 Okay, my clock shows 10 a.m. Pacific time, also known as SL time. So let me call our session to order today. Welcome to the Science Circle series of panel discussions. I'm glad you all could make time to join us today. I think we have a fun topic. It's going to be a little bit casual. But I thought it would be worthwhile to have an opportunity to talk about science books that are written for a popular audience. I think people might be curious to know what kind of resources are out there. If you're interested in a topic and want to delve into it deeper, lots of prominent scientists have written books for a popular audience and sometimes sort of describing their career or their own work or to survey a topic or something like that. I think it's worthwhile to take a little time. You know, in past panels, we talked about science fiction a lot. And I thought we'd give it a little twist this time and talk about actual science rather than science fiction. So that's kind of my thinking about this topic. And with that, I will introduce our panel members. We have a distinguished panel here to share the books that they like. We have the wordsmith Jarvanin here on my left. Moving down in that order. Also have Steven Zudify. And next to him is Vic Machilac. And finally, we have Mike Shaw. I think our students here are familiar with all our panelists. And I think, you know, they're very enjoyable to listen to. So with that, I'm going to turn it over. I'm going to start with wordsmith and ask him to maybe say a few words and then just get right into whatever books he wants to talk about. And we'll move down the panel in that way. And hopefully we'll have enough time at the end to have more of a kind of a round table conversation perhaps. So wordsmith, why don't you start us off? Thanks. My own background is as a computational physicist. I've also taught massage courses and mostly anatomy and kinesiology. So theory into practice. In world right now, I'm a chancellor of Oxbridge, which is a new resident training area with some socialization and opportunities for further socialization. Off-world, I'm more doing things like word analysis of tweets at conferences and science writing. The books I chose, well actually, I should say I sort of chose because there's a lot of good resources out there. I wanted to mention that for publications, New Scientist and Science News are both aimed at the lay person with good articles. There's an online site, Science Daily, that summarizes a night. A lot of science articles on a more readable basis. A couple books that had interested me along the way are first the book linked by Albert Laszlo Berabasi, which is on networks and how networks form. He goes way back to 150 years to Euler solving the Kernicksburg Bridge problem, an island in a river with seven bridges. People were asking back then, can you find a path that crosses each bridge only once? And the answer Euler was able to show was no. But what was unique about what Euler did is he took the bridge problem and made it a graph problem with nodes and links between the nodes. And in that form it was much easier to solve. Berabasi also talks about if you start with a cocktail party with a hundred people who don't know each other and let them mingle for a while. They'll start discussing in twos and threes. And then you tell some of them that the wine with one label is much better than the other. But only tell the people you've met and talked with. Then that information starts spreading and then people move on and form new groups. And you can follow the spreading of a piece of information as the different people in the room create links, social network links, and then the information propagates with the linking. So it's a fascinating science that ties in with things like cellular communication links. Because generally you have enzymes that promote some effect and enzymes that retard some effect. And there's this whole communication network including in work on cancer and working to ameliorate or slow down or control cat. The author is Albert Laszlo Berabasi, and the book is linked. Another book, and maybe it's the similarity in names, is a book by the mathematician Stephen Strogatz. And the name is Sink, so we've gone from linked to sink. Some years back Strogatz wrote an article in Scientific American, another source often of lay directed articles. And that article was about fireflies in Thailand. Okay, fireflies. It's night, they light up. But these fireflies have a special property. They not only light up, they fall into a sink or synchronization. And so the whole river banks will flash on and off at once, rather than the fireflies flashing independently. Other examples of this effect, of synchronization without a conductor. Nobody is pointing at each firefly and saying, you, you were late, speed it up a little. Audiences at the end of a performance clapping. And within seconds everyone's clapping together. Nobody directed that. It just happened. If, so do American ones, very often clap together. For the hallmark of Russian audiences in particular, that they sort of clap, you know, in rhythm. But I think that's true, that if you have a large enough audience, it does, I think it frequently tends to just gravitate that way. It's interesting. Yeah, go into synchronization. And the amazing thing is it happens without anybody directing that. You know, it's just every, every person who you might think of as a cell in other contexts, getting some input from others and very quickly drop into synchronization. We have 10,000 cells in our heart that are pulse makers. And they synchronize even though the individual cells might have slightly different rhythms, natural rhythms. They basically listen or sense when each other are firing and synchronize, and that sets up a heartbeat. When it fails, we have fibrillation of the heart. But so another example of what might be called oscillators dropping the natural synchronization. Yeah, it really seems like a powerful mechanism and really sort of, it's not so much an explanation, but it sort of provides a context for the way lots of things in nature have become naturally self-organized. Yeah, it was noticed that two pendulum clocks on the same wall would drop into synchronization. So they're communicating along the wall slightly. And it's enough that over time they synchronize. That's just such an interesting topic. Well, since we do have a large panel, if you don't mind wordsmith, let me move along and let's have Steve take it up. Sounds good. And Steve, why don't you say a few words and tell us what books you want to talk about. All right, thanks, Berrigan. I have a history of always being a bench and experimental scientist. That's where I did my graduate and postdoc work. And then I did a detour to teaching for a while. And this was in late, starting about 2007 through 2016. And this was an amazing time, I think, in the popularization of science for biology. Because if you think back, many of you are probably old enough to remember the name Stephen J. Gould. And I'll start off with him in just a second. But for some reason, in that period of time, there was an amazing flowering of both interesting evolutionary biology and then scientists, again, hardcore scientists who I think in some ways got recruited to popularize and talk about their science in different media. And so it was a great time both to take those books and those media to actually use them for teaching and developing courses. So that was something I got heavily involved with and did end up teaching a history and philosophy of science class that I developed at Ball State University. So the books I've chosen are ones that are two essay-related books because, again, you don't want to give students books that are too long to read in any given semester. And then the middle book is one I didn't teach from, but I think it's actually just a great example of something for people to read in a popular audience. So let me start with Stephen J. Gould, and he was a paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and, again, an amazing and very prolific writer, someone who, you know, there are, like, I think 10 or 12 collections of his essays that you can now buy as books. And one of his large themes was trying to make the case for evolutionary biology. Remember, this is, again, in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, a little bit more of a conservative bent to America at the time. And he was always trying to make the logical rhetorical case for why evolution is a very believable science and to take examples from it. So one of his, again, most famous works is an essay called The Panda's Thumb. And what I have up here is, again, this is a cover for the collection of essays. And I'm actually going to pop into local chat real quick. You can actually get the entire book as a PDF at this website. So if you ever want to read through his essays yourself, they're great, and they're available there. And Cesar G. Mentzen mentions bully for brontosaurus, and that is just one of his excellent ones. One thing that he did do, let me just back up for a second, is he focused a lot on things that people would relate to. So he did a lot of essays on dinosaurs at the time. That's a great part of what he understood in terms of reaching out to a non-science audience. So what I have up here is just an example of the anatomy of the panda, which, as you know, is a bear. It technically is in the family carnivora. But in fact, it only eats bamboo. And so this is, one, at face value, very bizarre-looking. And two, means that a lot of things that have happened for the animal to be able to eat become a vegetarian from being a meat eater. Well, actually, bears were technically always omnivores. So this picture shows the comparative anatomy of a human thumb, which is in green, and then also this modification of the radiocesmoid bone that allows pandas to help strip bamboo shoots and leaves from the stick so they can eat them more easily. So again, if you look at the panda hand, it looks like it has maybe six fingers. And what's important to recognize here is that this is a small modification of one bone for an important evolutionary adaptation. And so this type of comparative anatomy and talking to an audience was something he really did excel at. And what I'm going to pop up here next is just a random, cute picture of said panda because it's cute. And to show how it sits and that little protrusion you see on its thumb is an example of how it helps strip the bamboo. And Berrigan mentioned something interesting that there is periods of controversy and in different areas that Gould engaged in. And I don't want to talk too much about that right now because he's just, again, I just want to introduce the idea that his essays are still very relevant and very well written for an audience today. And I think he really set the template for the type of scientists who could come out and relate to a common audience. And we can come back to some of his more controversial stories. So the book I want to talk about is Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin. Now he is also a paleontologist and he's at the University of Chicago. And again, the full name of the book, and this is important, is a journey into the 3.5 billion-year history of the human body. And that is the central conceit of the book that he does basically comparative anatomy of our human body plan and compares it to, again, different very ancient evolutionary lineages including all the way to like simple worms. And so each example of this, he talks a little about some of the microbiology, some of the embryology science that's very important. Now let me mention the reason Neil Shubin is most well-known in his kind of most famous addition to the world of science is how he discovered tectonic. And so that is the cover animal on the book. It's also the picture on the lower left-hand side. And let me show the slide. Now one thing, they have this very nice educational site. Yeah, so Vic has put in The Inner Fish Home. I'm going to throw in one more link which basically is to some degree about the book directly with a wide variety of educational resources if you ever want to go through it yourself or to use it to teach classes. And I just took the slides from there for this section because they were well done. So let me say, so that was the central conceit of the book. The other thing that I think makes this a very good book for a regular audience, although to some degree it can kind of drag, it's very much a first-person professional account of his science and work that's been done by colleagues. So the vast majority of the book are things that a good half of the book are things that he has engaged with in terms of science or when he was a med student or when he was learning and doing embryology as a grad student. These are all kind of the conceits. So it makes it very readable, it makes it very personable. And I think he does a very good job of not trying to use science jargon to explain the concepts. And so I'll just move quickly through some of these main topics from the book. Tiktolok is basically an intermediate form between fish to tetrapods. Again, we are tetrapod, we have four limbs. And the exploration that you talked about in the science of the book is trying to find this right geology and time frame to hopefully find an example of these intermediate forms. And that is really from the days of early paleontology from Darwin's days and earlier, trying to find these missing links or intermediate forms has always been one of the main functions. And it tells us the family relationship, the way that we relate to all other organisms on the planet or two different sub-branches thereof. Some of the other stuff in the book talking specifically about some really interesting work that was going on with limb development. And a lot of what's happening in this area was really understanding the morphological connections between something as simple as a fish fin all the way to the human hand and then also other intermediate forms. But what's really interesting, and it goes through this in the book, is this interesting embryology where people can basically turn on and off genes or even just transplant little components of embryos to new parts and get duplications of genes, get different proportions of limbs to actually show these controlling organizing elements that help us really understand how limb development works. And one of the key things, and this is something that I've talked about before and what Darwin never knew, is that there are these switches that their modulation of how much and when they're active is what can actually help create a lot of different body plans while conserving the total number of genes that you need to use in an organism. Something he went through as well in the book is this very ancient idea of pinching. And what's really interesting about this is that the ability to go from just basically a three-layer embryo of different tissue and then to differentiate that into things like scales, glands, feathers, pores, to hair follicles all relies upon this ability to invaginate and then have gene expression happen differently. And so he talks about this going very far back in terms of embryology and phylogeny. And that, again, one of the key ideas in evolution is that you find some sort of novel way of doing things and that becomes a platform where you can diversify based on need, based on natural selection to do all sorts of crazy different things. Another quick diagram from the book as well is discussing people who have heard about how we have gill slits when we're embryos, that you can actually map and track these gill slits, which are, again, very fish-like, and you see that in the fish embryo as well, but that the development of these goes to very specific parts in terms of our head and neck. And so this is just showing the geography of this. But the key thing he does, and he talks about this from his medical school days, is that anybody who's ever had to learn all of the cranial nerves and what their pathways are, what holes they go through, it's pretty daunting. And the reason this is is that that's a body plan that came out from ancient sharks. And you can see an ancient shark that's very easy to lay out. Those cranial nerves are cranial nerves all relatively short paths. They don't have strong bony things they have to go through. But by the time you change a shark head into a human head, then you aren't changing that you have these cranial nerves and they need to be in one place and start in another place. The reason it's so crazy looking is because it came from a developmental plan. It came from an ancient platform. And then of course has to change as that platform modifies for again humans or other organisms. And the last one I mentioned from the book is just this idea of, we can go in from primitive forms to more advanced forms that again very ancient organisms had the ability to detect pigments or to use pigments in order to detect visual things in their environment. And then over time these got refined. And we can actually see both the commonalities and the adding on that makes them more specific. And one thing that's important to recognize that the eye again coming around the time of the Cambrian explosion is something that was very powerful both for evading predators and then also getting prey. And this interaction of predator prey is something that drives a lot of evolution. And that this is a common theme in terms of how we understand these things. Yeah, it's a good thing we'll see the cupcakes again. He also talks about sense of smell. He talks about some of that as well. So just overall, what I liked about the book was, you know, it's well written. He gives very good examples, has nice illustrations and really tries to connect the human body now to how science and paleontology and even molecular biology connect us to the origins of body parts and plans. One thing he does do also at the very end, he has a chapter called the meaning of it all. And what's really interesting, he talks about certain diseases or afflictions that we have as humans is things happen that are strange. Like one thing that's an example is sleep apnea. Sleep apnea happens because we have these relatively weak walls and muscles in the back of our throat. So they can collapse during sleeping. But that's also what allows us to speak and have this high diversity of ways we can and can't speak in the noises we make. So a lot of times in evolution there are trade-offs. And then the last thing I want to mention because one thing he really did was trying to connect what we have as body plans to things that came from a more primitive organism and that contributes positively to body plans. And I just want to mention my other favorite author, Sean B. Carroll. And he's written several books and I've taught from them. And he has one book called The Making the Fittest where he really goes through a lot of the genetics and the microbiology as it relates to evolution and to natural selection and different examples. And the one thing he talks about in this one is the development of what are called pseudogenes where a gene can become mutated. It's not very useful for the organism anymore and it does become a genetic fossil. And it seems kind of strange that a gene that's working perfectly is something that would then no longer be working. But if you relate it to what the organism does or does not need, it makes a lot of sense. So the example he has here in the phylogenetic tree is at the celicanth, which is, again, some kind of fossil, a living fossil. It sits in the very depths of the ocean, at the ocean floor. So it doesn't need to have a lot of light diversity. It just needs to have very sensitive light detection. And so it lost them compared to the original fish. And this is also true of dolphins and whales' excitations. This is also true of different types of nocturnal primates that you don't need them so they actually become no longer necessary and we don't spend the time making them. And he doesn't go into this too much, but maybe not having them allows other things to work better. So this idea, which I think is interesting, and that's why I'm kind of capping here, is the idea that the things that don't work in bodies from a genetic or vestigial organ also can tell us important information about the lifestyle or the development of any given organism. Like, for example, if they don't have opsoons, they may be nocturnal. That's an interesting question about junk DNA. Junk DNA actually has to do with retro-transposons or transposons, which are these mobile parasitic genomic elements. So they're not quite the same thing. And it's something I've done research in. I don't want to get you started. So I just want to endcap this, that there's a great amount of popularizers of science who are themselves scientists and the ability to, I think, use computer graphics to re-represent the things from our past is something that, in media, is incredibly cool and powerful that young people today, I think, have a great advantage with. So, again, Sean Carroll, Stephen Jake Gould, Neil Shubin, I recommend all of them. And thanks. Fantastic. That was a really great presentation. I'm really enjoying the diversity of topics. And it's just so interesting to really... Well, it just makes me feel that it reminds me of all the different kinds of topics that we enjoy here at the Science Circle and how they kind of dovetail into each other somehow. It really gives you a sense of kind of a unity of knowledge, I guess, very gratifying. Well, so thank you, Stephen. Let's move along now. Vic, would you like to tell us about your books and say anything you would like to... I think students are familiar with you, but if you want to say a few words about your background or something, feel free to do that. And let's move right along. Sure. Oh, there's so many good science books out there. The one I would like to share with you today is called Lab Girl by Dr. Hope Jarin. And, okay, it's a little bit as far as background goes, is two lives ago, back before I was a professor and back before I was a military officer in the most of the 70s, I was a researcher in biochemistry. Next up, a NASA at the University of Hawaii. Well, the interesting thing is that this person, Dr. Jarin, did a lot of her work at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, which is exactly where I was. I was in plant pathology, and she was in another lab at a different time. So for me, this is a great book. Now, the reason it's a great book is let me give you some idea about it. On my slides here, it's a personal journey, what I would call a personal journey with friends, both plants and animals. And she uses the, it's a little unusual in the format of the book because she and my dog's barking. Hang on a second. Puppy has strong opinions about this. Yeah. Well, you know, first life always takes the, in place of second life. Okay, so in any case, what she does in the book is it's not just about describing her own life, but she uses the life of plants as a metaphor for her own struggles with life. She, from growing up in childhood Minnesota through her own research. Let me tell you a little bit about the way the book is laid out and then I'll tell you a little bit more about the science part of the book. Okay, so what makes a good science book? I'm sure that the panel here would probably agree with me that when you're reading it, you sense a genuine curiosity and a passion and a familiarity with the topic. And it's very personal and it's not just, and I was thinking of an example this morning and I was going, okay, a textbook would just go, the radius and ulna are connected to the humerus. Well, that's not a good science book to me. It's more like here. Okay, look, let me introduce you to my friends. Better yet, shake hands with them, see how the combination of humerus, radius, ulna, allow the hands to move in all directions and rotate to meet your hand. In other words, it's very personal. You can see it. You can be there with the author. So the way she sets it out is in three parts. One is about roots and leaves. And she's basically talking about growing up and creating her own roots and branching out. Her father, I've got a little bit of a script here that I can add to the chat, is her father was a science teacher for 42 years. And what he used to do is he used to take her to the lab. And for me, this is very personal because this is how I grew up in science. And even before she was tall enough to feel the smooth surface of the benches and the little air jets that she could turn on and such like that while he was preparing for the next day. And she describes her... She wanted to be like her father, but unfortunately in the time period that she grew up, she was told she was a girl. And she had to do girl things. But she also got to... So she wasn't able to do some of the things she wanted when she was a girl, which is, by the way, the reason why she calls it lab girl. But she was able to garden with her mother. And one of the descriptions she has of the soil in Minnesota was there was no clay, not like down here in Texas. Okay, but it was rich soil like devil's food cake. And there was little pink earthworms wriggling around in it. And she learned that her mother... Yeah, you can almost taste it in her descriptions. And her mother wanted to be do research and go to school when she was young, but she basically found that it was man that got funded. And she ended up getting married, having kids, and putting off a degree until the kids are grown. Now, I can identify a lot with Dr. Sharon as far as how she describes science in the lab because she basically chose science as a safe home and spent most of her day here there. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, I didn't do all that well in my courses. I went to the courses that I liked and the other ones I didn't do, I didn't like. And I actually didn't get a very good GPA in undergrad. But the lab was my home. I mean, not my apartment. I used to spend nights there. And I can remember doing one experiment was 36 hours long. And it was my real home. And so she describes the lab as the light's always on. It's private, but the people know each other. She can... Going home is just a waste of time. You can sleep in the lab and do the things she needs to and the hands-on type of experimentation that she had. So being in the lab enabled her to kind of be a child still. And of course this is what they say about Einstein and others. And it was her church, so to speak, where she learned about things. It also was a place where she describes... where her guilt for not having done stuff like calling her parents, paying bills, washing dishes, shaving her legs, that sort of thing was pretty much made up by what she did get accomplished. And she was a very... Or she is a very accomplished scientist. The Time Magazine named her among 100 Muslim people, popular science among the 10 brilliant, 10 young... Yeah, no social media, no television, no life. Although she does talk about that in the book. So for example, let me see. So in the second part of the book, the first part of the book is growing up all the way through her first professor job. And then the second part of the book is about wood and knots. In other words, now she's a professor and she's building her own lab, but there's knots and problems. So she's got the worries of facing research and procuring and paying for the staff and living at the lab and no life by her own decision more or less and field trips and conferences, that sort of thing. The third part of the book is called flowers and fruits. In other words, you put in all this time and effort and now it is paying off. But she also encounters sexism in the field and struggles with mental health. So it's all about, it's not just about the plants, but it's also about her life and overcoming things. And then she, today by the way, she's at the University of Oslo in Norway where she conducts. Now what I'd like to do real quick here is to give you a couple excerpts from the book itself. So at the very beginning when she's growing up, she talks about a favorite tree of hers. And she says, and I'm just going to read it here for people. A bit smaller is, my tree had been a child too. The embryo that had become a tree sat on the ground for years, caught between the danger of waiting too long and the danger of leaving the tree too early. Any mistakes would surely lead to death. My tree had also been a teenager. It went through 10, a 10-year period where it grew wildly with little regard for the future, between ages 10 and 20, it doubled in size and was often ill-prepared for the new challenges and responsibilities that came with such height. So she goes through, and that's just another way when she starts out a chapter. Yeah, it's excellent. When she starts out a chapter, she starts with a metaphor for her life and then she goes on and talks about it. So in other words, the plants and the humans in her story are both intimately familiar to her. She talks about, and then the little plant that's growing up a seed knows how to wait. Most seeds wait for a year before starting to grow. A cherry seed can wait 100 years, no problem. What exactly a seed's waiting for is only known as a seed, but some unique trigger combination of temperature, moisture, light, many other things. So you can almost, you can almost identify with being that seed. She talks, and then she goes with the root and she goes, okay, no risk is more terrifying than being taken by the first root. A lucky root will eventually find water, but its first job is to anchor. Never again to enjoy any hope of relocating to places less cold, less dry, less dangerous. And then a leaf. As she talks about leaves, the first leaf is a new idea. As soon as the seed is anchored, its priority shift, and it directs all its energy towards stretching up. Its reserves have almost nearly run out, and it desperately needs to catch light in order to fuel the process of keeping it alive. Now, in the example of a metaphor, let me just show you real quick on there. She essentially says that she's talking about a tree budget and her own budget. And she says the life of a deciduous tree is ruled by its annual budget. So, in the short months from March to July, that must be up in Minnesota somewhere. Down here in Texas, things grow all year, except for the deciduous ones. They're just starting to lose their leaves now. It must grow an entire canopy of leaves. If it fails to meet its quota each year, some competitor will grow into a corner of its space and the tree will eventually lose its foothold and die. That's one thing about plants, of course, that's interesting as they can't. In other words, with global warming average and climate change and stuff, birds and flower and stuff like that may be able to adapt a bit, we can, but some plants just don't have a choice. They're rooted where they are. And then she talks in talking about the deciduous tree budget. She talks about her own struggles with funding research and budgeting and grants, such like that. That's why I like the book. The book, I can identify it with it. It's because I've lived some of it I can feel for her own particular struggles. And it's just plain good science. I love reading about plants and how they are both similar and dissimilar to us. And that's my book that I'd like to share with you. Thank you, Vic. That was really great. You know, one of the things that this book highlights, it seems to me, one of the things that I like to do is I like to read about plants and what this book highlights, it seems to me, and one of the things I love about a good popular science book is, you know, when the scientist is really able to convey what they love about their subject in such a personal and unique way that really helps you enjoy the topic almost as much as they do. You kind of see it with new eyes and suddenly say, wow, actually this subject is like really cool. And you can totally get why they are fascinated by it. And so a good popular science book, I think, does that. And I would also like to mention that the struggles with getting grant funding and budgeting your research and so forth, you know, it's hard to make a living as a scientist and that's why I ended up going to law school. That's the last refuge of a scoundrel. So, you know, people that really do stick with it and are, you know, put up with the difficulty of making a living and doing science, I think really deserves it. Let's see. Is my voice okay? Hope I'm not too loud or too faint. Before maybe move on to a mic, while I'm thinking of it, I also wanted to mention a couple of books on my own. One is Isaac Asimov, who I think was a great popularizer of actual science, not just a science fiction writer, but he wrote a lot of science essays that were collected into books and also just straightforward sort of science popularizing books. And he was a big influence on me in high school. I travel a lot in high school and didn't go to school much, but I read a lot of Isaac Asimov science essays and science books. So when I came back to the States and had to finish high school and take the, well, in my school, we took the ACT test, but really it was Isaac Asimov that got me into college because I learned all the science I knew from him rather than going to school. So I really love that. And one, and then also wanted to mention an honorable mention to the science book Godel, Escher and Bach and Eternal Golden Braid, which is a really challenging book that explains Godel's incompleteness theorem by using examples from the music of Bach and the art of M.C. Escher. And it's a bit of a slog, but totally worth it. And I'm always a little bit surprised that the author, Doug Hofstetter, sort of faded into obscurity over the decades, even though he has written this truly landmark work on Godel's theorem. So while I was thinking of that, I wanted to plug those two items. And with that, I would like now to move along to Mike Shaw and Mike, why don't you take it away and tell us about the book you want to talk about. Okay. Mike has his mic on. I hope everyone can hear me. I hope anyone can hear me. We can hear you. The voice is a little low, but we can hear you fine. Okay. Well, maybe I should just actually speak up instead of mumble. That would help things out. So yeah, I chose an Oliver Sacks book, Hallucinations. I actually chose Oliver Sacks rather than the book. So let me ask my audience here. How many of you are familiar with Oliver Sacks? Only a little bit? Nope. Okay. If I ask you, have you seen the movie Awakenings with Robin Williams? Well, Robin Williams played Oliver Sacks in that movie. So the movie is a little bit fictionalized. There's relationships in there that didn't happen, but otherwise it was basically a good telling of the story of the people for whom El Dopa freed from a Parkinsonian, Catatonia-like state from sleepy sickness they had had in the early 20th century. So here's the Wikipedia page. So we see how it's spelled. Well, Oliver Sacks had a long, long career. He passed away in 2015. His first book Migraine in 1970 was a textbook on migraine, but had an approach that was more like what you would have expected from a book from the 1800s, where much more descriptive language was used to talk about case histories in depth. And that was one of the things that he always wanted to do in his writing. And so Awakenings was the next book, and the man who mistook his wife for a hat. His stories, his chapters in his books have always been about, have been about case histories written with dignity and understanding of people who have had neurological events that result in specific behaviors. In some cases, brain scans allow for pinpointing of a lesion in a particular area of the brain resulting in a particular phenomenon. So a man who mistook his wife for a hat is one I read more than 20 years ago. I'm craving reading it again. Anthropologist on Mars has a big section on Temple Grandin. And most of his career was about the neuroanatomy, neuroscience. He also had an interesting connection to chemistry as you know I'm a chemist. You may be wondering why I'm not talking about chemistry popular books. Well, I like to read something else once in a while. But Oliver Sacks had a great book, Uncle Tungsten, about his experiences as a child with his own lab that he was encouraged to study by his parents who were both MDs. And they, oh my God, they let him do things that just make me cringe. I guess in the 1940s in England you could go down to early 1950s, you could go down to the local pharmacy and buy like sodium. Yeah, and things to do with sodium and things to do like with gallium. These stories are wonderful. I have been reading his later books very recently including On the Move, which is his autobiography. It was surprising to me. He was very reticent to talk about his personal life in any of his books, even though he shared a great deal. Until I read his autobiography written in like 2012 from his long career, I didn't know he was gay. And it makes sense that someone who grew up in that time and era, 1950s in England would be quiet about his personal life, especially if he was gay. I understand this completely. I came out on my interview trip to work my current job and I've been there for 21 years, but that's because times have changed. In 1950s in England you may remember what happened to Aaron Palin Turing. This was something that wanted the professional life you would have. So, you know, I feel a connection there. To get to my actual book, Hallucinations, I won't go through the whole book. He's got a whole bunch of chapters on different types of hallucinations. The theme that runs through the book is that many hallucinations can be explained, caused, result from, a type of sensory deprivation. So, you know, the first chapter is on Charles Bonnet syndrome. And that's essentially visual hallucinations. They're devoid of emotional content. They are just images, people see. When the input from the eyes to the visual sensors of the brain starts to diminish, right? So, that could happen for any number of reasons. You know, the optic nerve could be damaged or the eyes themselves could be damaged or retinas could be damaged. But a feature that happens can be expected to happen is that in the absence of input, visual sensors of the brain most likely have some random activity, that the rest of the brain makes up stories about. So, upshot is that people can have visual hallucinations. And the ones described in Charles Bonnet syndrome can be like, since they have no emotional content people don't feel positive or negatively about them. They're not particularly disturbing elves in pirate dress and things like that. But, you know, in later chapters of the books he talks about folks who have olfactory sensory deprivation and having olfactory hallucinations. They can't smell anything and yet certain associations will give them a vivid hallucination of an odor. Auditory hallucinations even tactile hallucinations. So, the experience I get from reading this particular book was that hallucinations are something that is common within the human experience. And just about everyone sometime is going to an experience of hallucination. You know, either from their own mental states or through interactions with drugs. He actually talks about some of the things he did in the late 1950s when he was living in California that just horrified me in terms of self-medication. But, you know, he also talked about those and his autobiography on the move and he was able to move beyond those. So, wrapping up a little bit because I noticed our time is 1256. Now, I would strongly recommend reading all of our sacks and I have just one paragraph I'd like to read from his final book called Gratitude. This is a piece called My Own Life and this is after he was given his final diagnosis that the cancer that he had in his eye had metastasized. So, it goes, I cannot pretend I am without fear but my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers and above all, I have been a sentient being a thinking animal on this beautiful planet and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure. So, with that, I will sign off. Wow! That is a great ending. A sentient creature. Bravo! Well, thank you very much, panelists. Mike, I was wondering in local chat, you know, there's recently been sort of increasing interest in using psychedelics therapeutically. You know, apparently they can be quite effective in like treating schizophrenic disorders I think and things like that. Do you think that Max's sort of candid discussion of hallucinogens sort of may be informed at least informed the interest in psychedelics as therapeutics? Yeah. I'm just curious about that because Let me respond in voice since my typing is terrible. Yes, absolutely. I think so. Especially in On the Move and in the hallucinations books he details his observations of his own reactions when taking psychedelics and other drugs and it's particular one event where he had run out of the thing that he was using to sleep which is like massive overdoses of something and then he got DTs and had several days of terrifying hallucinations that friends gawk him through. But yeah, his discussion of the LSD I think it was led to his realization that he had had a spiritual experience except that he recognized that he was an atheist all his life. Interesting. I think that's accurate. You know, Sax also wrote beautifully about the power of music to help people with emotional or you know, cognitive deficits and things and yeah, musicophilia and again I think it's sort of the same format of sort of describing case studies of individuals who had some sort of maybe cognitive deficit or something and how music was able to sort of help them organize their thinking or become more whole things like that and I think that's also a really fascinating topic. So, well let me just thank our panelists those were all fantastic choices I think we really covered a lot of interesting topics today we have a few minutes left does anyone in the audience have any science books that they would like us to give a shout out to? Oh, Carl Sagan, yes let's give honorable mention to Carl Sagan another great science popularizer thanks for mentioning Sagan we probably never would have heard the end of it if we hadn't at least mentioned him. All right I won't belabor this I think we did pretty good filling our hour so I will gavel this month's panel discussion to a close and thanks again to everyone for tending to all my panelists who I'm always impressed how well you guys prepare for these talks with your slides and multimedia and also thanks to Chan and Jess for helping me put this panel together and get it advertised in a timely fashion and with that have a good weekend you all I'll sign off