The Three Pound Universe By Judith Hooper and Dick Teresi. Illustrated. 410 pages. New York, Macmillan Press. $25. Mind is a strange situation indeed for matter. I often wonder how something like hydrogen, the simplest atom created in the early chaos of the universe, led to us and the wonderful frenzy we call consciousness. If the brain is made of only three pounds of blood, dreams, and electricity, how can we contemplate ourselves, worry about our souls, study time and motion, admire the bashful hooves of a goat, know that we will die, and enjoy all the fuss and fuss of love? What is the mind that allows one to get out of “my…”? How can neurons feel compassion? What is the self if, as Judith Hooper and Dick Teresi put it, “what our Victorian grandparents called ‘personality’ is contained in a complex matrix of speech centers, motor pathways, and subtle electrical circuits?” Why would automatic, inherited mammals like our ancestors have evolved brains with the ability to think, imagine, predict, compare, abstract, and think about the future? What does it mean to know something, to desire something, to exist, if our mental experiences are in fact just simmering a chemical stew that can be easily altered?
These are the kinds of thoughts that come to mind when reading “The Three Pound Universe.” One might be surprised to learn how many neuroscientists are working on issues that are traditionally part of the realm of philosophers, theologians, and artists: truth, ethics, identity, perception, empathy. Hooper, a contributing editor at Omni magazine, and Teresi, a consulting editor at Omni and the author of “Lasers: The Supertool of the 1980s” (1982), begin the book by asking a fundamental question about brain research: How can a system observe itself? What we call “truth” may be the only possible view from the prison of our perception. Maybe physicists are wrong when they say mathematics is an open sesame of matter. Maybe it’s just the way our highly specialized minds have found to confront the world. The authors portray the individual mind as the vault in which everything in the universe happens (not the other way around), and quote Bishop Berkeley to remind us that there is no reason to assume that chairs are more real than ideas. Both chairs and ideas exist in the mind, and in that sense they are both ideas.
From there, the authors embark on a concise, readable, and endlessly entertaining journey through neuroscience, reviewing what we know so far about the brain, highlighting current research, explaining some of the debates that have neuroscientists in a frenzy (e.g., what is free will and what is the self?), and predicting how close we will be to a chemical Valhalla in the next decade, where there will be “super drugs for everything from writer’s block to overeating.” The authors explore the neurobiology of violence, the nature of madness, and various theories about schizophrenia. They explain how high-tech diagnostic tools, painkillers, and memory drugs work, how the brain communicates with the brain, and more. The authors look at hallucinations, altered states of consciousness, and more.
The anecdotal portrayals of eccentric yet brilliant scientists are particularly good. Robert Heath, who has invented a brain pacemaker and is busy filming animals and humans electrically stimulating their anger and fear circuits, is to the author “a modern-day Virgil of the brain’s underworld” and “a scientist well versed in the byways of the id.”
