R. Sekuler & R. Blake. Star Trek on the Brain: Alien Minds, Human Minds (1998)

     R. Sekuler & R. Blake. Star Trek on the Brain: Alien Minds, Human Minds (1998) I found a marginal note by me, so I have read this book before. Perhaps I can’t remember as well as I could, or perhaps the book is forgettable. I lean towards the latter, because yesterday I found I could remember most of a book that I’d read a couple of years ago, merely from reading the back cover blurb.
     This book ranks lowest of the Star Trek spinoffs that aped The Physics of Star Trek. Its authors are no doubt nice people and decent fellows, to judge from their jacket photos. Professors at a couple of minor liberal arts colleges, they no doubt enjoy a good reputation among students. If this book constitutes evidence, their courses don’t demand much, and offer a deal of mild entertainment. But as a discourse on the nature of mind and behaviour, this book falls short.
     The defects show up most strongly in the section on memory, in which the two authors waffle around the concepts of memory as storage and memory as a process, without ever making clear what either conceptualisation entails, and how, if at all, Star Trek illustrates or exemplifies them. In particular, they use the notion of “procedural memory” for what are clearly behaviours shaped by operant conditioning. That people can “learn new skills” supposedly shows that procedural memory can remain intact even while trauma has damaged or destroyed “declarative memory”. The authors imply that this is a mystery, which it isn’t. Our behaviours are shaped by operant conditioning, so it should be obvious that damage to one part of the brain shouldn’t affect the shaping of behaviours mediated by other parts of the brain. If it were otherwise, it would be a mystery that some strokes impair the ability to walk but not to talk, and vice versa. Actually, the fact that “procedural memory” can remain intact when other kinds of remembering are impaired supports the concept of memory as behaviour. Similar muddles show up in other sections.
     The authors are best when they deal with interactions between people, at which level questions of how to conceptualise the way the brain actually functions are irrelevant. Although they don’t use the word “conditioning”, much of their talk about phobias, for example, makes it clear that phobias are glitches in behaviour, and can be fixed by working with sufferers to change their responses to the triggers of phobic behaviours.
     The central question, whether we can in fact imagine truly alien minds, is dealt with briefly. We can to some extent imagine the sensorium of other creatures. Technical advances in making visible details that can be seen only in UV light show that we can get a vague sense of what it would be like to see like a bee. In some circumstances, a human can actually do so, sort of: the authors cite the experience of a man whose cataract operation permitted UV to enter his eyes, which resulted in unusual responses in the retina, and affected his sense of colour. But all aliens that we imagine will share human traits with us. Those are the only traits we can imagine. We can imagine aliens that resemble the more exotic terrestrial creatures in looks or actions (think of the alien in Alien, for example), but again, our imaginings are based on what we know. It cannot be otherwise. The truly alien is unimaginable by definition. Thus, the authors very sensibly draw attention to how both human and non-human characters in Star Trek exemplify human traits, and so help us understand ourselves.
     All in all, this is a lightweight and forgettable work. But I already said that, didn’t I? ** (2007)