Thursday, March 10, 2022

Christopher Kemp, Dark and Magical Places **

Dark and Magical Places is a non-fiction book about the neuroscience of navigation, "how the brain helps us to understand and navigate space," as it says on the inner flap. What a fascinating subject! Written by a scientist! With a nicely chosen title!

Kemp admits up front that he has a very poor sense of direction, has difficulty creating a cognitive map. Unfortunately, this shortcoming impairs his ability to help me create a cognitive map of the subject area. He guides us past place cells, head-direction cells, grid cells, the retrospenial cortex, and the parahippocampal place area (PPA), but I would fail the route-integration task of determining how they relate to one another. 

Kemp has the tendency to wander aimlessly between subjects. More problematic, though, is that I don't trust his explanations. He will introduce a topic with an unlikely sounding proclamation (head-direction cells have a firing pattern that correlates with your "absolute direction, independent of location"). After a couple of pages describing the experiment that lead to the discovery, he expands on the topic in ways that don't deepen the simple picture so much as undermine it ("if the postcard was taken from the north-facing wall of the rat's environment and placed on the south-facing wall, a head-direction cell that previously had been tuned to north suddenly only fired when the rat pointed south"). 

The book cries out for illustrations, showing navigational strategies and brain topography. In the first chapter Kemp discusses the schematic map of the London Underground from 1931 and compares it to the "geographically more accurate" previous maps, but we don't see either map.

As a framing device, the book uses the story of Amanda Eller, a hiker who in 2019 got lost "on the northwest slopes of the volcano Haleakalā [in] Maui's rugged interior." In the final chapter, we hear that Eller ended up far outside the search area: "one mile further northwest and she's have hit the Oahu coastline." That is really lost!

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