How Brains Think - William H Calvin

After a couple of quotes, Calvin opens his book, subtitled Evolving Intelligence, Now and Then, paraphrasing Piaget - "intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do," a neat encapsulation of his central premise, which in part differentiates being smart from being intelligent.
Informed by a number of disciplines, including linguistics, neurosceinces, evolutionary biology, anthropology, sociology, war theory and (in the last section) computing and AI modelling, Calvin explores how evolutionary biology allowed human intelligence to emerge, as well as looking at where we might be headed.
I learned a number of fascinating facts, among them the difference in cortex size between a human, chimp, monkey and rat, and found the entire language section fascinating - since reading Oliver Sack's book about Deaf communities (Seeing Voices) I've had a strong but strictly amateur interest in linguistics and language development. Calvin examines how word order differs from language to language; the differences, similarities and evolution from pidgin and creole; and some developments in our understandings of linguistic competence and rules.
In this wide-ranging book he also investigates what's involved in solving novel problems, differentiating between intent and instinct (even when the latter looks complex and directed, as in bird song), and has a very interesting section on the construction of reality and how we fill in what's not that. In the process Calvin discusses a number of examples that nicely counterpoint the experiences described in Heathcote-James' After-Death Communication (I do like it when seemingly disparate elemnets intersect unexpectedly).
I was interested to discover that Calvin refers to those neurologists who model themselves after Australian neurophysiologist John Eccles as "ecclesiastical," which gives quite a different flavour to the description, though it doesn't leand anything to this review so I'll move on.
I found myself noting quotations, something I rarely do unless I'm reading for academic content in my other life. One articulates a concept I've been sensitised to since reading Stephen J Gould's fascinating history of the (often only allegedly) scientific examination of intelligence, about how what we expect colours what we find, and is of particular relevance to me as a research student:

We do not realise how deeply our starting assumptions affect the way we go about looking for and interpreting the data we collect. - Sue Savage-Rumbaugh 1994 (speaking of animal studies and prejudices)

Also of particular resonance was this:

I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mod I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details, It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose. - Sven Birkets 1994

I sadly read How Brains Think some time ago, and concluded it while I was unwell. I made notes about hand-mouth synergies, and that Calvin includes a nice summation of the requirements for Darwinian processes that is both clear and concise without omiting essential elements, but sadly can no longer flesh these out.
Sadly Calvin lost me in the last third of the book. I am unable to tell if this was because of my weakened state, recovering from a killer cold, or the denseness of the book, but based on the readablility and accessibility of the first two thirds of this impressive time I suspect the fault lies with the reader not the author. - Alex