Welcome to this web page. There was no such thing a few years ago!

Life with computers is really changing things for us middle-aged folks. It's exciting to be participating now, in real life, in the dreams of a half-century ago when I began reading Isaac Asimov's robot stories. I've got to admit I haven't kept up with all the more recent S-F, cyberpunk, etc. But, like other good authors, Asimov was prescient in many ways - e.g. about things like new issues in democracy evolving in a wired world, and the BIG question of "What is a human being?" His old book of short stories,

Hey prospective Lake Forest College students!

It's nice to see that you've made it to my homepage and are all set to help me out with my research. Click on the link below to go to the radial maze. WAIT!!! You'll see that more might be done with it. Since you're still reading, you've already passed the Test of Mutual Interests. Attend Lake Forest College, and let's talk about doing research together.

Take me to the radial maze

Do you think, with the Internet, we're all becoming a single world-mind, and will find better ways to get along? Not? Might it be that giga-velocity communication, with the broadcasting we can all do, just shifts the terrain of conflict? If so, then it's those social mechanisms we need more insight into. Computers by themselves may not make the world better. So:

Welcome to Psychology.

Welcome to College.

Speaking of personal web pages, I'm somewhat shy on first meeting, especially separated as we are now by time and space and walls. I'm not ready to put my face up on the web, but here are some pictures of me in earlier incarnations:

Seriously, though, the evolution of human beings and of human psychology is one of my deepest interests. Have you been provoked by any books on that? Some pretty good ones are …

HUMAN EVOLUTION: SOME GOOD BOOKS TO READ

On Aggression - a controversial, insightful, older, great book, by Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz. Lorenz's love for animals really comes across in his writing, along with the many ways he sees them as similar to people. As always, read thoughtfully and critically. Lorenz has an engaging style of writing. He was probably wrong in some of what he said - but NOT wrong in the way some of his louder critics have claimed. People and animals really are alike in many deep ways. Lorenz had a unique way of raising penetrating issues about the inner dynamics of mind and behavior.

The Naked Ape - a somewhat more freewheeling oldie but goodie. Or read any of Desmond Morris' more recent, provocative books, such as Catwatching, Babywatching. Or get hold of his Time-Life movies on "The Human Animal."

Descartes' Error - Brain scientist Antonio Damasio's discussion of the intimate connections between our emotions and how we think.

The Symbolic Species - An interesting argument, by neuroanthropologist Terrence Deacon, that human language really does set us quite a leap apart from any other species.

The Language Instinct, by Stephen Pinker is another interesting one about language. People tell me that his more recent books (e.g. How the Mind Works) are also good.

The Moral Animal - Journalist Robert Wright's excellent review of the evolutionary psychological science of friendship, love, sex, marriage, and the meaning of human life. I use this as a supplemental text in one of my courses. What do you think? Does Wright succeed in explaining our foundations? More recently, Wright ratcheted up a bit in having a go at the meaning of human social life, in his book Nonzero. That title is a play on the idea that when we interact with each other, at best we're not merely engaging in what economists call a "zero-sum game" - which is to say that whatever Joe wins Sam loses. At best, things come together (get ready for a fancy word) synergistically, so that "the whole is more than the sum of the parts." In street language, that's your "win-win situation."

There's also a lot of other good popular-intellectual material around on issues in human evolution. And, ahem, of course, some good textbooks. (This is your professor speaking.)

NEUROSCIENCE (Brain Science)

My main interest in life is in furthering our ability to connect what we know about the mind with what we know about the brain. If it weren't for an occasional game of tennis, in-line skating, family, cleaning the garage, cleaning my parakeets' cage, and so forth, I'd spend all my time thinking, researching, and teaching about the mind and the brain! All of it. I'm not kidding. I really love this subject.

How can it be that my feelings, thoughts, sense of experiencing life and intentions to do things are somehow embodied in "stuff"? But never mind me. How can it be that your feelings, thoughts, sense of experiencing life and intentions to do things are somehow embodied in "stuff"?

What is a brain made of? Many years ago, the neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington used the interesting metaphor "enchanted loom" in trying capture what is amazing about the brain. In your head there is a vast, highly interconnected network of neurons. It is almost unimaginably intricate; by one estimate there are about two miles of fine nerve fibers in only a typical cubic millimeter of cortical tissue. (Pardon the mixing of English and metric units.) These neurons are constantly sparking dense, rapid pulses of electrical activity at the same time as they are constantly communicating via dozens of chemicals.

How does that sort of thing add up to who we are?

There are a lot of ways in which we think about that issue here. Email me if you would like a suggestion for a good neuroscience textbook.

AHEM. A PARTIAL DIGRESSION FROM THE BRAIN

TO MATTERS OF ULTIMATE MEANING.

I've got to admit it. Learning so close up about how life works sometimes is so amazing that it makes my thoughts wander back to where the deep thinkers roamed a few centuries ago, well before Charlie Darwin, at the dawn of what historians call "The Enlightenment." Many of those pioneer scientists figured that they were studying God's handiwork. God-talk (as theologians sometimes call it) has largely gone out of fashion in this science/tech/commercial/go-go era - partly for good reasons and partly for bad reasons.

A good reason for holding off God-talk: Traditional styles of worshipfulness may make you too passive in the face of pompously acting authority figures. Certain kinds of religiosity (as psychologists call it) can turn off your thoughtfulness. (But heck; my students often find all sorts of other ways to turn their minds off!~((;->)# Sorry. Just kidding.)

A bad reason for disconnecting from religion: The decline of respectful attitude goes with a certain "I-can-do-it-all" cockiness that sometimes gets us into big trouble. It's like "Oh. I wonder what this button does…" "WAIT!!!!! DON'T PUSH THAT BUTTON YE…….." Scientists seem as if they're beginning to realize this; hence, the burgeoning of concerns about ethics. But have you noticed that when we worry (as we should) about the environment, for example, this public worrying enterprise often takes on a reverential air?

THE ENVIRONMENT

It almost seems like a kind of worship thing. Am I right or what? Does such realization that we need to look at the larger picture of our motivations, actions, and their consequences really look at a large enough picture? In addition to straight-out religion or theology, much of the literature of the last few centuries picks up this issue of human control of things, and its shadow side. Like the Faust story. (An interesting interpretation of the various versions of that story is in humanistic psychologist Rollo May's last book The Cry for Myth.)

Anyway, you and I would need to be face-to-face to better think about these things together. My own opinion is that modern intellectual folks, in choosing their rainbows to follow, are neglecting a great deal that's important in traditional religions. Even those of us who eventually decide that god-talk is more of a hindrance might set aside their stereotypes of what religious concepts mean, to see what's really going on under the surface, perhaps in the same way they regard great literature or other art forms. Here are a few articles and books, in the meantime:

The Human Factor by Philip Hefner

Religion and Science by Ian Barbour

The Humanizing Brain by James Ashbrook and Carol Albright

Or take a look at

Zygon, Journal of Religion and Science

for some interesting intellectual stuff that's much more and better than the usual popular media stuff about things like "Who's right? The evolutionists or the creationists?"

BACK TO THE BRAIN

During recent summers college students have been working with me in researching the following issue:

Do "Harmonies" in Brain Waves Underlie Working-Memory Capacity?

Robert Glassman, Department of Psychology

Why can we bear in mind only a few independent items at a time? Psychologists interested in the nature of memory sometimes speak of "the magical number seven." That is, we seem to be able to hold only only about that many digits or words - plus or minus two - spoken in random sequence. In previous Richter projects at Lake Forest College (some of them now published), we have found that capacity to remember a number of places is about the same as this verbal capacity, also 7 ± 2, and that this is true both for human beings for the laboratory animals, which many neuroscientists have studied. What properties of the brain underlie "the magical number 7 ± 2"? Some current theories say that when the electrical activity of the brain becomes synchronized across different regions, that enables us to unify our perception of an object or to unify a thought. But before unity there must be diversity. Flexibility of thought requires separate cognitions merging into new combinations. In this Richter project we will test the hypothesis that more than one synchronous set of brain waves is underway at a time and that, because of basic properties of oscillating signals, such waves must bear arithmetic relations with each other that are like the small whole-number ratios of musical harmonies. We will record brain waves from people using ordinary scalp electrodes, during working-memory tasks. We will begin by trying to do simple, computerized Fourier spectral analyses of the brain waves. Reading and conversation will include topics in the nature of memory and relevant brain systems, and also in musicology and the science of musical harmonies.

Another current interest is in the whether there is anything about the strange, overall shape of the human cerebral cortex that has to do with the way it functions. (I think yes.) It turns out that about 90 percent of your brain is really shaped like a thin sheet. A crumpled-up sheet, yes, so it can fit inside your egg-round head, but a sheet nonetheless.

How thin is this sheet? Only about 2 to 3 millimeters. And that's about the same for all mammals. Yes, your brain is a lot bigger than that of a mouse, but your cortex is the same thickness as cousin mouse's. (Ok, maybe it's a fraction of a millimeter thicker.) The main difference in brain volume between mice and us is in the AREA of the cortex. A conservative estimate of the area of the human cortex is 2,600 square centimeters.

What's that in "real units"? Well, if it were flattened out, and then if it just happened to be square in its overall shape (which it's not), then it would be a square about 20 inches by 20 inches. As it turns out, this is about twice the linear dimension of a graduation "mortarboard" cap, so one day I decided to make a model to dramatize this fact. During the fall of 2000 I put my model on display at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, together with a poster that summarized for other college professors some of the "Amazing Facts about cortical anatomy that are in various papers and books in the brain literature. Here's a picture of that poster:

The 2000 meeting was in New Orleans, so I bought a Mardi Gras mask to help set the scale. The other thing helping to set the scale is a Beanie Baby owl wearing a little black graduation cap and bowtie, which I'd picked up in Chicago O'Hare Airport on the way to New Orleans. (Pardon the cutesy stuff.)

By the way, the most incredible amazing fact is the one I mentioned above: Your connections among neurons are so fine and densely packed in the cortex that each cubic millimeter of the cortex contains AT LEAST ONE MILE OF NERVE FIBERS! So the poster title is "Miles within Millimeters of Our Mortarboard Human Cortex and Other Amazing Facts …"

Holler if you'd like the names of some things to read about the way the cortex works. It's awesome.

Speaking of awesome, …

WHY I REALLY LIKE LIVING IN LAKE FOREST

This is a beautiful place. Ok, it's quiet; it's not Chicago. But Chicago is close by and, anyway, I LIKE it quiet. There are lots of cool bike trails (many of which have great asphalt for inline skating - something I took up a few years ago), nice places to walk. For example, there's a nice half-mile walk from the college to the beach, one of my favorite spots for practicing photography. Here's a once-in-a-thousand years photograph taken there, on the morning of the millennium - January 1, 2001:

Ok, yes, I tweaked it a bit with some software.

And here's a summer pic in my front yard (in July, not January)

:

There's a lot more going on around here, and a lot more to look at. I'll work on this web page as these other activities permit. I'll try to add explanations and to clarify these interests in history, philosophy, and the humanities in general, as additional great ways to approach understanding what life is all about.

Consider emailing me a note at glassman@lfc.edu; so long for now.