BOOKS

The Genesis of Genius

The hardy seeds of scientific passion can take root almost anywhere      

By Jennifer Kahn

Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist
Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist

Edited by John Brockman

Pantheon Books, $23.95


Courtesy of Sherry Turkle

Ethnographer Sherry Turkle imagined herself at age 8 as a roller-skating Nancy Drew.

As a toddler, future physicist Freeman Dyson spent his afternoon nap time playing with numbers instead of sleeping. “I added one plus a half plus a quarter plus an 

eighth plus a sixteenth and so on, and I discovered that if you go on adding like this forever you end up with two,” he recalls. “I had discovered infinite series.”

Dyson’s precocious feat may seem like a fairly typical beginning for a brilliant thinker. Yet few of the 27 scientists whose autobiographies appear in Curious Minds repeat Dyson’s tale—which is what makes the collection so compelling. Indeed, rather than revealing a secret formula that produces an adult scientist, this collection proves just how disparate are the ingredients. Scientific passion can percolate among early and late bloomers, the privileged and the poor, social misfits and stars.

Editor John Brockman’s “unruly bunch” of essayists includes Mary Catherine Bateson, an anthropologist who as a child took notes on her playmates; Richard Dawkins, a zoologist who learned about

Courtesy of Marc Hauser

Marc Hauser began observing animal behavior at age 1.

“species-ism” from The Adventures of Dr. Dolittle; and darker personalities like Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist whose early obession with virtual reality drove him to build a haunted house out of his own electronic contraptions. One of the most eloquent narratives belongs to psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, whose grandfather, a Nobel laureate, entertained him by dissecting a sheep’s eye. “I grew up feeling that I carried a similar warrant to explore anything I chose,” Humphrey writes. “[A] kind of ancestral droit de seigneur.” Presented as a boy with a copy of Ivan Pavlov’s Last Testament, Humphrey cites a passage in which Pavlov advises scientists not to be dazzled by wishful theories: “Perfect as is the wing of a bird, it never could raise the bird up without resting on air. Facts are the air of a scientist. Without them you can never fly.”

Courtesy of Steven Pinker

Psychologist Steven Pinker (on a high school quiz team, bottom row second from left) discovered linguistics in grad school.

Such idiosyncrasies are, in the end, what gives the collection its kick. So while Dyson recounts the 1927 eclipse of the sun (he was 3 1/2), neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux describes a career that began with an apprenticeship cutting meat in his father’s butcher shop. Nor are all the authors convinced by the book’s subtitle. More than one account begins with a muttering disclaimer about the unreliability of childhood memories, and psychologist Steven Pinker goes much further, using his essay to debunk the idea that specific events set one on an unwavering path toward science. “Rather than childhood experiences causing us to be who we are,” he asserts, “who we are causes our childhood experiences.” Take that, memoirists.

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The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach

 By Christof Koch; Roberts & Company, $45

How does the smell of a rain-soaked dog or the sight of a jungle scene evoke a conscious feeling? In this highly readable college-level text, Caltech cognitive scientist Koch argues that consciousness arises from the chatter of interconnected networks of neurons. Check out the chapter on “the zombie within” to find out how often we operate automatically in the absence of conscious control.

—Maia Weinstock