I checked this book out of the library because I have long had an interest in the interface of neuroscience, philosophy, ethics, and daily decision-making, and it seemed to be relevant.
The founder of the Lab of Misfits, Beau Lotto is a British/American neuroscientist whose research mostly relates to how humans perceive their external world through their five senses. After struggling through this difficult work, I am not sure if he is a genius who is so smart that I can’t possibly understand him or an arrogant elitist who tries hard to impress us lesser beings by using endless disconnected narratives, analogies and linguistic jargon. With either possibility, he failed to impress me. With chapter titles such as “Information is Meaningless”, “The Illusion of Illusions”, “Changing The Future Past”, and “Celebrate Doubt”, it seems the one constant in his message is that we can’t really know anything and everything we think we know is a delusion. Only he and his misfits apparently have the insight to understand this, although he attempts to convince the rest of us that this is true- and fails. And it seems peculiar that this professor who specializes in sensory perceptions and misfits does not even mention synesthesia, the not-rare varied phenomenon of crossed wiring of sensory inputs resulting in people smelling colours, seeing sounds or tasting names. It strikes me that someone with this syndrome (many do not recognize that they are uniquely wired neurologically) would make for a great central figure in a work of fiction. Does anyone know of such a novel?
Abundant use of silly and annoying switching of fonts, spacing, capitals, italics and bold type in the both text and insets, obscure visual tricks, and meaningless line diagrams may make the message seem erudite and profound to some readers, but not this one. A quote, “At bottom, our lives are in fact nothing more than millions and millions of sequential knee-jerk reflexive responses.” would seem to deny the possibility of us exerting any free will- or of us following his later advice to modify our lives by questioning our every assumption. He never really addresses the conundrum of free will.
What does such gobbledegook as “Understanding reduces the complexity of data by collapsing the dimensionality of information to a lower set of known variables.” mean for those of us whose language skills are average? And there are literally hundreds of such obscure sentences in this book.
Unless you are in need of a humbling education by someone who purports to have insights that you could not possibly understand, I cannot recommend this book. But did I learn anything? Yes- be a bit more cautious when deciding to check a book out of the library, and to ignore the Advanced Praise blurbs of people whose names I do not recognize.
The Passionate Reader 