&ie=UTF-8&as_scoring=d&lr=&num=100&hl=en
.
|
