Whereas Finding My Voice is a typical—although insightful—autobiography, Toward Commitment is as much about marriage in general as it is about the Rehms’ 50-year union. John Rehm, a retired attorney, shares equal billing and is as eloquent as his wife. The book is formatted as essays followed by dialogues, with each author weighing in on more than 20 issues that spouses face. Never preaching, they talk about everything from money to religion and from to anger to making love. Again, honesty prevails. In the chapter called “The Third Person,” each partner admits to experiencing an attraction to someone outside their marriage. “I think at one point we were both serious about going our separate ways,” writes Diane.

Fortunately, they didn’t. Unfortunately they never discussed the hurt that the outside relationships caused them. Only when they collaborated on Toward Commitment did they air their feelings and put them to rest. “Now that you and I are in a good place,” writes John. “it isn’t that painful to look back.”

To nudge readers to take a look at their own marriages, the Rehms include several questions that spouses might ask each other. They conclude: “If this book succeeds in provoking individuals to think harder and more seriously about the committed relationship, both its benefits and its drawbacks, it will have been worthwhile.”

“Does that mean we should do away with our rat traps? Gazzaniga rhetorically asks in his latest book, Human, The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique. “I don’t think so,” is his answer.

The director of the University of California-Santa Barbara’s SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind, and author of The Ethical Brain, Gazzaniga is certain of one thing: In spite of all our connections with the biologic world we came from, humans remain “hugely different” from all other animals.

Just how different is what this noted neurosciencist sets out to demonstrate in a witty, whirlwind review of the mountains of research into “the most complex entity known to science,” the human brain, and its brainchild, the human being.

To gauge the cognitive gap separating man from his most brainy animal relatives, Gazzaniga proposes a hypothetical “date with a chimpanzee.” In such a case, communication would be one of the more important considerations. But how well can apes comprehend language? One bright bonobo named Kanzi has shown it can understand word order, as in “Make the doggie bite the snake” vs. “Make the snake bite the doggie,” and even respond to unfamiliar sentences such as “Squeeze the hot dog” (both firsts for a nonhuman). Still, on an ape date, conversation involving deeper concepts might be preferred. What Kanzi can’t quite grasp, for example, is the meaning of propositions and conjunctions such as in, on and next to, or and, that, and which. The one obvious advantage of a date with an ape, Gazzaniga notes, is that “you wouldn’t be subjected to dangling participles or terminal prepositions, as in “Where are you going to be at?” Beyond that, Gazzaniga says, he would prefer a bit “more culture.”

Understanding what is really going on in the human psyche is a complex task. Much of Gazzaniga’s own research has focused on the split brain, the anomalies in individuals who are without a corpus callosum, the fiber tract that connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Human brains show significant lateral specialization, something rarely seen in other mammals. Gazzaniga speculates this specialization may have been “the great enabler” making possible the human condition. The two hemispheres of the brain are themselves specialized, the right side devoted to perception while the left side is mostly involved with cognition, also known as thinking. The left hemisphere is therefore of primary importance for intelligent behavior. “Don’t leave home without it,” Gazzaniga cautions. Unfortunately, many do.

The left hemisphere is in particular demand when tackling Gazzaniga’s forays into research involving human morality: the ability of humans to “psych out” their fellow humans; the functions and meaning of the arts; and the human proclivity for dualism that is, viewing of other humans as both physical and essence (i.e., Johnny is five feet tall. He is a sweet-tempered boy), which is another great specialty of human thought not apparently shared by any other species. People perceive “essences,” Gazzaniga notes. Animals do not; they perceive “characteristics.”

In his final chapters, Gazzaniga moves away from the animal kingdom entirely and into the brave new world of robotics and silicon brains, where he notes that knowledge in the area of artificial intelligence is increasing not at a linear rate, as many may believe, but at an exponential rate, “what you would like your stock price to do.” People are not prepared for what is going to happen much sooner than they might guess, such as brain chips that will increase people’s intelligence or memory, providing them with an instant ability at French or Japanese or calculus. The big decisions may someday be: Will you use that extra money for that vacation to Greece or to upgrade Jimmy and Janey’s brains so they can keep up with their friends?

Inevitably in writing of robots, Gazzaniga encounters the conundrum of consciousness. When a Time magazine reporter asks him if we could produce a conscious robot by duplicating the processes behind human consciousness, his answer is reassuring. Consciousness is not some kind of process that brings our thoughts into a special energy and reality called personal consciousness. “That is not how it works,” Gazzaniga says. “Consciousness is an emergent property and not a process in and of itself.” It is a collection of little consciousnesses found distributed throughout the brain and constantly changing.

Readers of Gazzaniga’s intriguing insights into the realm of neuroscience are certain to have their consciousness pleasantly piqued in numerous ways.

Here’s an excerpt, entitled “Smart Robot,” from Michael S. Gazzaniga’s book Human, The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique.

My desires in a personal robot are rather mundane. I just want it to do all the things I don’t want to do. I want it to get the mail, hand me any personal handwritten letters and invitations, and take everything else and deal with it. I want it to check my e-mail and throw out all the spam and pay my bills. I want it to keep track of finances, fund my retirement, do the taxes, and hand me a net profit at the end of the year. I want it to clean the house (including the windows), and it might as well do all the car maintenance. Ditto with weeding, trapping gophers, and, well, it might as well do the cooking, too, except when I want to. I would like my robot to look like Sophia Loren in Divorce Italian Style, not R2D2. I may have trouble with that one, because my wife wants Johnny Depp doing all the chores. Maybe R2D2 isn’t such a bad idea. As I said, my needs are mundane. I can do all these things, but I’d rather spend my time doing something else. For disabled persons who cannot do any of these things, a personalized robot would allow far more autonomy than they have.

The thing is, this may not be so far off, or at least some of it, and that would be great. But maybe, if we aren’t careful, the smart robot won’t be grumbling about cat hair as it is cleaning the floor. It may be discussing quantum physics or, worse yet, its “feelings.” And if it is intelligent, will it still do all our chores? Just like you and your kids, won’t it figure out a way not to do them? That would mean it would have desires. Once it has feelings, will we feel guilty about making it do all the scut work, and start cleaning up before the robot comes in, and apologizing for the mess? Once it is conscious, will we have to go to court to get it decommissioned so we can get the latest model? Will a robot have rights? As Clynes and Cline pointed out in their original description of a cyborg in space, “The purpose of the Cyborg is to provide an organizational system in which [such] robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free to explore, create, think, and feeI.” Without my actually merging physically with silicon, without actually becoming a cyborg, a separate silicon assistant could just as easily give me more time to explore, create, think, and feel (and, I might add, gain weight). So I am going to be careful which model I order. I do not want a robot with emotions. I don’t want to feel guilty that my robot is vacuuming while I am out on the deck in the sun eating a now mandatory calorie-reduced lunch and thinking deep thoughts, like maybe I should get up and weed.

How close are we to my idea of a personal robot? If you haven’t been keeping up with what is going on in the world of robotics, you will be amazed. There are currently robots doing plenty of the jobs that are repetitive and/or require precision, from automobile assembly to surgery. Currently the domain of robots is the three Ds: dull, dangerous, or dirty. The dirty category includes toxic waste cleanups. Surgery is none of those three; it is just being done on a microscopic level. Currently Pack Bots that weigh eighteen kilograms are being used as emergency and military robots. They can negotiate rough terrain and obstacles such as rocks, logs, rubble, and debris; they can survive a drop of two meters onto a concrete surface and land upright; and they can function in water up to two meters deep. They can perform search and rescue, and disarm bombs. They are being used to detect roadside bombs and reconnoiter caves. However, these robots do not look like your dream of a handsome search-and-rescue guy (like my brother-in-law) as you are lying at the base of some cliff you foolishly tried to climb. They look like something your kid would build with an erector set.

There are also unmanned robotic aircraft. A robot has driven most of the way across the United States. Driving in an urban setting is still the most difficult test and has yet to be perfected. The Urban Challenge, a sixty-mile competition for autonomous vehicles sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), was held in November 2007. Vehicles had to be able to negotiate city streets, intersections, and the parking lot, including finding a spot, parking legally, and then leaving the lot without a fender bender, while avoiding shopping carts and other random objects. This is not remote control. These are cars controlled by software, driving on their own. It may not be too long before computer programs will drive all cars. We will recline, read the paper, munch a doughnut (I’ll take jelly), and drink a latte on the way to work.

But so far, on the home-cleaning front, all we have is a floor cleaner and vacuum cleaner that looks like a CD player, and a lawn mower. But what these robots have, and what my dream does not have, are wheels. No robot yet can move through the room like Sophia Loren or Johnny Depp. Half the neurons in the human brain are at work in the cerebellum. Part of their job is motivating, not in the sense of “come on, you can do it,” but in the sense of Chuck Berry and Maybelline in the Coupe de Ville motivating up the hill, that is, timing and coordinating muscles and skills.

Developing a robot with animal-like motion is incredibly difficult and has yet to be accomplished, but engineers at Shadow Robot Company in England, under founder Richard Greenhill, think they are getting close. Since 1987, they have been working to build a bipedal robot. Greenhill says, “The need for anthropomorphism in domestic robotics is classically illustrated by the problem of staircases. It is not feasible to alter houses or to remove the staircases. It is possible to design robots with stair-climbing attachments, but these are usually weak spots in the design. Providing a robot with the same locomotive structures as a human will ensure that it can certainly operate in any environment a human can operate in.” They are getting there, and along the way they have developed many innovations, one of them being the Shadow Hand, a state-of-the-art robotic hand that can do twenty-four out of the twenty-five movements that a human hand can perform. It has forty “air muscles,” another invention. The shadow hand has touch sensors on its fingertips and can pick up a coin. Many other laboratories are working on other aspects of the anthropomorphic robot. David Hanson, at the University of Texas, has made a substance he has called Flubber, which is very much like human skin and allows lifelike facial expressions. So it is possible to have a robotic Johnny Depp sitting in your living room, but he isn’t up to doing the tango yet.

Ecco Books