Cat Sense – John Bradshaw

Let’s get one thing clear from the start. I have a cat, Rosie. Before that I shared my home with Moth (for 18 years ) and before that the rather marvellously named Rodney (and the less imaginatively named Lucky). As a child we always had a dog but, left to my own devices, I opted for the less labour-intensive pet. I began by wanting to avoid having to go for long walks in all weathers and ended up a confirmed cat person.* (Bex has two cats, Lily and Dora, and would have more if her other half would let her – ’nuff said….)

Obviously my ‘cat person’ tendencies led me to want to read John Bradshaw’s Cat Sense – the idea that someone (and, more importantly to me, someone who has made a proper scientific study of cat behaviour for decades) could help me to understand the animals who have been living in my house for the last 25 years was appealing. I wanted all those litter-tray emptyings to have meant something! I guess what I really wanted to know was were my cats as fond of me as I was of them. Or was I just the hand that fed them….

Cats are now the most popular pet in the world – apparently outnumbering dogs by three to one – so we should have a better understanding of what makes them tick but, on reading this book, I find we have barely scratched the surface of their psychology. It seems our main error, forgivable maybe in regards to an animal with such a rounded, big-eyed, babylike face, is to treat cats as if they were small people. I don’t mean by talking to them (it’s normal to have a conversation with your cat when everyone else is out, right?) but by assuming that they have similar emotional responses to us – that they also enjoy the companionship of others for example. Bradshaw shows us, by taking us through the evolution of the domestic cat and the history of its relationship with man, that our feline companions are not yet fully domesticated – even more than dogs they are only a generation away from becoming feral – but are smart enough to live alongside mankind.

This book will not necessarily reveal every little foible which your individual cat may have but it does make sense of so many things. I personally have learned, the hard way, what a cat will do if it feels the stress of having its space invaded by a large crowd of people (including kids and dogs). If you want to avoid this kind of mess (and the rather smelly cleaning up afterwards) and to have a happier life with your cat then I can heartily recommend this book. In fact even if you don’t like cats it is worth reading – it is a fascinating and plainly written account of how two species have learned to live alongside one another.

Jane

 

 

 

 

*I do still love dogs though and enjoy walking. It is still the ‘in all weathers’ that puts me off…

Night School – Richard Wiseman

That Shakespeare is a clever bloke. He has a quote for everything and in this case it is ‘To sleep, perchance to dream’ – which pretty much covers this fascinating study of something called ‘sleep science’.  I will admit that I was initially dubious about the word ‘science’ but most of the source materials listed at the end of the text  are respected scientific journals like ‘Science‘ and ‘The Lancet‘ so there is certainly a solid basis to Professor Wiseman’s claims.

So, what did I learn? Quite a bit in the end – some factoids which would not be out of place on an episode of QI* and some really useful and practical hints and tips which I will be using to improve both the quality and quantity of my own sleep. It turns out that we are, in these modern times, becoming chronically sleep deprived from a very early age – this didn’t happen before the age of electricity so next time you can’t sleep maybe you should be blaming Thomas Edison. There have been a lot of news reports recently blaming our collective insomnia on the devices (tvs, laptops and smart phones) which we have allowed into our bedrooms: this book goes into some detail about exactly why these things are a problem.

Richard Wiseman is Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire so it should be no surprise that this book, despite covering an awful lot of psychology, neuroscience and other clever stuff, is an entertaining read. It is full of anecdotes – about a DJ trying to stay awake for 8 days, researchers living in caves to discover if we still have a cycle of sleeping and waking even when we don’t see daylight for weeks and how sleep deprivation led to one of the largest environmental disasters ever – and helps you to assess what sort of sleep you are currently getting.  It also makes a good case for trying to get more and better sleep – some of the horror stories about the effects of sleep deprivation on drivers in particular is, ironically, going to be keeping me awake at nights.

Not getting enough good sleep can contribute to obesity, some cancers, high blood pressure and reduced life expectancy generally. A decent night’s sleep can improve your complexion and flush toxins from your brain cells. And all this is before we get to the benefits and purpose of dreams. The best part of this book is that, with a bit of work, it seems you can learn how to avoid jet-lag, improve the quality of your sleeping and, in some cases, learn how to exert control over your dreams. In the interests of science I’m considering an early night and thinking happy thoughts (possibly involving Benedict Cumberbatch….)

Jane

 

 

 

* Did you know that older people, who were raised on black and white television, are over 3 times more likely to  dream in monochrome than those who had access to colour tv as children?

An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist – by Richard Dawkins

I greatly admire Richard Dawkins as a biologist and science writer. His wonderful 1986 classic The Blind Watchmaker is an eminently clear and readable explanation of the mechanism of evolution by natural selection, and in his 2004 book The Ancestor’s Tale – for my money, his best to date – he overlays this theory with layer after layer of rich and compelling hard evidence (and in such a way that any remaining doubts you might have had about the truth of evolution will, by the end, have been beaten out of you as surely as if Richard had been holding a cricket bat – with a breeze block nailed to the end – when you had dared make the suggestion).

I say this as a preamble because his latest book – volume one of his autobiography, called An Appetite for Wonder: The making of a Scientist – is a bit of a mess, which makes it a book for confirmed Dawkins fans only.

There’s no reason why it should have been – there is enough of interest in Richard’s life, from an early childhood in 1940s colonial Africa, through an adolescence in the heyday of the Whizz for Atomms, Nigel Molesworth world of English public school, and a spell at Berkeley University, California in the midst of the late 60s counterculture with students being fired on by the National Guard and Richard himself on the receiving end of tear-gas  – there’s enough there that a different author would have been able to spell out a teriffic page turner for anyone to read. Richard however relates these events, and more, with, more often than not, the kind of remote analytical detatchment that he might bring to examining a flatworm in a microscope.

In a way, this tells you far more about Richard than the words on the page –  this constant, intellectual curiosity is a measure of his character that not all will find easy to get on with, although it has the advantage of being true. An anecdote about how a distant ancestor of 1849 almost lost his manhood through an accidentally aimed cannonball – which in the hands of Bill Bryson would have you laughing up your own skull – is here used to launch a little lecture on how all of reality is accidental. An early childhood memory of playing hide and seek in Nyasaland is countered with an adult reflection that believing in invisible men is educationally harmful. Relating an anecdote of a storm in the Bay of Biscay brings Richard to speculating on the research of Harry Harlow on cloth-mother substitutes in Rhesus monkeys. There’s many more, but you get the point by now, he can’t stop himself. It’s part of who he is.

If you’re able to tolerate this scientific-analytical tic, it’s actually not a bad first half of the book. There’s a lot of local colour in the tales of Nyasaland and Kenya, and Richard’s move with his family to England in the 1950s to attend schools at Chafyn Grove and Oundle give, as I’ve said, room for a lot of great tales of masters with nicknames like Bufty and Bunjy. Richard’s recounting of his adolescent neo-religious fervour for Elvis is genuinely funny and warm.

The humour and poetry start to fall away with the coming of young adulthood and Balliol College, as Richard knuckles down to becoming a good scientist. Before we know it we’re into counting pecking chickens and the Drive-Threshold model, and if Stephen Hawking managed to produce A Brief History of Time with one single equation in it, Dawkins evens the score by printing pages of graphs. Yes, graphs. In an autobiography! I think a pie chart may be needed to explain it.

The final 100 pages of the book are quite an unrewarding slog unless you are truly interested in a precis of Richard’s scientific papers between 1969-75 on the grammar of behaviour, but we do at last approach the genesis of the work that made his name – the Selfish Gene theory, in which living organisms are merely vehicles to ensure the most effective propagation of the genes they contain. By this point, I am afraid I was ready for the book to end, although there is a promise of a volume 2 in 2015.

Sorry Richard, what is needed next time is a biography, not an autobiography.

An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist – Richard Dawkins
Bantam Press 310 pp Hardback

Chris Hadfield – An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth

First a confession for anyone who doesn’t know me – I’m a complete space nut. I love the science, the history, the human stories. On a clear night I’m the guy stood out there in the garden watching the International Space Station (ISS) fly overhead. So astronaut biographies are a dead cert for me – from the classic of Michael Collins’ Carrying the Fire, through Gene Cernan’s Last Man On the Moon, and now Commander Chris Hadfield’s new book about his own experiences in space.

Chris Hadfield is a Canadian astronaut, veteran of two Space Shuttle missions and became a twitter celebrity last year, with his awe-inspiring photography from his six-month shift on the ISS and then with his version of Space Oddity, sung from space, a version which went viral and has been seen over 15 million times on his Youtube channel. His new book starts off at quite a pace too, with the opening chapter running the reader through his life and career before joining NASA at a rate that makes you wonder what the rest of the book will have left to talk about. At times I found myself unfairly resenting his sheer rate of achievement – one more anecdote of “… and then our paper won the top award…” would have had me flinging the book against the wall in a fit of inadequate pique.

Fortunately that didn’t happen. The book settles down from Chapter 2 onwards as he describes his years at NASA, and the real Chris Hadfield comes out, a very competent and professional astronaut, sure, but also a human being with a strong knowledge of his own limits, a good line in self-deprecation, who has a job to do but does it not for glory and heroism or individual ego, but because he believes what he does is helping lay a path to the future and those who will come after him. Because also, he is ultimately part of a very big team. Astronautics is more than anything a discipline – of “sweating the small stuff”, of preparing for every conceivable failure before it happens, of supporting your colleagues without being asked, all lessons which can be applied right down here in life on the ground.

More than any other astronaut biography I’ve read, Chris Hadfield makes it clear that an astronaut’s job is not ten years of waiting around on Earth for a few days working in space – the work really is down here. As he puts it, an astronaut is a “perpetual Student”, one who is always required to learn, to train, to anticipate, to support the people flying right now, whoever they may be. In half a century in space we have learned a lot, but we are still finding our way and in orbit there is no such thing as a “minor” mistake.

The crowning glory of Chris’s career is of course his stint on the ISS, and he describes his preparation, journey and time there with great relish and lucidity in what to me are the most engaging chapters of the book. Here he draws the threads together – the years of training to get to this point, the standing on the shouders of the giants who helped build this amazing orbiting station whose giant observation windows casually frame miracles. And in addition his genuine desire to find new ways to communicate the awe to the public, the social media success which did more for NASA’s profile than the last 10 years of press conferences, an achievement which he modestly credits to his son Evan’s vision and work behind the scenes.

I ended up really liking this book and Chris Hadfield himself. I’d recommend it for anyone with a sense of wonder, anyone who has ever looked up at the sky and felt dizzied by the promise and challenge of exploring space.

Chris Hadfield – An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth (Pan McMillan, 285pp)

http://chrishadfield.ca/