The Throwing Madonna

by Calvin, William H. and William H. Calvin

Book Overview

These essays on the brain leap from the philosophical to the comical, from the scientific theory to mundane events of everyday life. The Throwing Madonna provides a window through which the average... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0553352296
• ISBN13: 9780553352290
• Release Date: June 1991
• Publisher: Bantam
• Length: 215 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Throwing Madonna

I read this years ago and wanted to read it again - it's very interesting and gives some insight into why we do the things we do. Excellent read.

Interesting, informative, and enjoyable

William Calvin is one of my favorite writers and thinkers on the brain. I don't always agree with his ideas, but he's creative in a way I enjoy and his ideas are always provocative and even pathbreaking in the way he integrates diverse areas--from linguistics to climatology--with the evolution and development of the brain. This books brings together some of his best essays, covering a diverse array of topics. For those of you who aren't familiar with Calvin, this is an excellent introduction to his thought, which I can highly recommend. Since we're on the subject, I thought I'd make a few comments on one of Calvin's interesting ideas--which is the proposition that spear-throwing was specifically the motor action that provided the stimulus for the subsequent evolution of the cerebral cortex and greater encephalization of the human brain. While I like this idea, and also am excited by the possbility of pinpointing such an important causative agent in our evolution, I also feel it's very difficult to isolate or pinpoint a specific action that could be responsible, but I'd like to consider it nevertheless in the light of what we do know about the development and nature of motor control in the human brain. If you look at the pyramidal cortex, which has the most complex motor capabilities, we see that it's mainly specialized for fine hand movements and coordination. For example, typing or playing the piano or a musical instrument gets mediated by this area--or the fine control required by a surgeon's hand. Rhythmic movements, even very fast ones, oddly enough, are not necessarily a highly evolved capability and in fact, if I remember right, are mediated by the cerebellar vermis, a structure in the cerebellum, or at least some portion of the cerebellum. We know from brain damage studies that people lose this ability from damage to the cerebellum. It has the tongue-twisting name of dysdiadocochinesia. But getting back to the spear throwing capability, much of the eye-hand coordination for this sort of thing is in fact still mediated by the cerebellum. For example, it is known that scale transformation of muscle movements and velocity prediction occurs in the cerebellum in hard-wired circuits that are basically using tensor matrix multiplication to handle the scaling issues and mapping issues between sensory and motor control functions. Speaking of "hard-wired" capabilities, I recall from my own studies of synaptic connectivity that the pyramidal cortex neurons have an average of about 3000 synapses with other neurons. Contrast this with those of the cerebellum, which are thought to have 100,000 connections, a truly staggering number. But this makes sense when you consider that it controls so many functions that have to be very quick and essentially automatic with very low time latencies and time constants. And if you've ever seen the mathematical studies in the area of occulomotor control theory, which mostly looks at the optic tectum and super