Reviews

Mind Hacks: Tips & Tools for Using Your Brain
by Tom Stafford & Matt Webb

Publisher: O’Reilly Media, Inc.

Reviewed by Bayle Emlein

Price $24.95

Tips & Tools for Using Your Brain” tells much more about this book than the main title, “Mind Hacks.” However, using “hacks” in the title places the book in the O’Reilly series of that category and correctly implies that the user is a system component. The authors do not limit themselves to this aspect of brain/mind functioning, but anyone who is involved in advertising, animation, or sensory input (seeing, hearing, touching) would be well-advised to be up-to-date with current knowledge. Some of the vision hacks demonstrate how shading and shadows are effective ways of both highlighting computer menu buttons and enhancing the effects of make-up. (We each have our field of interest.)

I’ve had a mind for years and have long been fascinated by the similarities and differences between mine and other models. Having spent decades as a special education teacher, I’ve paid more attention than most non-medical folks to the developing knowledge of brain function and the interaction between the mind, the brain, neurochemistry, the rest of one’s body, and the environment.

Mind Hacks is a relatively comprehensive and comprehensible for a layman’s survey of current knowledge about neuroanatomy, with relevant details about neurochemistry.  A separate section, a page or two in length, is devoted to each topic, or “hack.” The hacks are written to stand independently, so you don’t need to read the whole book if all you want to know about is color vision. When information from other sections provides needed background, the other section is clearly referenced by section number. I would have appreciated a page number also.

Unlike poetry, scientific style needs to present its message and not be an element in its own right. Style here should be invisible. Writing stand-alone sections that still interrelate is quite a challenge. The authors of Mind Hacks succeeded better at some times than others, gracefully rephrasing without condescending. Other times, they repeated themselves verbatim with just a few paragraphs between. English teachers (even retired ones) notice when you use the same word twice in the same sentence, the same phrase twice in the same paragraph, the same sentence twice in the same chapter. That’s not cool in anything but poetry and books written for people under the age of 5. It’s harder with science than with prose to vary phrasing, but occasionally the authors manage quite well. For example: “five times a second”, “in 1/5th of a second,” “once every 200 milliseconds,” and a brief foray in into math to explain how these are equivalent.

Each hack includes a “In Action” section describing how to replicate the results on your own and the reader is encouraged to try each of the hacks at home. This level of detail in of writing, the extensive references to research and to further resources on the internet would make this book an ideal addition to a middle or high school biology class. Several of the activities need a partner, and could be instructional in a supervised group setting. Placing the references at the end of each section makes them readily available without interrupting those of us who read Mind Hacks the same way we read a novel.

In this book about assumptions and mental fill-ins, I found some of the social assumptions to be a bit annoying. At 5 a.m. I couldn’t find anyone except my cats who wanted me to poke his or her back with sharp pointed household items to test how close together I could get them on various body parts before they stopped feeling like two separate objects. And my furry helpers refused to give me the kind of feedback specified. I did appreciate the many links to follow up and get more information or to get animated or WAV files to demonstrate vision and hearing hacks. However, a number of them were dead, and that discouraged me from continuing to use this aspect of the book. I think there’s a hack somewhere that explains why I came to this logical conclusion.

Another assumption was that I’d have access to a computer pretty much any time I was reading Mind Hacks. The authors occasionally suggest a work-around for someone who can’t get on line, but the substitutions are few and far between. Guess they don’t expect much of an audience in the Third World or on BART trains that go through tunnels. I don’t mind dropping a book into my bubble bath, but bathing with a wireless PDA isn’t on my agenda.

Mind Hacks lacks two things: a good website and a good editor. Corralling all the links in one place–and having them already entered would prevent reading coming to a screeching halt in the wake of my typo.  It would also allow the authors or editor to update links as they change. After a few dead links, thinking about all the steps between me and the internet came to seem like a huge burden, and I started ignoring this aspect of the book altogether. I think that is a real shame, because this contrivance could signal a new way of reading, especially for non-fiction. Inclusion of a pre-paid wireless PDA with the book (at no added cost, of course) would be one way to address the problem created by sometimes reading while not at a connected computer, at least until BART went through a tunnel.

A web page would also be a great way to present a picture of exactly the part of the brain, or whatever bit of neurology and/or musculature is being featured. With an index of hack numbers that linked to zoomable pictures I could click on the hack number, and the relevant neurons would light up. At the beginning of the book, there are a few very general diagrams of the brain. They weren’t  detailed enough to make flipping back to them worth the trouble. The Internet has a wealth of brainy pictures at all levels of detail. The good ones have so much detail it’s hard to relate them to the book text without some clues. Having the relevant neuron(s) light up with a click on the hack number I’m looking at would have helped me visualize the geography better. From the amount of space given to such placement descriptions, I presume that the authors felt that in the brain, as in other areas of life, location matters. It matters to me, in any case: I was the student who kept asking the Beginning Electronics teacher to put Day-Glo sneakers on the electrons as they ran around the motherboard so I could really see the architecture. Now I’d like to see flashing, squeaking tennis shoes and be able to pull off an equivalent feat with any text involving neuroscience without having to review several anatomy classes.

The other thing that this book lacks is a good editor. I found the spelling, grammatical, and continuity errors to be distracting. (OK. They took the English teacher out of the classroom, but nobody took the English class away from the teacher.) I can’t help but wonder if anybody checked the reported facts as carefully as they checked their text.

Mind Hacks would be a good place to start if you need to update your understanding of “the brain as computer” model. If you animate games, write advertising, place advertising in print or on web sites, design web sites--or if you are the end-user of any of these technologies, you could find it useful to know about the tools others have at their disposal. Despite its drawbacks, I’d recommend Mind Hacks to anyone whose last psychology or biology text was written in the middle of the last century. The book presents many bits of information, most of them relatively new, without going overboard into medical jargon.

O’Reilly Media, Inc., Sebastopol, CA 2005
www.oreilly.com
List $24.95 USD. 363 pages
First Edition November 2004
Series: Hacks
ISBN: 0-596-00779-5

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Last Updated on March 9, 2008 12:07 PM by Webmaster