Steven Poole on Bring the Noise | The Artist and the Mathematician | The Political Brain

Bring the Noise by Simon Reynolds (Faber, £14.99)



The Artist and the Mathematician by Amir D Aczel (High Stakes Publishing, £12.99)

Nicholas Bourbaki was one of the most influential mathematicians of the 20th century, publishing celebrated volumes about the structure and foundations of mathematics. And yet he never existed. "Bourbaki" was the pseudonymous invention of a group of French mathematicians who gathered regularly from the years before the second world war to conduct anarchic, free-wheeling conversations about the nature of maths.

Aczel illuminates well how the group directly inspired the "structuralism" in the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, as well as ideas in psychoanalysis and economics. He traces their origin, intriguingly, to the cubism of Picasso and Braque. By the end, he has vindicated his thesis: "Major developments in mathematics have often followed important trends in popular culture; and conversely, developments in mathematics have acted as harbingers of changes in the general culture."

The Political Brain by Drew Westen (Public Affairs, £15.99)

Many American books on politics these days seem to be exercises in touting for work as a consultant, and here is another. Westen is a psychologist, and he conducted a widely reported experiment last year that scanned people's brains while they were trying to reconcile contradictory statements by politicians of their party. The lesson? People think about politics emotionally not rationally, so politicians should make emotional arguments.

You may wonder if we needed fMRI scans to learn this. Indeed, the book's claim of a rigorously scientific approach to political strategy is dubious, as the author speaks too freely of "neural networks" being "activated" by ideas or emotions, without any concrete evidence of the existence of such "networks".

So mostly this amounts to a spicy rephrasing of "framing" rhetoric, from the point of view of what the Democrats should do next. As that goes, it's energetically argued and amusing.