Customer Reviews

The Barmaid's Brain: And Other Strange Tales from Science

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This collection of short essays on quirky scientific subjects is a fun read for the scientifically curious. In plain language, Ingram presents various mysteries - how a barmaid can remember fifteen orders when most people can only remember a series of seven, how a colony of single-celled Volvoxes can develop specialized roles that allow only a select few to reproduce, why humans are bipedal and largely hairless - and proceeds to discuss scientific progress on these matters. Ingram is not afraid of messy packages; he includes refutations and some strange sidenotes. Several of the issues in this book have not been solved and may never be (and some are ridiculous, such as building a ladder to the moon, a subject which the author treats with good humor AND good science), but Ingram always gives his readers a solid understanding of the problem at hand.

All in all, this is an entertaining book. Although working scientists might be disappointed by the lack of depth (the results of experiments are succintly summarized, for example), most people will be satisfied with the knowledge gained. Like Stephen Jay Gould's popular science books, this should find a spot on many bookshelves.

(Because of its accessibility, I recommend it for high school students as well as adults. Children as young as fourteen will find much to interest them.)

My day job is news editor for Science Daily, Discovery Channel's science news show. One of the our hosts is noted science writer and broadcaster Jay Ingram, who has a new book, The Barmaid's Brain. As someone who works with Jay every day, I'm sure my reaction to reading the book will be similar to that of anyone who watches the show regularly ... "Jay has a sense of humour????"

Who knew?

Truth be told, this is a delightful book. It's clear, and written in a very accessible style. More importantly, it presents a fascinating range of subjects ... everything from perpetual motion machines to Joan of Arc. It's a good synthesis of contemporary thought on a wide variety of topics. And perhaps most refreshingly, Ingram doesn't hesitate to shrug when he doesn't know the answer. Sometimes, as with his explanation of the aquatic ape hypothesis, he presents the information and says there just isn't enough information to make a reasonable judgement. Other times he'll say which answer seems more likely, but never tries to present it as the only possible answer.

In an age of quick fixes and "instant experts", it's comforting to be reminded that we sometimes don't know. We might think we know. We might be pretty sure we know. But ultimately, even an expert's judgement is often just a best guess. And that's something we could all stand to be reminded of. www.exn.ca/printedmatter

Accessible, lively and wide-ranging, Jay Ingram's twenty-one tales from the edges of science delves succinctly into an array of scientific oddities and mysteries from the source of Joan of Arc's voices and the Salem Witch phenomenon to the ingenious construction of the antlion's ambush pit and why sickle cell anemia confers evolutionary advantage.

A science writer ("The Science of Everyday Life," "The Burning House") and Discovery Channel host, Ingram has collected his personal favorites and organized them into five sections: Human Behavior, Curiosities of Life, Science and History, Natural Battles, How Things Work.

Why is that the barmaid routinely performs prodigious feats of memory yet misperceives the level of liquid in a tilted glass far more often than the average Joe (literally - the average Jane's perception is better than the barmaid's but not as good as Joe's)? Why does the moth fly to light? Something to do with navigating by moon, probably but then why is light lure stronger than sex? When is a cowbird egg in a cacique nest a good thing? Answer: when there are no bees and wasps nests around.

Then there's "Consumed by Learning" in which trained flatworms, chopped and fed to untrained flatworms, were able to pass on their knowledge. These results were greeted with such hoots of derision that the research was abandoned - leaving the question.

How about the sedentary British bird that learned to open milk containers and somehow spread this knowledge gradually northwards? In a Canadian experiment twenty-five percent of chickadees figured it out on their own and were able to tutor the less able. Strangely though, when tutor birds were placed in a cage with no milk container, the bird in the next cage figured out how to open its container. Telepathy? (This is not the conclusion the scientists arrived at.)

Ingram revisits the 1960s theory, popularized by Elaine Morgan, that human hairlessness, bipedalism, nose shape, tears, etc., indicate that "Homo Aquaticus" became a creature of the ocean shallows for a few million years. Pooh-poohed but not disproved.

He looks into Archimedes' war machines, the doomed quest for perpetual motion, the anatomy of laughter, a scary viral predator whose aggressive perfection is, thankfully, confined to bacteria. Presenting various theories with their pros and cons, he outlines a range of experiments and counter experiments and doesn't hesitate to digress when it's called for. He touches on the personalities and politics of science and keeps his quirky sense of humor at the fore.

Knowledge of science is not necessary but neither does it get in the way of enjoyment. Ingram's topics have been the subjects of whole books and for those whose curiosity is aroused, he provides a bibliography (no index).

"The Barmaid's Brain" was both entertaining and mildly disappointing. The cover blurb has it that this book is in the tradition of Stephen Jay Gould and Oliver Sacks, which I took to mean a collection of thematically connected essays on science. Gould concentrates on learned, very readable essays on evolution; Sacks specializes in tales of neurological dysfunction, e.g. the famous "Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat."

However, Ingram doesn't attempt to thread his miscellany of essays with an overarching theme, as do Gould and Sacks. He is more in the tradition of magpie science---he writes about whatever catches his eye.

Here are a couple of his essays that caught my eye:

"Consumed by Learning"---I was saddened to learn that the "The Worm Runner's Digest" (a feature of my college years) is no more. Nowadays hardly anyone believes that he can learn to play the piano by taking a pill, and Planaria are no longer forced to dine on their learned brethren. Even more disturbing, James McConnell, the iconoclastic `Worm Runner General' himself was targeted late in his life by the Unabomber and suffered a permanent hearing impairment from the bomb blast---the unanticipated price of his brief moment of scientific fame.

"The Monks Who Saw the Moon Split Open"--- The mysterious birth of the Lunar Crater Giordano Bruno. As reported by Ingram via the twelfth century "Chronicles of Gervase," a group of five Englishmen saw "fire, hot coals, and sparks" bursting forth from the Moon on the evening of June 18, 1178. Did they witness the cataclysmic birth of Crater Giordano Bruno via asteroid impact? Ingram argues that the location and age of the 22-kilometer (14-mile) lunar crater Giordano Bruno indicates that this was indeed the case.

However, a new study suggests the event was a meteoritic trick of the eye.

Paul Withers of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory argues that an impact large enough to create Giordano Bruno "would have triggered a blizzard-like, week-long meteor storm on Earth -- yet there are no accounts of such a storm in any known historical record." Withers reports his analysis and other tests of the `crater' hypothesis in the journal of the Meteoritical Society "Meteoritics and Planetary Science."

Read both Ingram's essay and Paul Withers's account (there is a summary at the Science@NASA home page) and decide for yourself whether five medieval Englishmen indeed witnessed the birth of a crater on our Moon.

"The Barmaid's Brain" is a lively collection of essays, well worth savoring one at time. Ingram entertains as he educates.

A set of twenty non-fiction essays/stories/investigations about various topics.

eg:

"I Just Had to Laugh"
What causes laughter? What tests have been done to isolate the laughter-center of the brain?

"Seeing Things"
We all know that light travels in a straight line, right? Wrong! Read about real mirages; how the cityscape of one city is projected to the clouds and seen miles away in another town.

"Sane in an Insane World"
1970's experiment where a dozen sane people go to psychiatrists and simply say "I heard a voice in my head". Learn what then happens to these people as they're immediately medicated and institutionalized. Don't try this one at home! ... at least not unless you have a friend who'll come bail you out of the asylum.

"The Barmaid's Brain"
Ever been to a busy restaurant and wondered how the waitress remembers your orders w/o writing it down? How about cocktail waitresses who, on New Year's Eve, are able to remember the orders of 150 patrons and do refills/etc w/o asking them to repeat the order?

"The Invention of Thievery"
All the sudden, in Engand in the 1920's, chickadees began opening and drinking from bottles of milk left on customers' doorsteps. Why? More interestingly, how did the chickadees propagate the "knowledge" across the country when a typical chickadee never travels more than 15 miles from it's birthplace in its entire life?

An interesting collection of 'why's'. The author presents some phenomenom such as why a barmaid can remember all the drink orders of a large table and why moths fly towards a light then suddenly turn away.

The Barmaid's Brain is a collection of tales of intrigue. I equate it to a set of unsolved mysteries of history and science. Several interesting tales from various historical and scientific disciplines give this book a broad appeal. Human behavior section includes a great story about Rosenhan's article in 1973 - completely normal people reported to ERs and claimed to be hallucinating. Many were diagnosed with schizophrenia. The curiosities of life section was great - i.e. interesting sections of why moths fly toward light and controversy over validity of the theory that our ancestors spent most of their time in the water - "homo aquaticus". If you're innately curious, you'll enjoy this book. If you don't like watching the history channel, TLC and Discovery channels, you probably won't like it at all.

Over twenty stories from science and nature examine quirks of natural history and will appeal to any who read Stephen Jay Gould and other science writers. The general reader will find quite appealing this survey of new theories, facts, discoveries and anecdotes.