The alarming spread of artificial intelligence into book publishing, the arts, social media and politics has been discussed several times in recent weeks. It was at least a tiny bit gratifying to read this fact in Ashley Ward’s recently published Where We Meet the World: The Story of the Senses:
Yet for all the extraordinary advances in artificial intelligence, it’s spectacularly difficult to develop a robotic hand that can smoothly pick up a cup of tea without spilling it, crack an egg, or secure a morsel of food using chopsticks—things that humans do without thinking.
It seems that to make a human emulation, you have to be able to break a few eggs, and AI is still struggling.
This tidbit comes from the chapter on touch in this fascinating tour of the human senses. Our skin is an amazing organ, creating our tactile sensations along with keeping our fluids in and keeping pathogens out. The average body is covered with about 20 square feet of skin, which makes up one-sixth of our body weight. Our sense of touch comes primarily from four different cellular receptors.The Merkel cells, just below the surface all over the body, but concentrated in the fingers, provide a continuous flow of information on everything we touch, allowing us to feel the slightest indentations in a surface, and an instantaneous awareness of differences as we move our fingers along.
Meissner corpuscles, on the other hand, are in charge of detecting things that touch us. Unlike the continuous instantaneous communication with the brain of Merkel cells, the Meissner corpuscles only alert us to changes. This is why we aren’t constantly focused of the chair we’re sitting in or the clothes we’re wearing. The Pacinian corpuscles are more attuned to deeper pressure, interpreting the things we touch as vibrations to reveaal their texture. Finally, the Ruffini endings sense how our skin is stretching in every moment, which relates to our posture, our spatial body awareness, and to our ability to reach for an egg and close our fingers around it.
Our human bodies are extremely attuned to touch, and being deprived of it can harm our development and our health. Our skin responds intensely to movement against it, as in caresses or pats on the back, In fact, studies have revealed the sweet spot for our bodies responding to being touched: a stroke of 3-5 centimeters per second is the most relaxing. It doesn’t even matter whether the sensation is coming from the hand of a loved one or, ummm, from a robotic arm.
Grrrr. Keep your tea-spilling hands off me, AI!
Each of the senses is given fascinating treatment. A few of the things revealed:
- At the center of our retina is the fovea, at which our sharpest visual acuity is found. At a distance of six feet or so, the fovea only brings an area of about an inch-and-a-half into clear focus. When we are talking with someone, our eyes make dozens of infinitesimal movements every second, which our brain instantaneously knits together into a seamless picture of the person’s full face.
- Our ears and sense of hearing are amazing, but there are marvels throughout the living kingdom. Evening primroses can detect the buzz of bees, and when they do, they sweeten their nectar to attract the pollinators. Rock cress plants can sense the sound of caterpillars chewing, and then synthesize chemicals to make their leaves more bitter. Other buzzing insects do not make the primroses react, and other sounds do not alarm the rock cresses. Of course, these plants are lacking in ears and other auditory mechanisms; what they are sensing and reacting to are vibrations. But that is what sound is: vibrations. And so, the ability of plants to react to specific vibrations seems very akin to hearing.
- The song of the blue whale is objectively many times louder than a jet engine. However, it happens outside the range of frequencies that the human ear can detect, so we don’t hear it.
- Our senses influence each other, and also subconsciously affect our thoughts. Studies have shown that people make harsher judgments when discussing a subject if there is a bad smell introduced to the room. People say that a strawberry smoothie tastes less sweet if it is dyed green, even when it is identical to a red one.
In all, a fascinating book, and yet another subject that fills me with wonder at the complexity of existence. It covers human history and natural history, with a good measure of philosophizing as well as humor.
Over at The Literate Lizard this week, in addition to our usual selection of 20% discounted new releases, I have two themed book lists also discounted 20%, with choices for adults and kids: Hispanic Heritage Month, and Indigenous Peoples Day. Both discounts continue through October 15th. And of course, your DAILYKOS coupon code can always get you 15% off. And here is the link to my list in today’s Black Kos diary of this week’s books of particular interest to Black and Latino/a readers.
THIS WEEK’S NEW NONFICTION
- Breaking Through: My Life in Science, by Katalin Karikó. A powerful memoir from Katalin Karikó, winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, whose decades-long research led to the COVID-19 vaccines, which have saved millions of lives. She arrived as a postdoctoral fellow in 1985 with $1,200 sewn into her toddler’s teddy bear and a dream to remake medicine.
Karikó worked in obscurity, battled cockroaches in a windowless lab, and faced outright derision and even deportation threats from her bosses and colleagues. She balked as prestigious research institutions increasingly conflated science and money. Despite setbacks, she never wavered in her belief that an ephemeral and underappreciated molecule called messenger RNA could change the world.
- Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction, by Fergus M. Bordewich. A stunning history of the first national anti-terrorist campaign waged on American soil—when Ulysses S. Grant wielded the power of the federal government to dismantle the KKK. To repel the virulent tidal wave of violence, President Ulysses S. Grant waged a two-term battle against both armed Southern enemies of Reconstruction and Northern politicians seduced by visions of postwar conciliation, testing the limits of the federal government in determining the extent of states’ rights. Klan War is a bold and bracing record of America’s past that reveals the bloody, Reconstruction-era roots of present-day battles to protect the ballot box and stamp out resurgent white supremacist ideologies.
- The Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party Is Driving Our Democracy to Autocracy, by Stuart Stevens. We recognize that every Republican played a part in the rise of the party of Trumpist fascism. Still, it can be useful to hear the point of view of the apostates.
Former chief Republican strategist and Lincoln Project adviser Stuart Stevens offers an ominous warning that the GOP is dragging our country toward autocracy—and if we don’t wake up to the crisis in our system, 2024 may well be our last free and fair election. Today’s Republican party is not a “normal” political party in the American tradition. It has become an autocratic movement masquerading as a political party. Whenever a democracy slides into autocracy, there are five critical elements at work: financers, propagandists, party support, legal theories to legitimize, and shock troops.Stevens examines each of these driving forces on the Right and makes clear how they are working in concert to end our democracy as we know it.
- Big Bets: How Large-Scale Change Really Happens, by Rajiv Shah. Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation and former administrator of President Barack Obama’s United States Agency for International Development, shares a dynamic new model for creating large scale change, inspired by his own involvements with some of the largest humanitarian projects of our time.
His secret? A big bets philosophy—the idea that seeking to solve problems rather than make incremental improvements can attract the unlikely partners with the power and know-how to achieve transformational change. He distills his battle-tested strategies for creating change, arguing that big bets have a surprising advantage over cautious ones: a bold vision can attract support, collaborations, and fresh ideas from key players who might otherwise be resistant.
- Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People's Business, by Roxane Gay. Opinions is a collection of Roxane Gay’s best nonfiction pieces from the past ten years. Covering a wide range of topics—politics, feminism, the culture wars, civil rights, and much more—with an all-new introduction in which she reflects on the past decade in America, this sharp, thought-provoking anthology will delight Roxane Gay’s devotees and draw new readers to this inimitable talent.
- Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir, by Werner Herzog. Until age 11, Herzog did not even know of the existence of cinema. His interest in films began at age 15, but since no one was willing to finance them, he worked the night shift as a welder in a steel factory. He started to travel on foot. He made his first phone call at age 17, and his first film in 1961 at age 19. The wildly productive working life that followed—spanning the seven continents and encompassing both documentary and fiction—was an adventure as grand and otherworldly as any depicted in his many classic films.
- Madonna: A Rebel Life, by Mary Gabriel. With her arrival on the music scene in the early 1980s, Madonna generated nothing short of an explosion—as great as that of Elvis or the Beatles—taking the nation by storm with her liberated politics and breathtaking talent. Within two years of her 1983 debut album, a flagship Macy's store in Manhattan held a Madonna lookalike contest featuring Andy Warhol as a judge, and opened a department called “Madonna-land.”
But Madonna was more than just a pop star. Everywhere, fans gravitated to her as an emblem of a new age, one in which feminism could shed the buttoned-down demeanor of the 1970s and feel relevant to a new generation. Amid the scourge of AIDS, she brought queer identities into the mainstream, fiercely defending a person's right to love whomever—and be whoever—they wanted. Despite fierce criticism, she never separated her music from her political activism. And, as an artist, she never stopped experimenting. Madonna existed to push past boundaries by creating provocative, visionary music, videos, films, and live performances that changed culture globally.
- A Fool's Journey: To the Beach Boys and beyond, by Carli Muñoz. A tell-all memoir of a rock and jazz sensation and former pianist of the legendary Beach Boys. Cutting his musical teeth in a Puerto Rican jazz club in the 1960s, Carli Muñoz came of age during the countercultural flowering of that era; he lived for music, knowledge, and the mind-expanding magic of LSD. Wanting to expand creative horizons for his successful psychedelic rock band, Muñoz flew to New York on a whim with $11 in his pocket and embarked on a deep dive into the gritty scene of gigs, girls, and trips, struggling to fill his pockets with dollars and his belly with food. Free-falling into the dark underbelly of the city, Muñoz ended up homeless and penniless until an epiphany on the subway brought him back to the surface.
On the cusp of a new decade, Muñoz moved to LA to fight for a new life and a second chance. Hanging out in Houdini’s old mansion in Laurel Canyon, he watched the free-loving idealism of the ’60s melt into the disco- and cocaine-saturated hedonism of the ’70s, until one day he found himself on tour with the Beach Boys.
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The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters, by Benjamin Moser. Plunged into a strange land at twenty-five, Benjamin Moser began an obsessive, decades-long study of the Dutch Masters to set his world right again. Arriving as a young writer in an ancient Dutch town, Benjamin Moser found himself visiting—casually at first, and then more and more obsessively—the country’s great museums. Inside these old buildings, he discovered the remains of the Dutch Golden Age and began to unearth the strange, inspiring, and terrifying stories of the artists who gave shape to one of the most luminous moments in the history of human creativity.
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them, but If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be truly appreciated. I would love to be considered ‘The Official Bookstore of Daily Kos.’ Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 20% each week). I’m busily adding new content every day, and will have lots more dedicated subject pages and curated booklists as it grows. I want it to be full of book-lined rabbit holes to lose yourself in (and maybe throw some of those books into a shopping cart as well.)
We also partner Libro.fm for audiobooks. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month. Note that the DAILYKOS coupon code is only for the bookstore, not for the audiobook affiliate.
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
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