A roughly mixed SF collection

kw: book reviews, science fiction, short stories, collections

My "when I can't read anything else" book this past few weeks has been The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack, an e-book I got for a promotional price of 99¢…and that's about what it is worth. It contains a few classics such as "Out of All Them Bright Stars" by Nancy Kress, "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C. Clarke, and "The Syndic" by C.M. Kornbluth, and a couple of the lesser-known stories by writers such as Philip K. Dick and Ray Bradbury. Most of the other stories are by authors I had never heard of, and I find that is for good reason. They were definitely bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. Usually when I skip the bulk of a story it is because it is vulgar, but in this volume I skipped out of several stories simply because they were either based on bad ideas or too badly written to make them worth ingesting; sometimes both.

Let this be my shortest review so far. I hope this volume represents the nadir of the MEGAPACK® series.

1984 plus fifty - how very apt!

 kw: book reviews, novels, warfare, cyber warfare, world war 4, chinese-american relations

I grew up in the shadow of Communism. Our big fear was the USSR, but even in the 1950's some wiser ones foretold that the bigger danger would eventually be from China. I have many, many church friends from both sides of the Strait of Formosa, and that is the view of them all. I remember the "liberalization" in China after Mao's death in 1976. I remember wondering how long it would last, because Deng was getting old already. Sure enough, in my estimation, each Chinese leader to follow Deng has been worse than the prior one, and Xi is poised to do more damage to the human race than Mao did.

The timeline of 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis, is set just over a dozen years in the future, so perhaps the authors expect a future Chairman to arise who will outdo even Xi, who will be 80 in 2034, should he live so long. The authors do mention Putin, the Russian President, who will be 82; he plays a part in a side drama.

The premise of the novel is simple: The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which already (2021) has the world's largest navy, plus formidable cyber warfare capabilities, will think itself invincible, particularly once the US is found to have a weak President ("…whose greatest weakness is her fear of being perceived as weak."). The weakness of Biden does not bode well…

If I were to go into my reactions and learnings from 2034, I'd have to drop spoilers right and left. Maybe the authors would be OK with that, but I think it better to say that the scenarios of the novel are plausible, and fit right into what I have learned about China and the CCP from friends and acquaintances. I find it very unsettling. The Chinese tactics described rely on their cyber warfare capabilities. All that is keeping events like those in the book from happening right now are that the CCP's cyber warfare and cyber silencing techniques aren't yet quite up to snuff. I don't think it will take a dozen years for that gap to be filled.

A Chinese (not Taiwanese) friend told me recently about the Chinese GPS system, called BeiDou; the CCP will not permit the use of the "Western" GPS system in China. I replied, "It would behoove our military to get a bunch of BeiDou equipment, then, in case their first act of war is to silence GPS!" Needless to say, the NSA would need to take a whack at making sure there aren't any "surprises" buried in BeiDou software. I know of a couple of areas for which my GPS navigator is consistently in error by one mile. I presume it is for a military reason. It is a mistake to make cruise missiles and armed drones, let alone bombers and fighter jets, dependent on GPS.

I can surmise a few reasons for the authors picking 2034 as the year it all begins. For one thing, although Xi and Putin could still be in power, all the senior leadership of both American parties, including Trump, Biden, McConnell, Pelosi, and Schumer, will almost surely have died by then. That frees the authors from accounting for the personalities of any of these folks, and of the Clintons, whose last gasp may not yet have been heard. But I think the reason for settling on 2034 in particular, rather than 2040 or even 2027, is that 2034 is fifty years after 1984, and I think it is the right choice; I favor the mantle of George Orwell falling upon their shoulders. My bottom line:

AI is misnamed

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, artificial intelligence, polemics

Mechanical brains, they called them. Starting with ENIAC, dubbed the Giant Brain when it was made public in 1945, computing machinery has been compared to our brain, and computers were often called "thinking machines" in the first few decades of their existence. That's ironic. The one thing they most definitely do NOT do is Think! They are not thinkers, they are computers. They Compute.

ENIAC was indeed a giant: a row of cabinets 3 feet thick, 8 feet high, 98 feet long, wrapped around the walls of a big room. Running it took 150 kW. Much has been said about its speed: It performed ballistic calculations 2,400 times as fast as a human using pencil and paper, though I never saw it compared to a skilled operator of a Marchant mechanical calculator (my father's company had one of those; running a division problem made a wonderful noise!). Since that time, various computers have been compared to human speeds. Not once has anyone mentioned that arithmetical calculations are what the human brain is worst at! A very few people are "lightning calculators", able to use a bit of their brain to calculate rapidly. They are hundreds to thousands of times as fast as the rest of us. But even ENIAC was faster.

I began programming computers, initially using FORTRAN, in 1968. I've watched speeds increase, by a factor of a million between then and now, for single-processor machines, and much more than that for machines that incorporate stacks and stacks of processors, in the tens of thousands for the fastest weather-forecasting supercomputers. Before 1970 I read predictions that one day computers would be able to "program themselves". Nobody ever predicted how a computer would know what to program, unless a person "gave it the idea". To this day, no computer has "had an idea."

These are just a few of the reasons I look at all claims of "artificial intelligence" with a jaundiced eye. For more than 50 years, "human scale" AI has been touted as "no more than 10-20 years away." I always say, "Nonsense."

Finally, someone with a finger to the pulse of the AI community has written a book exposing the hype: Not only does the AI Emperor have no clothes, it has no mind either. computer scientist Erik J. Larson's book The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do proves that case, quite handily. His point is not that they "don't" think the way we do, but that they can't do so. Not now, and not ever.

Dr. Larson shows, in a stuffed handful of ways, that nearly all arguments in favor of AI becoming a superhuman superintelligence run the same way: This or that program can do deductive inferences, and such-and-such a program can do inductive inferences, and if we just put enough computing muscle behind some collection of such programs, they will "evolve" or "develop" into a conscious entity that can outthink any human. The few arguments that don't follow this schema are based on efforts like Blue Brain, which used a supercomputer to simulate the activities of neurons and all their connections in a segment of a mouse or rat brain. Such projects have uniformly failed, although their promoters have tried in vain to cover up the failure by waving their hands and talking about "making a pivot" (pick your buzzword for hyping a consolation prize) in some other direction.

The characteristic of both deductive inference and inductive inference (things we all do many times daily) is their reliance on a knowledge base. Whichever kind of inference is to be performed, the entity (brain or machine) making the inference is limited to the domain of knowledge stated in the initial problem, plus any related knowledge the entity can access. More succinctly: both brands of inference can look only backward, never forward, because there is nothing in the process of inference that anticipates the future.

A key word in this book: Abduction. Abductive inference is "what if" thinking. We call it "getting an idea." Also called "counterfactual", an abductive inference follows the exhortation of Jack Kennedy, "Others look at what is and say, 'Why?' Let us consider what might be and say, 'Why not?' " (a paraphrase from memory; it's been a long time since I heard him say it.)

Nobody knows how abduction works. Until they do, there is no theory we can use to develop a machine that can do it. Abduction isn't some automatic offspring of deduction plus induction. It is something different. Only abduction can look forward. Without it, there is no progress, no invention, and literally, "nothing new under the sun." (Solomon was wrong, and he'd be the first to admit it if he were to see a typewriter, an auto, or a smart phone. But he wasn't talking about technology anyway. Hi-tech for him was a spear head made of iron instead of bronze.)

Here is a side thought I had, on a different line from the book: A brain produces and consumes Meaning. Language (Dr. Larson's specialty) is based on what words Mean. A key concept is the difference between a word's Denotation (dictionary definition under a specific usage) and its Connotation (shade of meaning depending on context, tone of voice, and other tacit matters). I connect this thought with another: Computers excel at detecting Differences; Brains excel at detecting Similarities. Based primarily on this latter principle, I built a 40-year career as a computer programmer upon writing programs that did what brains do badly, while facilitating people's ability to use their brains to do what computers do badly.

I want to dig into this idea of simulating a brain's neurons. Many brain theorists use the "column" hypothesis to understand how our cerebral cortex works. The cortex apparently consists of 50-100 million "mini-columns" made up of 100-300 neurons each, arranged in larger columns that number around a million or so. What would it take to simulate the action of about 200 neurons, in real time?

The various synchronized pulses that we can detect with EEG range as high as 40 Hz, with a lot taking place in the 10-20 Hz range. Thus, whatever you simulate, the cycle time has to be in this range or faster.

A neuron is not a transistor. A transistor has three connections, and is basically an on-off switch. A neuron has between a few hundred and 10,000 inputs, and from thousands to as many as 100,000 outputs. The 200 neuron mini-column we want to simulate will thus have thousands of connections just within itself, and 2-5 million connections with other parts of the brain. Further, each neuron, under the influence of its inputs, emits a train of pulses to its thousands of outputs, at variable rates.

A base-level simulation must first proceed by assuming the column is isolated, so we can ignore a few million connections, except for perhaps one, to be used to trigger the system to see what happens.

To simulate a single neuron requires all the processing power of a modest microprocessor such as a single-core Pentium CPU (in the 1990's they ran with cycle times of about 50 MHz). These days, it is no problem to string together CPU power equivalent to 200 Pentiums. Collecting the data just from all the internal connections will generate about 100 kbytes, each 1/10th to 1/40th of a second. During "beta wave" heavy thinking, that's around 40 Mbytes/sec. That's not so enormous; it's about half the write speed of a magnetic disk. But now let's remember the 2-5 million outputs from, and an equal number of inputs to, these 200 neurons and other parts of the brain. You really have to consider the whole cortex, and a few other things, to begin to simulate a human brain. Each mini-column in apparently connected to at least 1-2% of the entire brain, a few million other mini-columns.

Bottom line: to simulate the entire cerebral cortex of about 16 billion neurons, with the tens of trillions of connections between them, requires the computing power of 16 billion Pentium-class CPU chips, or something like, by my estimation, 300 million processor cores running 4-5 GHz. They would need about 40 million hard disks to handle the throughput, or about 5 million solid state drives (SSD's). At least during setup and testing you need to record it all to see what is happening. Later less of it needs to be kept.

Will processing speed and disk speed and capacity "save the bacon" in another decade or so? Not really. Do you remember Moore's Law? As originally stated, the number of transistors on a CPU chip doubled twice every three years. Amazingly, this held true for decades. A modern Intel I7 chip has several "cores" (separate CPU's), each containing about 3 billion transistors. But this hasn't changed much in the past 15 years. Clock speeds maxed out around 5 GHz before 2005. Modern supercomputers just stack larger and larger numbers of multicore processors together. The electronic brain described above would need 300 million such cores, and that isn't going to change much. And we are decades to centuries away from "quantum computers" that can exceed the power of today's CPU's, if that ever happens.

That is just to simulate the cerebral cortex and its 16 billion neurons. What about the rest of the brain? You might say, "Doesn't the brain have 100 billion neurons?" The actual number is closer to 86 billion, but most of them are in the cerebellum! See this diagram. (It neglects two items. The limbic system or mid-brain handles our emotional responses and mediates memory storage, using one billion neurons, and the brain stem below the cerebellum shuttles signals between the cerebellum and the body, also with about a billion neurons.) The cerebellum mainly runs the body, but that isn't all...a subject for later discussion.

A disembodied cortex, absent the rest, is not going to operate like a real brain. It'll probably go insane so fast, it will stop running in a matter of seconds. It will die a-borning. Just for one example, the visual cortex at the back of the brain takes up about 1/4 of the whole. What kind of eyes will you give your brain-in-a-warehouse? Without them, what will happen? If you want a truly disembodied brain, you just simulate the frontal lobes, but you need to communicate with them. A big, big issue.

I have a different question: What's the big deal about duplicating the human brain? Millions of natural ones are created every year, and much of their training and education is accomplished in 10-20 years. Our present computer hardware works very differently from a neuron-derived brain. Making a computer simulate a natural brain is incredibly difficult, costly, and probably would suck down electrical power like a steel plant. Can we take advantage of computing machinery in "native mode", to work out new ways of thinking? Until we have a theory of abduction, we need humans to come up with the ideas. Single, thoughtful, bright brains are better at that than any kind of hive mind, committee, or brainstorming team. Ideas need development, however, and we must focus on better and better ways to automate at least some of that.

I like SYNERGY. I built a career on it. If I were to return to work in the field, it's what I would focus on. A final key point of Dr. Larson's: there is not only wasted effort in the falsely-named AI field; effort is being diverted from things that matter, things that need doing, while natural (that is, genuine) intelligence is being denigrated, to the detriment of us all. That's the tragedy of misdirected AI.

The anti-shrink case

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, psychiatry, history, polemics

In my prior review, of a book about psychiatry written by psychiatrists, I wrote (perhaps more than I should have) of my experience with psychiatrists. To sum up my takeaway: of at least ten shrinks that I have worked with, all of whom accepted ComPsych "insurance", I consider only two to be "normal", and only these two were of genuine help. Furthermore, when I asked family doctors to recommend psychiatrists whom they thought weren't crazy themselves, in each case, the ones recommended wouldn't accept ComPsych referrals, and their fees were extremely high, in the $400/hour range or more.

Side note: Do you know that guy who goes in with a screwdriver and needle-nose pliers to defuse a bomb? His work is worth $400/hour, and perhaps even more. Anybody else on the planet, no matter who, should not be paid more than half that. Period.

The last one I saw, I was pretty impressed with, at first. At our first visit he reviewed my case in detail, and we talked for a half hour. Then, thinking out loud, he ran through a differential diagnosis to reach the conclusion Dr. Valentine had reached several years earlier, of Bipolar II (the milder type, but still distressing enough). He suggested Abilify, an "atypical antipsychotic", which is also useful for reducing the distress of depression, but doesn't much affect mild mania. As he put it, "We'll let you have your fun," because hypomania is a happy state, while full-blown mania is torment (as I've been told by two friends so afflicted). The main side effects of Abilify for me were a little weight gain and the need for a daily nap. Otherwise, it was pretty good. However, after a year, going in for a third visit, I was planning to ask if there might be something better. He was gone. Vanished. No trace. No sign or note on the office door. Other doctors I've had who moved away or left the business at least had the grace to inform their patients. At that point, I decided I had learned enough about mood management to live without psychoactive medications, and I have done so ever since, for almost 15 years.

Reading Psychiatry and its Discontents, by Andrew Scull, I find that the differential diagnosis used by this doctor may have sounded good, but whether it was scientific or even medically accurate is not so certain. Based on my experiences over the years, for at least this condition (Bipolar II), I think the basic criteria the doctor (and Dr. Valentine) used are useful. In other cases, perhaps not so much.

Professor Scull's book mainly consists of prior articles and book reviews, edited for coherence, and it is a historical review of the various incarnations of psychiatry. Prior to the late 1800's those who worked with the insane were called Alienists, because the older meaning of "alien" was "insane". Once the word "alien" picked up the meaning "foreign", the ambiguity gradually led some to seek a new term. The Greek word "psyche" refers to the soul or mind, so that was a good prefix, and on it went.

Whatever one calls them, those who treat the insane (and the "sorta insane" like me), have always been sort of stepchildren of the medical profession. Apparently, after decades of working empirically (at best!), in the mid-1900's psychiatrists felt the need to establish their work on a more scientific basis. The process is dealt with, over the space of several chapters, and is a sad history at best. The result was a total of eight editions of a guidebook called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM. The current edition is DSM-5, a thousand-page tome. In the view of our author, the first "official" version, DSM-III, released in 1980, was "an anti-intellectual collection of categories jammed between two covers". Later editions only compounded its errors, and much greater errors were gathered to comprise DSM-5.

It is a rather difficult for a layman to consult DSM-5 to see for themselves what is going on. Firstly, it is enormous, 947 pages, covering 297 named "disorders"; it is expensive at $199, or $149 for the paperback. There is a little bit of information available without cost. I took a look at some of the Fact Sheets found at this page. One of them is titled Personality Disorder, though the sheet itself is titled Personality Disorders, and lists ten items in the first paragraph. Look at this list, mentally appending the term "personality disorder" to each item:

• paranoid
• schizoid
• schizotypal
• antisocial
• borderline
• histrionic
• narcissistic
• avoidant
• dependent
• obsessive-compulsive

If you dig into the characteristics and criteria used to "diagnose" any of these, they are nearly all rather mild extensions of ordinary tendencies we all pick up over time. In the discussion on the Fact Sheet, four of these are somewhat deprecated—frankly, they are redundant, being covered by other items dealt with elsewhere—leaving the six I have highlighted to be dealt with in the body of DSM-5. Prof. Scull states several times that most of the 297 categories in DSM-5 are inventions of the drug companies that effectively "pathologize" common behaviors so drugs can be sold to the "anxious well", people who are quite sane, but easily convinced to worry about their mental health.

Why is DSM-5 important? The insurance companies have adopted it as the "standard" upon which they are willing to pay. Shrinks everywhere have to put a diagnostic number on a prescription or treatment schedule or they won't be paid by the insurance company, and in most cases, the patient can't afford to pay. Sadly, most of the categories are, in my view (developed years ago), bogus.

The Autism Spectrum was invented, practically out of whole cloth, during the production of DSM-5, which was released in 2013, but "the spectrum" was being bandied about earlier. Before the 1990's about one child in 500 was counted as autistic. A much smaller number, formerly called "high functioning autistic" were later said to have Asperger's Syndrome. "The spectrum" produced millions of new "victims", such that one person in 90 is now "on the spectrum". I have several friends or acquaintances who are considered "on the spectrum." Actually, with one exception, they are just shy and a little withdrawn. Big deal. So was I. I suppose I could, even now, go get diagnosed and get some kid of Federal "help". I'd be mortally ashamed to do so.

My grandmother, using an old term for "mildly crazy", would say, "Everybody's pixilated except you and me. Sometimes I wonder about you." Extend that to the psychiatric profession. Most (not all!) of the psychiatrists I've known are earnest and honest, but it is certain that a significant number are just cynical enough to be willing to profit if the entire population were to be brought under their "care."

I won't get into the horrors that "mental care" entailed in the past, nor many other aspects of the book. Psychiatry has the lowest rate of "true help" of all the medical and fringe-medical professions. It did help me, even though I eventually learned how to do better without any more "help".

I don't agree with some who say there are no mental illnesses (neither does the author). There can be organic problems with the brain, which is physical, after all. Some afflictions such as schizophrenia and bipolar and chronic depression may be organically-based. Also, there are stresses, particularly if they are severe enough or chronic, that require some people to develop defense mechanisms, and defensive habits are hard to break, even though their cause is no longer present. This is how most neuroses arise. We still don't know enough to go beyond that with any pretension of scientific credibility.

The book is, then, a history of a failed profession, and a polemic against its present incarnation as a practice enslaved to DSM-5, and a polemic against DSM-5 itself. I happen to agree. The two psychiatrists that I respect had a human dimension to their practice that went far beyond totting up a checklist of my symptoms to get me in the right pigeonhole. They did their best, with both hands tied, to treat the whole person that I am. The current state of psychiatry, as seen in this book and in the prior one, is well described as a tiny candle in a dark forest. Nobody yet knows how to bring any more light on the subject. Our brain and mind are still almost total mysteries.

Been Shrunk?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, medicine, psychology, psychiatry, psychiatrists

I am pretty sure the number of psychiatrists I have engaged approaches ten. Only two were "normal", whatever that might mean. I have also had talk therapy with several other psychologists, and I remember only one who was someone I'd be willing to befriend.

Over the years I did, finally, come to understand that a psychologist or therapist is empowered only to offer talk therapy, while a psychiatrist, who may also conduct talk therapy, is an MD who can prescribe medication if needed, or prescribe visits to a therapist. I was rather slow on the uptake. I thought of them all under the derogatory heading "head shrinkers."

Up front disclaimer: I am considered "crazy" by many, and looked at askance by many more. The label I've earned is Bipolar 2: I am a middle-of-the-road mood cycler. Bipolar 1 is the more extreme version and shades into what I call Bipolar Zero: someone with maniacal energy for a few weeks at a time, followed by months of melancholy and reclusiveness, culminating in deep depression and perhaps a suicide attempt (or several); only to pop back into mania almost overnight. That is one pattern of the classic Manic-Depressive syndrome. My "mania" is called "hypomania", meaning sorta-kinda-manic, and my depressive periods are more a kind of introversion and withdrawal. I also cycle rapidly, with several cycles yearly rather than one or at most two, the more usual pattern. I suspected this about myself beginning about age 30, but it was more of an "I wonder" sort of idea for a long time.

At about age 55 I saw a psychiatrist and it was confirmed. This was the wise and lovely Dr. Valentine (I don't mind using her name; I'll defer for the others). She confirmed that I was Bipolar 2, and discussed several courses of action with me. I had gone to her when a short stint using Zoloft had the unexpected (to me) result of triggering full-blown mania. My GP, who had suggested trying Zoloft because I felt very depressed (more than my usual month-or-two-of moodiness), saw that I was manic when I saw him after taking Zoloft for two weeks. I was interrupting him—heck, I was interrupting myself!—and making all sorts of grandiose statements. At my most effusive, I had not been so grandiose before. Dr. Valentine prescribed a mild mood stabilizer. I don't remember which one (this was almost 20 years ago).

The drug eventually had side effects I didn't want to cope with, including the need for a daily nap. However, when I called for an appointment I found Dr. Valentine had moved her practice to another state. The mental health appointments were being paid for through a program at DuPont called Employee Assistance Program (EAP), which contracted work through ComPsych. I had to go through them to find an in-network doctor. No doctor I saw after this came even close to the combination of caring and expertise. Though they were competent, they were all rather off-center, and some were downright looney. I realized that ComPsych draws mostly from the bottom of the barrel: doctors who need the referrals because they couldn't stay in business otherwise. I could seldom stay with a doctor for more than a year or two, sometimes because I wanted someone less crazy than myself, and sometimes because they left the business or moved elsewhere. I live in an area that is poorly served because state laws are not very doctor-friendly. That means, whether a family doctor, a psychiatrist, or any specialist, about half the doctors around here are really altruists, serving where they know they are needed, and the rest are here because they couldn't make it in a more competitive environment. I have had some of both, in all areas (Luckily for me, when I needed cancer surgery, I got a true expert! But that's a story for another day).

I have to mention one example of "barrel bottom" psychiatry. I was sent to a psychiatrist because I had a suicidal episode. I was stopping a drug that made me gain weight and didn't help with depression all that much anyway. After a short, almost cursory interview, the doctor prescribed Depakote and gave me a bag with some samples. I was shocked. A friend of mine, who has more severe Bipolar than I, had been on Depakote and gained 90 pounds. I already weighed about 30 pounds more than I liked. I started to leave, and then I put the bag back on the desk and said, "You must be insane. This medication will make me even fatter than I am already. How will that improve my depression?" I walked out and I didn't pay the copay.

With many decades of experience with psychiatrists and psychologists under my belt (starting at age 12, but with significant gaps before middle age), I was quite interested to see Shrink Rap: Three Psychiatrists Explain Their Work, by Drs. Dinah Miller, Annette Hanson, and Steven Ray Daviss. The book is based upon the blog Shrink Wrap and the podcast My Three Shrinks, but it is much more than a simple compilation.

Each chapter uses one or two example "patients" to illustrate various facets of the work of the three doctors. Each "patient" is a composite, so as not to expose too much about any one person, who might be harmed by public exposure. Considering that some of the "cases" are mild, while others are quite severe, this is a valid concern. Consider "Josh", who is mostly pretty ordinary but has had some reverses. It is quite usual these days for an extended period of depression to prompt a doctor to prescribe Zoloft. "Josh" and his doctor found out what I and my doctor did: hidden Bipolar gets manifested by the general mood-lifting action of Zoloft. Josh's experience was more extreme than mine. And then, when he had a medical condition that was treated with steroids, he went full-blown manic, and needed to be hospitalized for a while. He missed a semester of college. The doctors who treated him had quite a job on their hands. It is kind of like accidentally starting a raging fire, and then trying to put it out without drowning everybody. And this was one of the milder cases.

I've had experience with clinical and therapeutic psychiatry. I was most interested in the discussions around forensic psychiatry. Previously I knew nothing about it. The word "forensic" conjures up doctors sifting for clues to a crime, or using DNA to confirm an identity, or not. "Forensic" is derived from an old word for "legal", so forensic psychiatry is its practice related to legal matters, such as determining the competence of a defendant whose lawyer is claiming an insanity defense, or judging the fitness of a parent in a divorce case who is accused of criminal abuse (if there is no criminal complaint, a different psychiatric specialist is consulted). A forensic psychiatrist will also interview a newly-arrested suspect who exhibits abnormal behavior.

There are a couple of chapters that weigh the relative merits of talk therapy versus medications. Both have their uses, but it is often quite a puzzle to determine which might be more effective. It has been said that the human brain is so complex that if there were only one human brain in the universe, it would contain within itself more than half the total complexity of the universe. Dealing with brain malfunction is thus the most difficult task of all. For many decades people have been studying human personality and its ills (actually, many millennia, though we usually set the starting point "only" two millennia ago with Aristotle). The study intensified in the past two centuries, beginning with Freud and Jung. Now in the early 21st Century, we are about an inch beyond the starting line in a "race" to figure out how to help people with emotional, personality, and brain malfunctions.

There is a lot more I could go into, and it is all very interesting, but I will bow out here. The book is like a textbook in some ways, though it is mercifully brief by comparison, and yet comprehensive. I came away with a better appreciation for the complex decisions that these doctors must make, and the great gulfs of unknown they must navigate. Heart surgery has been likened to doing an engine overhaul while the engine is running. Psychiatry is similar, except you can't even lift the hood to get at the engine. That limits things. I am glad that not every psychiatrist I dealt with was a bottom feeder; at least two or three were very helpful to me, in different ways and quite different times. The three authors of the book are based in the Baltimore area. If I need a shrink again (I hope I don't; I manage well without medication now), I might contact one of them!