Book Review-Physical Intelligence by Scott Grafton

This book would never have been on my radar because I would never have thought to look for something in this area. Luckily for me, I was listening to a Vern Gambetta podcast and Vern recommended this book very highly because he said he’d learn a lot about the connection between the body and the mind, which helped him in his coaching and training. Indeed, anything Vern recommends, especially about training, I take very seriously. I am glad that I took heed  because this was a vastly different book than what I had expected about an area that I really had put very little thought towards.

The smaller title of the book is The Science of How the Body and the Mind Guide Each Other Through Life. Indeed, this book lays out the symbiotic relationships that we do not directly think about when we think about using our bodies.  We certainly do not think about how the mind enables and affects the body and vice versa.

Scott Grafton Is a neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also an avid hiker and outdoorsman. He states in the introduction that: To study the mind without the body ignores the greatest pleasure of being alive: experiencing the world directly, as we perform and create.  He follows his own advice when he laid out the book, he describes a trip that he took through the California desert as the backdrop of this exploration through all the mind-body connections, the Physical Intelligence of the title.

The tone of the book is strictly business. There are ten chapters in all, each of the  ten chapters are filled with research result summaries. He buttresses the research results with anecdotes from his lifelong hiking experiences as well as vignettes of this hiking trip in the California desert to illustrate the main points. He can get a little pedantic at times but then again that is a quality, because no time is wasted as he directly supports much of what he has to say in a clinical manner.

He goes into great details on how some of the research has been done to explain how each mind-body connection functions theoretically, and he cites study after study the support the theory. He further illustrates his point by supplementing it with his own experience, thereby creating a small example for the reader to digest simply. He explains the experiments that were conducted to determine that the theories were plausible and viable, he does so with the seriousness of a researcher and he points out the difficulties inherent in conducting the studies and he also points out the pitfalls that could sidetrack the studies.

It is not easy reading because it is not lighthearted, and it is not written for entertainment. It is written to inform; it is written to get the readers to think about the possibilities that are there for us to consider in these mind-body connections. I must admit that I struggled with the first few chapters as I lacked the  fundamentals to fully comprehend the connections. When he moved on to the topics in which he employed the much more familiar feedback control system language, my interest soared, and I was able to understand the topic and the mind-body connection more easily. Once I got to that part of the book, I began to understand some of the framework that the neuroscientists had created to explain the connections.

One unique feature about this book that I had first struggled with but now I completely appreciate, is the fact that the author wrote what he had to say in ten chapters and ended the book. He did not try to write a deep summary of what he had to say because he had already said it in the book. Initially I felt the book ended rather abruptly, but then as I thought about it, I appreciated the fact that he told you what he was going to tell you in the introduction, he told you in the ten chapters, and then he stopped. Nothing wasted.

I will be rereading parts of this book in the future as I will be reexamining these mind-body connections in my effort to understand the physical intelligence for my own specific purpose. It was a great recommendation from Vern and I am grateful for this book.  It is one of those serendipitous things in life where you do not know what you do not know until you learn about it.

Book Review-Do Dice Play God: The Mathematics of Uncertainty

By Ian Stewart

This is the book that I was very eager to read because of the subject: the mathematics of uncertainty. I read it in parallel with The Art of Statistics by David Spiegelhalter because I felt the combination of the two books on similar topics from two different directions would make the reading experience more complete as the two books should complement one another. It was mentally challenging to read both books together, but I am glad I did because my goal was accomplished: they were indeed complementary. There were certain areas where the books overlapped but it was good retrieval practice to go over some of those areas at spaced intervals.

The book comprises of 18 chapters. The first two chapters sets the tone for Stewart.  By defining the six ages of uncertainty in Chapter One, Stewart proceeds to converse about some of the things that humankind has been using to deal with uncertainty and to predict the future. He follows that initial setting of the stage with a qualitative discussion of the idea of probability and statistics. It is a difficult task because it is easier to discuss probability and statistics in terms of the equations. Even with that caveat, Stewart did an excellent job of explaining quantitative concepts qualitatively, it takes someone who deeply understands the ideas, in all their glory, to be able to pull it off, and Stewart did so. This is not to say that the book is completely devoid of numbers and figures, but it was enlightening to be reading about these concepts without equations and mathematics.

The book then proceeds into many topics about uncertainty and randomness. He shares an abundance of examples and evidence which demonstrates the idea. It sometimes feel like an unrelenting onslaught of different cases in different areas, regarding different problems. The examples  come from mathematics, biology, medicine, physics, numerical systems, and many more, which gives proper perspective to the reader as well elicits an understanding about the universality of uncertainty in our reality.  The main topics that I had struggles with,  and that is true of Spiegelhalter's book as well, is the section on the Bayesian probability, even though Stewart did a masterful job of explaining it. I understand Baysian ideas after having read both but I am still easily confused when trying to apply the idea.

Stewart lost me with his explanation of quantum mechanics and the counter intuitive ideas from quantum mechanics. It was a difficult section to read, even though I was exposed to the idea when I was a young engineering student. On the other hand, when Stewart expounded on the ideas of  dynamical systems, he made perfect sense, as I was thinking about  Lorenz attractors when I was studying dynamical systems as a graduate student.  Since I had understood those equations as equations,  it was not much of a leap for me to understand them as applications which made the mathematics more sensible.

As the reader work their way through the book, they will find themselves doing many mental gymnastics with the mathematics that he does present, but he does an excellent job of explaining  why these concepts are so important to us.

The last chapter is the magnum opus chapter that Professor Stewart uses as his platform to summarize his intention with the book. His key intent is to make the general audience become aware and comfortable with the fact that uncertainty is a normal part of life. Professor Stewart has work diligently throughout the book to chip away at our enduring and grossly erroneous belief that our lives are deterministic, and that any uncertainty that we admit or accept is not something that we overcome easily or can be disregarded because the uncertainty plays a very large role in how our lives will often result.

A quick summary of all the topics that that had been discussed ends the book. In returning to these topics while reading these short pages, the reader realizes the extensive number of  topics that Professor Stewart had discussed; more importantly, the reader finally understands the lessons that Professor Stewart is trying to teach us. He started with the basic ideas of how human beings dealt with uncertainty. As humanity progressed along the timeline, we got better at rationalizing some of the uncertainties, and we thought we were able to minimize the uncertainties. We invented tools like statistics and probability; we deliberately tested and  experimented to arrive at what we thought was the truth. Even though this book is not the definitive history of uncertainty in our world, this book does very well in filling some of the obvious gaps in our thinking and dispels enough biases to make the readers at least accept the fact that life itself is uncertain and full of mystery.

I thought the book was a marvelous read even though it was particularly challenging. Professor Stewart explained many different concepts very well, some better than others, but the overall effect is that the reader can gain a much better understanding of how little and how much we know about our world and appreciate how much guessing we are doing on a daily basis.