With the subtitle “31 days to rediscover your brain”, Cohen follows up his works on philosophy with stuff to stimulate the brain via thought experiments.  Cohen is editor of The Philosopher, and this is where his energies have gone until now.

This is not designed to emulate or replicate the brain games out there, but rather a voyage of discovery into the corners of the brain as directed by the tasks, a way of enlightening yourself as to the many functions of your brain.  This will occupy the best part of a month, as suggested by the subtitle.

He has sub-grouped these into weekly divisions: Week one is about influencing the lower cortical areas, the reptile brain.  His next week includes some weird stuff on “the development of little minds” and then the next after that includes exercises on practical philosophy as he calls it, and he should know. Next is miscellaneous philosophical investigations, and then he embarks on debriefing, a discussion of all of this. So you do the exercises, one each day, and then you follow up with the debriefing, which explains the point of all this.

Day one for instance involves working out just whose voice is it that inhabits your head, and then day two, what coding originally attached to words like ‘mother’ or in this case, cigarettes or coffee when you hear the word in your head. Going to the debriefing part, we read that coffee encodes for most of us as an aroma from childhood, since we didn’t like the taste, but liked the smell.  Not so when Nestle tried to sell coffee to the Japanese, who had no recall of childhood coffee: they had tea though, and liked sweet things, so the idea was to introduce the taste of bitter coffee into sweet desserts, so that the children grew up to like coffee taste, and hence, bingo, adult customers for the taste and smell of coffee. Cars, cigarettes etc all encode similarly. 

The fallacy of the lonely fact is one from day three, and here, he looks at how unlikely throwing 4 heads or 4 tails in a row when flipping a coin might be.  Of course, there is nothing about the first head or tails that stops the second one from being the same, the third and so on, each is a discrete event. So the debriefing again comes as a surprise as few people would wager a dollar on the risk of getting four in a row when tossing a coin 20 times. But it is not only possible, statistically it can happen even though over perhaps 10 000 tosses, it would even out 50/50.

And so it carries on throughout the book, each day a new thought challenge, and in the debriefing, an educational and philosophical anomaly in our thinking is pointed out. To reveal these more would disturb and detract from the value of buying the book, which is a fun book to read over a month, or even while on a long plane flight.

One thing did seem odd though, is the three line test on page 143.  There are three lines, the longest in the middle, and the typical trick is that the other two lines look uneven: this is a visual trick, but when I measured the two lines that are supposed to be equal but only look unequal, it turns out that they were in fact very different.  Not sure Martin, can you sort that one out for us? I get B is the longest, but A and C are in fact NOT equal: someone screwed up!

One of the tasks even includes building a bed of nails and then sleeping on it.  He understands no one will do this, but explains how the precise dimensions allow for this to be accomplished on a weight to arrangement of nails formula.  On this vein, Day 7 includes not speaking to a single soul, a form of trappism.

So Cohen’s book is not a simple Luminosity or similar brain experience, but a serious attempt to provoke the mind, and make us think about a variety of things, not just 31, but in 31 categories, to begin for us the process of challenging our predispositions to think of things in a certain way. It’s a really cool exercise, unlike Sudoku or crossword, and with far more bang for your buck.

From day to day there is a serious intent behind his choices, asking us to test ourselves over the month against some fine minds that have looked at these concepts across the centuries, as he has done, and rework our thinking in a way which might lead to a few interesting conversations with others over coffee…whatever the coding for that might be.

A great book and well worth the self-indulgence, one day at a time.

© 2011 Roy Sugarman

Roy Sugarman PhD, Director of Applied Neuroscience, Athletes Performance Arizona