The hardback of The Vision Revolution has been out for one year, and I couldn’t be happier with the reaction it has received, including reviews in fantastic places like the Wall Street Journal and Sciam Mind and mentions in places like the New York Times. It even made New Scientist’s “best books of 2009″ story! Soon it will appear in China, Korea and Germany.
There has, however, been one gnawing problem with the hardback.
…the problem is its hardbackiness.
To understand my trouble with hardbackiness, let me back up and explain what I was aiming for in writing the book.
As a start, let me first describe what I was not aiming for: Not an academic monograph, to be read only by specialists. Not a journalist-style coverage of a topic. And not a book about how to help your brain, like “20 ways to make your brain smarter than the Johnson’s next door.”
My aim was not only to write a book that is readable (and funny) to non-specialists (i.e., a “trade” or “popular” book). Rather, my aim was to build a book that is part of the scientific conversation.
By “part of the scientific conversation,” I mean that the book is filled with ideas and evidence that go beyond what is found in the technical journal articles.
That, I believe, is what makes a popular science book exciting to non-specialists and laymen: in reading the book they are not merely learning about science, but are witnessing a portion of the lively scientific exchange.
The reader is put within the scientific conversation itself.
I didn’t come to this philosophy about what makes a good popular science book on my own. As I struggled with the drafts of my first trade book proposals, I had the opportunity to meet with John Brockman (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/brockman.html ), the noted literary agent, author and the founder of The Edge ( http://www.edge.org ). That’s his photo at the top. It was he who laid out this good-popular-science book philosophy to me, and although it sounded obvious after he said it, it by no means was obvious to me beforehand.
That’s what makes authors like Desmond Morris, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker. Daniel Dennett and Andy Clark so compelling. It’s not merely that they write well, but that they’re making a scientific case for their viewpoint. …and you and I get to watch.
And so that’s what I did in The Vision Revolution, take the reader along as I lay out the case for a radical re-thinking of how we see. Color vision evolved for seeing skin and the underlying emotions, not for finding fruit. Forward-facing eyes evolved for seeing better in forests, not for seeing in depth. Illusions are due to our brain’s attempt to correct for the neural eye-to-brain delay, so as to “perceive the present.” And our ability to read is due to writing having culturally evolved to make written words look like natural objects, just what our illiterate visual system is competent at processing.
In aiming to be part of the lively scientific exchange, there was another thing I tried to inject into the book: I tried to not take things too seriously.
As I have discussed in an earlier piece [ http://www.science20.com/mark_changizi/mind_hacks_over_stacks_facts ], too often science is treated as a set of textbook facts. Textbooks usually give that impression, and even when they are careful to say that science is in fact deeply in flux, the textbook look and feel dupes most of us into imbuing the book with too much truthiness. This is especially a problem for the cognitive and brain sciences, because the object of study is the most complicated object in the known universe, and we very often don’t know what we’re talking about. (We don’t know jack: http://changizi.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/18/ )
And that brings me back to the most significant flaw with the hardback version of The Vision Revolution: its hardbackiness. The rigidity of a hardback suggests truthiness, and although I do believe the ideas I put forth and defend in the book are true, I don’t want the cover’s hardness to be part of my argument.
Luckily, The Vision Revolution is now out in paperback, and is so remarkably bendy that the reader cannot help but to read with that engaged maybe-this-is-not-correct mindset, rather than the oh-look-at-all-those-true-things-science-has-figured-out mindset. With that mindset, the reader will be in the right mindset to truly be “part of the scientific conversation.”
~~~
Mark Changizi is Professor of Human Cognition at 2AI, and the author of The Vision Revolution (Benbella Books) and the upcoming book Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man (Benbella Books).
This piece first appeared June 21, 2010, at Science 2.0. And, no, Brockman is not my agent.
Once again you put the spotlight on something I hadn’t thought of, but now can’t ignore. For other (less science-y reasons), I wonder how long the hardback can survive. The paperback still has relatively low cost of production going for it, but in the digital world it’s hard to imagine that hardbacks will continue their reign atop the publishing pyramid.
Well, I’m a librarian and I ordered the hardback for my library; I hate having to repair paperbacks (or worse, charge a patron for a book that’s beyond repair).
What I really want is a copy of The Brain from 25,000 Feet but I can’t since it costs over $100 and I know I’m the only person who would read it.
I guess I’ll get it through Interlibrary Loan and try to read it all in a week…
Seems that you’ve put in your book things that should be in the mainstream scientific literature, but aren’t. You mention the
“lively scientific exchange” and I think that a lively exchange is indeed rarely seen in journal articles. But how did you convey it in the book? Did you debate yourself, or imaginary characters, like Galileo did with Salviati vs. Simplicio?
The absence of much back-and-forth between scientists in journal articles is one reason I’ve been working on evidence-charts (www.evidencecharts.com). We need to find ways to bring real debating into the scientific literature. You can do it now in a book, but unfortunately most scientists will never write a book.
You also say “the book is filled with ideas and evidence that go beyond what is found in the technical journal articles”.
I agree, some kinds of ideas are notably absent from journal articles, but not sure I’m thinking of the same things you are. What sorts of things are you referring to?
Books are a good place to have larger-scale, synthesizing ideas laid out, something that would be difficult to publish — and fit — in a journal. In my Vis Rev book, even though the central research of each chapter appeared in journal articles, in each chapter I am able to lay out a broader case, and flesh out wider implications, things I couldn’t do in the earlier articles, and topics that, all by themselves, aren’t what one would publish in a journal article.
And by participating in the lively scientific exchange, I didn’t mean to do so within the book. Rather, because the book aims to make substantive new claims directed at the scientific community, it will lead to lively exchange over time. That’s not what happens to science books written as a journalistic overview or as a 20-ways-to-increase-your-brain.
Excellent on your evidence chart! (And your link above shouldn’t have an ‘s’ at the end! …with it one is led into web nightmare territory.)
But, as for having the debates within the journals, or books, themselves, I don’t have a strong opinion yet. To play devil’s advocate, I wonder if playing the debate out over longer periods of time leads to more rational players.
Yikes sorry about that link! yes, I meant evidencechart.com . It looks to me that the extended time needed for any back and forth with journal articles allows people to avoid engaging in a functional debate. Authors can just ignore aspects of another scientist’s argument and they may never get pinned down on this by the competing scientist. They might if the competitor ever reviews their paper, but then the debate is mostly behind closed doors again and it’s hard for a reader to see that a debate happened and understand the full reasons for what the author wrote.
OK, I need to write a blog post to develop this better