Jay Ingram. The Barmaid’s Brain (1999) - two reviews (updated post)

     Jay Ingram. The Barmaid’s Brain (1999) A pleasant collection of articles on the barmaid’s brain and other subjects of interest. Ingram writes well and clearly, and never forgets that scientific investigations are always unfinished. The answers are always merely the best available, and usually raise more questions. A  potato chip book: when you finish one article, you immediately want to read another. The title essay discusses an interesting finding: that while Munich barmaids can remember dozens of orders, they do badly on visualising the level of beer in a tilted glass (they think the surface of the beer is tilted, too). The inference is that by improving one ability, they disimprove another, an inference not in fact supported by this study. The barmaids may just be in the 40 to 60% of the population that makes the same mistake.   **½  (2007)
     Update 2013: Very little of this book is out of date. The last 14 years have added to the puzzles, and clarified a few of the questions Ingram raises. E.g. it's pretty certain now that the senses are the first level of processing, and that one's view of the world, and one's Self within it, are illusions, fabricated by the brain out of the filtered data that the senses deliver.

In 2008 I read the book agian, and wrote this review. You'll note I rated the book higher this tim e. Maybe I was just feeling more mellow:
     Jay Ingram. The Barmaid’s Brain (1998) Ingram likes science and scientific puzzles. His knack for explaining the puzzle and its (possible) solution is similar to Stephen Gould’s, but he casts his net wider, and unlike Gould doesn’t have much of an agenda beyond Science is Fun. He also doesn’t mind having to say “Answer unknown and possibly unknowable.” The hunt for answers is as important to him as the answer itself. The book is aimed at anyone with a high school education, although interested middle school pupils will have little difficulty following the discussion (with the occasional help of a dictionary). I bought this book at the BR Library book sale in July 2007, and gave it to Cassandra after reading it. Now I’ve read it a second time at her house, and a good read it was too.
     The Barmaid of the title is the beer waitress at the Oktoberfest, who despite her experience with beer thinks that the surface of the beer is not always level when the beer is poured, but who can remember a dozen or more orders distributed over several tables. Waiters had almost as high an error rate as waitresses, and both scored well below the average person. The essay also shows how the preliminary results suggest variations on experiments. It seems that believing water can tilt in a tilted glass is not wholly an innate mistake after all, but depends on the kind of container seen or visualized when the question is put: When presented with a drinking glass, about 50% of respondents believed that water can tilt, but when presented with a neutral container (such as a Petri dish), 30% or fewer made that mistake.
     Thus, context (i.e., environmental cues) is crucial. Even the memory feats of waitresses appear to be tied to context: When one experimenter set up a miniature cocktail bar to test people’s ability to remember many facts, waitresses did exceptionally well. Ingram doesn’t report on any control milieu; I would like to know how remembering changed when it was, say, a miniature street-scape. I suspect that a waitress would score only about average on the task of recalling items such as benches, bus stops, hydrants, shop fronts, etc. However, a cop might score higher, since it’s a cop’s job to notice things on the street. Or maybe not; it’s actually his job to notice what’s out of place, and an ordinary street doesn’t have much if anything out of place. Consider the recruiting test at the beginning of Men in Black, where Will Smith shoots at the schoolgirl figure, since a schoolchild reading about quantum physics is somewhat unusual, while the monsters were run-of-the-mill Hallowe’en types. *** (2008)