February books part 2

It was like i had expected, i was not able to get a lot done during february. :((

1. The emotional brain: Joseph Ledoux: I was loving it in the beginning. It is a neurobiologist's look at how the brain generates, interprets, and responds to emotions. What stimuli produce what kinds of reactions, what parts of the brain are involved and what are not. He goes over the history of the science of understanding emotions and does a pretty good job of it if i might say so. He describes experiments that give scientists a peek into the mysteries of what goes on in the brain.

Like there was this one experiment, where they gave women a lot of stockings in different bins and asked them to pick the best ones. Later they were asked reasons for their choices and people used explanations like texture, feel, quality of the cloth etc. The catch was, that they were all the same kinds of stockings, exactly alike. The inference being that once people make a choice, they fill in the reasons themselves, irrespective of whether those reasons exist in fact or not. Which I find very interesting, because that means that all you can ever say with confidence is that you like or do not like something, you can not really know why, your brain will give you bogus excuses. Or perhaps you cannot even be sure it likes what it likes, because why would it like one pair of stockings over the other when they are all supposedly alike? Interesting stuff isn't it.

In fact, i was having so much fun in the beginning I had half a mind to write to him and ask him if he would let me come work for him, then i figured, him being a brain scientist and all, he might insist on a full mind commitment :)

But later on the experiments conducted on animals got a bit too gore for my sensibilities, now may be i am wuss of all kinds, but I cannot imagine chopping off parts of a monkey's brain to infer that even though the visual regions of the brain were completely intact the monkey had the lost the ability to interpret the vision so he acted blind and would touch and smell and taste everything to be able to decide if that was edible or not. that is heinous! Or this other other one where they scared rats 'shitless' literally and measured the amount of fear by the number of droppings. Or where they modified the parts of the brain that experience fear, and then provided scary stimulii. How inhumane is that. I just find it hard to digest that you can learn about emotions in human beings by so grossly denying the one emotion that makes us human - compassion. How can we be so cruel to animals in the name of research. I could not stomach it anymore so I had to give up on it.

2. The E Myth revisted - The book is about the entrepreneurial myth, why most small businesses fail and what to do about it, being the tag line. I enjoyed it because it was very relevant, I could see my husband having gone through those stages since he started his business a few years back. It was also humbling, because of all the arguments and disagreements that we have had about the business - at least according to this book - he was right and i was wrong. Which is good too, because I ahve this whole new respect for him for having had foresight and instinct without reading about it in any book :) But then, this book did for me, what he himself has not been able to do in all these years. It has given me a whole new understanding of what a business should be about and just completely changed my idea of who should and should not go into business. I enjoyed reading it.