Bradley Voytek's Reading List

"I read this book in my late teens, before I was a neuroscientist. I have a soft spot for supernatural tales, and — oddly for an atheist — Judeo-Christian extreme stories, by which I mean angel-devil, fallen one stories. A lot of these take a Manichean point of view: light and dark, good versus evil. In the West this is heavily filtered through that Judeo-Christian lens. The Master and Margarita is brilliant, not only for its interweaving of past and present and linking of different timelines with the Pontius Pilate story, but also the complexity of the relationship between good and evil in it. You really feel for the evil characters — you find yourself backing them completely in their worst actions. The Rolling Stones song ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ was heavily inspired by The Master and Margarita . It’s a beautiful commentary and reflection on questions like ‘what are we doing in our lives, why are we here?’ Our interpretation of that story is heavily filtered by the culture in which we’re raised. You take someone who isn’t raised in the Judeo-Christian culture and have them read that book and they’re going to have a totally different perspective on it. A lot of the allusions and allegories in it won’t even make sense. That’s something that fascinates me — how the culture in which we’re raised affects our brain development and our perceptions and interpretations."

"There’s a phrase I once heard, ‘every story has one buy.’ There’s one totally ridiculous thing that readers have to buy into. The author doesn’t usually get more than one buy, and their story and their world have to be internally consistent with that one ridiculous thing. In The City & the City there is a supernatural force that comes in and yanks people out of reality if they break the rules of the mutually agreed upon imperception of the overlapping cities. It’s completely ridiculous, but Miéville builds the entire world around it and it’s internally consistent. The basic idea is that you’ve got these two warring factions within a city. It’s been decades, maybe hundreds of years, but at some point the two different factions within the city had a treaty and they agreed to coexist and continue living in the same city. But they agreed to never, never pay attention to each other. So the citizens are part of the same physical world, but they live in two different perceptual worlds. They share the same roads, they live in the same buildings, but they have all agreed not to pay attention to each other. That active not-paying-attention is actually active. If you’re driving down a road and you have to swerve around a car that belongs to a citizen of the other faction, you cannot reflect upon, or even think about, why you just swerved round. You have to trick yourself into thinking that you moved out of the way not to actively avoid something, but just because. Actively noticing that you had to avoid the citizen from the other city is, in itself, noticing a citizen from the other city and that will call down upon you this supernatural force that will punish you for having paid attention to them. The overarching narrative of the story is a murder committed in one part of the city, in this one faction. A detective from the other faction has to try and investigate this murder — in a place that he’s not even allowed to pay attention to. It’s amazing. For me, it’s a very impressive reflection on how we perceive the world around us. It’s a little tricky. I wrote a paper for a literary conference on this book and whether or not you could ‘unsee.’ It was interesting going into a science-fiction conference as a neuroscientist and trying to teach people the neurological mechanisms of attention. The best analogy I could give is from the point of view of hearing and language. We know, in mammals at least, that our auditory cortex — the part of our brain that first receives information from the ear about the sounds that you hear — is organised tonotopically. High frequency tones enter the auditory cortex in one part and then, as the frequencies get lower and lower, they are represented progressively further forward. That’s part of the way we think the brain decodes sounds: the neurones that represent those sounds — or the brain cells that respond to those sounds coming in — prefer different parts of the brain. So, if you take a rat, and you raise it in an environment where one tone or one frequency is overrepresented and you have a look at what happens in that rat’s brain, at its auditory cortex, the amount of brain dedicated to representing that frequency is way higher than in a rat that is raised in a normal environment. So the brains of animals raised in environments with different kinds of perceptual statistics develop in response to that. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Some people have followed up on this to see if it is true that one of the reasons that native English speakers can’t hear tonal differences in Chinese is because our brains can’t hear them. Similarly, let’s say you play the guitar. You pick the strings with your right hand and you fret with the left hand. The amount of brain area devoted to your left finger movements is much larger. In The City & the City they really don’t notice each other anymore and I would argue this isn’t actually horribly crazy or out of line with how we know the brain works. If you’re raised in a culture where you’ve been trained to not notice people wearing certain colours and dressing in certain ways and walking in certain ways — which is how they identify one another in the book — then you might lose the ability to actually pay attention to them or see them. We wouldn’t really ever have a way to test this. In reality, I don’t think that that is how the brain works. That is the buy in the book. All these things I’ve been talking about are fundamental low-level sensory processes, like hearing and movement, which are different from more cognitive processes like attention and memory. But it’s still in line, generally, with what we know."

"Culture. World War Z is told from multiple different perspectives and multiple different cultures. It’s about how they respond to the impending apocalypse: what the Americans do and what happens in the Middle East, how individuals respond. So you have a couple of people who are already preparing for the end of the world and you’ve got the military view. It’s great because Max Brooks really pulls together this multi-cultural viewpoint, it’s not just a Brad Pitt action-movie vehicle. In some ways this goes back to the Manichean ‘light and dark’ conversation. It’s interesting that the allusion to World War Two intermixes with zombies. There’s a celebration in American culture of World War II because there was a clear bad guy. Just like in the zombie movies, where there are the people who are trying to eat you and there’s not much of a grey area. It’s ok if you shoot a zombie in the head. It’s not like a stomach shot. It’s the most viscerally unsettling way of killing them, their identity, their personhood, their face — you have to kill it."

"That was another really transformative book for me. Oliver Sacks is a beautiful storyteller, but he’s also a neurologist and these are real patients that he saw, with real symptoms. And with some of these patients the mind boggles — those that can’t see faces, or think their loved ones have been replaced by robots. We don’t know how this happens in the brain, all these different maladies and disorders, but we know quite a number of them. We know generally how and why they come about and it’s just wild to me that this can happen. I can’t imagine one day waking up and not knowing who my wife is, or seeing my wife and thinking that she was replaced by some sort of clone or robot. But it could happen to any of us… That’s something we look at in our book a lot. Our preface is an attempt to pay homage to the idea that a lot of what we know about how the brain works first came about by looking at injury: when someone has a specific brain malady, or trauma, or wakes up after a stroke and are unable to speak, or they can talk but they can’t understand language, or they suddenly can’t see one part of their visual world. For me, one of the most interesting ones is a disorder called hemineglect, where you lose the ability to pay attention to the left side of space. You just forget that the left side of the world exists. If you ask someone with hemineglect to draw a clock, they will cluster all of the numbers 1 through 12 on the right side of the clock face. And these things tell us something very fundamental about how we pay attention to things in our visual world, how we speak, how we understand. Engineers will tell you that they’ll take something apart and try to put it together again. We obviously can’t do this with brains and minds, but when something breaks it does tell you something about how it works. For me, Sack’s book is more interesting because it’s real. There is no buy – going back to the idea of believability – it seems like the author is asking too much of you, he’s pushing your credulity to the limits, but it’s all real."

"A general overview of the plot is that there’s a computer virus that can also jump into being a biological virus but only for people who are hackers, people who natively speak binary computer code. The computer virus creates a ‘snow crash’ which is like white noise, a static image on computer screens. But it’s actually not white noise, all the black and white dots in the snow crash are representing binary 1s and 0s and if you speak binary then your brain is automatically interpreting those 1s and 0s, which is running code on your brain and hijacking your mind. Again, it’s a totally ridiculous science fiction buy. But it’s not too crazy. A thing like that almost certainly can’t exist, but it’s not so far out of the realm of what the brain does. As a neuroscientist, it doesn’t make me want to throw the book on the ground. “Our experiences of the world are not necessarily a true reflection of the world.” The technological aspect is interesting and amusing. The CIA has become a for-profit company in the future. One of the things I like about Snow Crash is that it’s not really a dystopian future, it’s just a mildly annoying future. People are making bad decisions, there are lots of really silly people, the world is kind of ridiculous in terms of where it’s gone. The Mafia has become a semi-respectable business organisation. Nothing is too outside the realm of plausibility and everyone is still fallible. I love it. There’s two answers to this. The first is that it’s trivial to say the Internet is changing our minds because everything is changing our minds. This conversation you and I are having? I am rewriting your memory right now, and vice versa. That’s having a physical effect on the neurones in your brain, new synapses are being formed. That is precisely what memory is. That is what the human experience is, our brains are rewiring with every experience that we have. So in a very trivial sense it’s true, but it’s not really meaningful. The second is that supposedly Socrates was going around lamenting how the written word was ruining people’s memory because you no longer have to keep track of conversations when you can write down the information. So two thousand years ago people were arguing that writing was fundamentally eroding our culture and our sense of personhood. And yet, here we are. I believe in the fundamental adaptability of humanity. We find a way to make a good out of whatever situation we find ourselves in. So, there’s a lot of garbage on the internet, but at the same time it’s an incredibly powerful tool for science and medicine and research and art. I tend to not buy into that fear-mongering. It frees us up for doing other things, right? In one of my classes I try to teach my students Google-fu, because I don’t think people need to be memorising every single detail, every single fact, about whatever it is they may be learning. You should have broad-swathe understandings of how different concepts relate to one another, both temporally and conceptually. But I can pull out my smartphone and look a fact up in ten seconds. Not having to remember every single detail we learn frees us up to be at a higher level, more creative. That said, I still believe that there are things that you just fundamentally have to know…"