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An engineer's lot
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Unnervingly fluid There is also good evidence that people with autism can have a less fixed perception of their own body. The resulting anxiety may lead to a characteristically intense desire for external order. These are just two examples of a speculative, emerging view of the self that the book uncovers. Alongside, much emerges about the brain regions involved, the emphasis returning repeatedly to the anterior insula’s key role in the moment-to-moment sense of self as a feeling entity. Underactivation here correlates with the fog of depersonalisation, overactivation to a unifying ecstasy. By the book’s close, you will see the unified self as an unnervingly fluid construction, and perhaps be able to argue with Buddhist, Hindu and Western philosophers on the very existence of “self”. The book has just one shortcoming. Ananthaswamy writes dispassionately about the people he meets. Only in the acknowledgments do his warm feelings towards them shine through. If he had let us in on the personal passion behind his great quest, we would have a book that is not just excellent but also impossible to put down. n Alun Anderson is a consultant for New Scientist
An engineer’s lot Why do we only care when things screw up, asks Jonathon Keats
Applied Minds: How engineers think, by Guru Madhavan, W.W. Norton, $26.95
THE discovery of penicillin is one of the greatest breakthroughs in medicine. Yet in 1942, more than a decade after Alexander Fleming first identified it, quantities were so limited that doctors used half of the US supply to treat one patient. As the nation went to war, military demand soared and pharmaceutical company Pfizer assigned the mass production of the antibiotic to a chemical engineer named Margaret Hutchinson. The technique she developed produced 650 billion doses for the Allies by 1945. Unlike Fleming, Hutchinson never became famous, an oversight that biomedical engineer Guru Madhavan attributes to her profession. Unrecognised creativity: engineers are omnipresent but invisible
Between these temporal bookends “Engineering is omnipresent but are tales of time zones, digital invisible,” he writes. “It tends to cameras and disposable nappies. be discussed only when an From each example, Madhavan airplane crashes… a building attempts to draw broader lessons. crumbles, or a technology fails.” But more often than not, he fails. In Applied Minds, Madhavan For instance, his account of how sets out to remedy this, claiming Martin Cooper developed the first for engineering the credit he cellphone for Motorola identifies says the profession deserves. prototyping as key, but Madhavan For him, engineers are the most remains frustratingly vague about significant actors in modern how the DynaTAC benefited from society. They are “propellers of prototyping, let alone why it is a economies, designers of our skill we all need. “Prototypes are material destinies… and subliminal brokers who facilitate our experiences with the world”. “Margaret Hutchinson We need to understand what they produced industrial quantities of penicillin do and how they think for the from mouldy cantaloupe” same reasons that it behoves us to understand our national the starting points toward our governments. ultimate creative destinations,” But in contrast to government, he writes. The same could be said where our main concern is that politicians act responsibly on our of blueprints or designs. Madhavan does better with behalf, engineering provides a penicillin. Working under great “multi-purpose tool kit” that Madhavan believes we all can use. pressure, Hutchinson enlisted Pfizer’s citric acid fermentation To elucidate, Madhavan’s vivid tanks as well as chemical cameos range from the purification techniques for petrol 18th-century development of French artillery to the 21st-century refinement to help her extract industrial quantities of penicillin implementation of Google Maps. from mouldy cantaloupe. “Adaptation is a pre-eminent form of creation,” argues Madhavan, showing why Hutchinson deserves as much admiration as Fleming. The “engineering practice of recombination” used by Hutchinson is both laudable and applicable beyond engineering. It helps make the most of available resources in any situation. But what is lacking are details. In his account of her ingenuity, we see why Madhavan’s book is both essential and inadequate. n akg-images
“as small as Barbie dolls or as big as a thirteen-foot-high-giant”. His travels reveal that the same broad idea – of a brain trying to make predictive sense of sometimes conflicting internal and external signals – can give insights into how many “maladies of self” develop. People with schizophrenia may lack agency, the sense that they are carrying out their own actions. The brain compensates by trying to make judgements about the ownership of their actions from a more external viewpoint, which may force them to feel almost outside themselves.
Jonathon Keats’s book on Buckminster Fuller will be published by Oxford University Press in 2016 29 August 2015 | NewScientist | 43
Unnervingly fluid There is also good evidence that people with autism can have a less fixed perception of their own body. The resulting anxiety may lead to a characteristically intense desire for external order. These are just two examples of a speculative, emerging view of the self that the book uncovers. Alongside, much emerges about the brain regions involved, the emphasis returning repeatedly to the anterior insula’s key role in the moment-to-moment sense of self as a feeling entity. Underactivation here correlates with the fog of depersonalisation, overactivation to a unifying ecstasy. By the book’s close, you will see the unified self as an unnervingly fluid construction, and perhaps be able to argue with Buddhist, Hindu and Western philosophers on the very existence of “self”. The book has just one shortcoming. Ananthaswamy writes dispassionately about the people he meets. Only in the acknowledgments do his warm feelings towards them shine through. If he had let us in on the personal passion behind his great quest, we would have a book that is not just excellent but also impossible to put down. n Alun Anderson is a consultant for New Scientist
An engineer’s lot Why do we only care when things screw up, asks Jonathon Keats
Applied Minds: How engineers think, by Guru Madhavan, W.W. Norton, $26.95
THE discovery of penicillin is one of the greatest breakthroughs in medicine. Yet in 1942, more than a decade after Alexander Fleming first identified it, quantities were so limited that doctors used half of the US supply to treat one patient. As the nation went to war, military demand soared and pharmaceutical company Pfizer assigned the mass production of the antibiotic to a chemical engineer named Margaret Hutchinson. The technique she developed produced 650 billion doses for the Allies by 1945. Unlike Fleming, Hutchinson never became famous, an oversight that biomedical engineer Guru Madhavan attributes to her profession. Unrecognised creativity: engineers are omnipresent but invisible
Between these temporal bookends “Engineering is omnipresent but are tales of time zones, digital invisible,” he writes. “It tends to cameras and disposable nappies. be discussed only when an From each example, Madhavan airplane crashes… a building attempts to draw broader lessons. crumbles, or a technology fails.” But more often than not, he fails. In Applied Minds, Madhavan For instance, his account of how sets out to remedy this, claiming Martin Cooper developed the first for engineering the credit he cellphone for Motorola identifies says the profession deserves. prototyping as key, but Madhavan For him, engineers are the most remains frustratingly vague about significant actors in modern how the DynaTAC benefited from society. They are “propellers of prototyping, let alone why it is a economies, designers of our skill we all need. “Prototypes are material destinies… and subliminal brokers who facilitate our experiences with the world”. “Margaret Hutchinson We need to understand what they produced industrial quantities of penicillin do and how they think for the from mouldy cantaloupe” same reasons that it behoves us to understand our national the starting points toward our governments. ultimate creative destinations,” But in contrast to government, he writes. The same could be said where our main concern is that politicians act responsibly on our of blueprints or designs. Madhavan does better with behalf, engineering provides a penicillin. Working under great “multi-purpose tool kit” that Madhavan believes we all can use. pressure, Hutchinson enlisted Pfizer’s citric acid fermentation To elucidate, Madhavan’s vivid tanks as well as chemical cameos range from the purification techniques for petrol 18th-century development of French artillery to the 21st-century refinement to help her extract industrial quantities of penicillin implementation of Google Maps. from mouldy cantaloupe. “Adaptation is a pre-eminent form of creation,” argues Madhavan, showing why Hutchinson deserves as much admiration as Fleming. The “engineering practice of recombination” used by Hutchinson is both laudable and applicable beyond engineering. It helps make the most of available resources in any situation. But what is lacking are details. In his account of her ingenuity, we see why Madhavan’s book is both essential and inadequate. n akg-images
“as small as Barbie dolls or as big as a thirteen-foot-high-giant”. His travels reveal that the same broad idea – of a brain trying to make predictive sense of sometimes conflicting internal and external signals – can give insights into how many “maladies of self” develop. People with schizophrenia may lack agency, the sense that they are carrying out their own actions. The brain compensates by trying to make judgements about the ownership of their actions from a more external viewpoint, which may force them to feel almost outside themselves.
Jonathon Keats’s book on Buckminster Fuller will be published by Oxford University Press in 2016 29 August 2015 | NewScientist | 43