The Hungry Brain
Lahr, Anthea
The Hungry Brain The Mind of Man, by Nigel Galder. The Viking Press. 288 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by Anthea Lahr This is a wonderful book. It com- pletely transcends the dead frogs, test tubes,...
...He concludes, "Wom- en are by nature less pushing and they are therefore less likely to succeed in a competition where men have usually written the rules...
...It shows that the division between arts and sciences should not be dogmatic...
...In this century, we have seen great scientific breakthroughs harnessed to evil motives...
...the human mind alone can supply us with answers...
...We must not only supply mental "food" but make people aware that their apparent "backwardness" is due to a deficiency of cerebral diversion...
...For surely the quest of "who or what am I?" is one of the most important and spiritual characteristics of homo sapiens...
...That would be to stifle one of our most important assets—human curiosity...
...For this, we must not blame the scientists, but the politicians, the industrialists, and all those who stand to benefit in power and money from scientific achieve- ments...
...Nigel Calder's book is also a treasury of revelatory anecdotes—such as the account of the "executive" monkeys that developed ulcers...
...A robot can work out problems that can be solved mathematically...
...Man must tame the com- puter and technology as he has tamed nature...
...And as the man's way of doing things has produced so much war, brutality, and oppression, surely it is the woman's turn to make the rules...
...The question inevitably arises: can the human brain be replaced by a computer...
...But we cannot and should not discourage research because it can be abused...
...More is needed than bags of rice...
...It can even write poetry that is metrical- ly and grammatically correct...
...The Hungry Brain The Mind of Man, by Nigel Galder...
...But a computer needs a programmer...
...Reviewed by Anthea Lahr This is a wonderful book...
...Femininity rather than feminism may have to be as- serted, to secure greater esteem for the woman's way of doing things...
...But social consciousness and responsibility seem unable to keep up with advances in science...
...The brain craves for information as the body craves for food...
...Lack of interest and of concentration powers may be due to a lack of chem- icals caused by bad food patterns...
...At the moment the answer is No...
...As Calder reiterates, the mind is not a Cartesian soul in the pineal gland, but an integral part of the body...
...The computer has a certain amount of rea- son, but no intuition...
...Much of its inter- est comes from the contemplation of the possible effects of the inquiry into the brain on our political and social life...
...Man is a highly efficient machine that must be kept in good repair...
...While we are constantly aware of the starvation and unhealthy diets in the world, this sort of malnutrition may be less harm- ful than the lack of intellectual stim- ulation...
...But we can learn from this book, and from the work done with animals, about ourselves, our problems and our potential...
...For obvious reasons, experiments on humans are limited and we must not be too hasty in applying the results of tests on animals to humans...
...It com- pletely transcends the dead frogs, test tubes, and graph paper that put off so many "arts" students who are forced to "take" science...
...The Mind of Man is primarily writ- ten for the layman...
...We must marvel, in reading, at the amount of activity and the intricacy of the machinery inside our heads...
...There is a great art, a great creativity in science, and Nigel Galder describes this, in re- lation to the human brain, with a de- votion and clarity that make his book an essential key to discovering man...
...Calder, anxious to avoid the hos- tility of women liberationists, is care- ful not to compare the quality of the different brains...
...This has led, in certain areas, to Luddite and anti-scientific views...
...Sure- ly, if we realize we are all endowed with such a wealth of dynamism and organization, we cannot help but be more hopeful about each other and about the world...
...Not women who are imitations of men, but women who are proud to be women...
...The faculty of creating, of believing, and of making inspirational leaps of intelligence is man's alone...
...Male and female brains are differ- ent...
Vol. 35 • August 1971 • No. 10
