Ken's Book Club

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

This fascinating book is really three books in one. It is well written and fairly easy to read.

BOOK-AUTHOR
Jeff Hawkins

Part 1: A New Understanding of the Brain
This is the section of the book that is most exciting from the context of the theory that has been
developed and the quality of the exposition. It reflects the lifetime that the author has devoted to
explaining how the brain works.
Hawkins provides a theory of the functioning of the neocortex which is dramatically different from other
theories. He asserts that his theory covers the phenomena that we can observe and have tested over
time. It is at once simple and complex, providing a compelling description of how it is we are able to
function in our world and in particular how we are able to learn and extend knowledge.

The core of the theory is centered on the cortical columns in the neocortex. These structures are essentially the same throughout the neocortex, even though various areas of the neocortex seemingly handle different function. Each of these columns is capable of controlling movement, of learning and of creating predictive models. These models are called reference frames and through these we sense our
world, create our thoughts and remember things.

While the total description of the theory is long, Hawkins leads the reader to an understanding through
a well organized and articulated explanation of his thoughts in a manner that provides comprehension
and awe.

Part2: Machine Intelligence
In this part of the book, the author tackles the issue of machine intelligence. He first dispels the notion that what passes for “artificial intelligence” in modern parlance is intelligence. He also rejects the notion that smart machines that can defeat a human in a particular field (say at playing chess or go) have
intelligence.

He provides a list of four criteria that a machine would have to fulfill so as to be considered an intelligent machine:

• The ability to learn continuously
• The ability to learn via movement
• The capacity to create many models of objects
• The ability to use reference frames to store knowledge
The arguments behind this list are compelling and clearly indicate how far we have to go to create
machines with intelligence, while holding out belief that it will come to pass.

Part 3: Human Intelligence
In this section of the book the author diverges from his scientific areas of expertise to ponder on the
future of intelligence in the collective sense of the accumulated knowledge of mankind.
He spends considerable effort on discussing how people can have different beliefs on things – referring
to some of these as false beliefs. Yet, he takes as given issues that are much argued from credible
points of view – seemingly ignoring his concept of reference frames. At the same time he gives very
good descriptions of how our models of events and objects, stored in our personal reference frames,
are almost always going to be approximations of realty if for not other reason than that we do not have
the full ranges of inputs by which to create a perfect model.
He ponders on the risks of our intelligence to our survival as a species and ways in which we can
extend our species survival through interplanetary diaspora as well as through preserving our
accumulated knowledge through “estate planning for humanity”

Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime

An exciting book in which Aubrey and Michael structure the problem of ending aging into an cellular engineering task with seven major thrusts.

Lifespan

In this groundbreaking book, Dr. David Sinclair, leading world authority on genetics and longevity, reveals a bold new theory for why we age.

Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease

Seldom, if ever, have I read a more compelling argument. Dr. Esselstyn’s presentation of the rational for a plant based diet is clear, concise and demands action.

BOOK-AUTHOR
Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr. M.D.

Description

Read about my personal experience with the Esselstyn diet.
Seldom, if ever, have I read a more compelling argument. Dr. Esselstyn’s presentation of the rational
for a plant based diet is clear, concise and demands action.
I have heart disease. Specifically, I have coronary artery disease — the clogging of the arteries that
supply blood to my heart. I have stents in my heart. I have cholesterol levels, once thought ‘normal’,
now considered in the dangerously high range — around 210 mg/dL. I have tried the statin drugs to
reduce my cholesterol; but I do not tolerate them at all well. I have tried to moderate my diet and
increase my activity levels. But my cholesterol remains in that range.
If you believe you do not have heart disease here are a few comments from the book that you might
want to reflect on:

1. For one quarter of the people who are diagnosed with heart disease, the first symptom is sudden death!

2. Each year in the United States, more than half a million people die from coronary disease.

3. Autopsies of Vietnam war dead revealed that over 80% of casualties showed signs of coronary artery disease. These were generally young men in their late teens or early twenties who were in the prime of life and physically fit.

I read this book (it is an easy read) on 1 February 2012 during a 3 hour flight. By 3 February I had adopted his diet. What was so compelling in this presentation? Essentially what struck me so emphatically were the following four major points:

1. Dr. Esselstyn formulated a plan of action to take 24 persons to whom cardiologists had indicated they could do no more for them and that they essentially should go home and would die in a fairly short time. These persons were placed on a strict plant based diet. Subsequently 6 of these patients withdrew from the study and reverted to their usual diet. Of the 18 persons who stayed on the program, and had had 49 cardiac incidents prior to the study, there was only one incident of a cardiac event in the next 12 years, and this was for a patient who had gone off the diet for 18 months. Of those who withdrew there were 11 cardiac incidents and two deaths.

2. Dr. Esselstyn notes that persons with a cholesterol level below 150 mg/dL generally do not have
the symptoms of heart disease. This level of cholesterol is common in parts of the world where people live on a plant based diet — generally in the undeveloped nations. But he also notes that as these populations become more affluent and adopt western eating styles they evolve to western levels of morbidity from heart disease. This information, in part, is from “The China Study” and substantiates the basis for Dr. Esselstyn’s plant based diet.

3. Moderation kills. In a well reasoned chapter Dr. Esselstyn discusses the issue of how strictly his
diet needs to be followed. The moderation diet (low fats, fish, olive oil, etc.) — the kind I have
followed for years — just puts far too much fat and cholesterol into the body — and it causes continued (if perhaps slowed) progression of heart disease. An interesting part of this argument is the effect that even one fatty meal can have on your arteries; he describes a test that has been performed that shows that it can take up to 6 hours to recover from such a dietary event.

4. The program reverses the damage of heart disease. This, of course, is the most compelling part
of his argument. If you have heart disease (and you probably do if you live on a western diet)
there is hope of reversing this damage. This is illustrated by angiogram photographs showing
how blocked coronary arteries have recovered fully after three years on the diet. Similar examples exist for the unclogging of blocked arteries in the legs. This is just an outline of the information in the book. There is much more. The book has about 300
pages. The first 118 deal with the medical argument which I have partially summarized above.

The remainder of the book is a cookbook — recipes for the diet itself, which, simply, is: plant based foods only and that means:

no meat
no fish
no dairy
no oils, meaning
no animal based products such as butter or cheese, but also
no olive oils or canola oils or other vegetable oils
no avocados
no nuts

This book needs to be read. And you need to act on its recommendations! (You can buy this book at
Amazon).

I have just been on this journey for a month. Surprisingly, I have not had any particular difficulty with
the diet. I do not crave meat or fish or dairy products or oils. If anything, this diet has given me a much
easier time with my digestion and it seems to me that my skin is healthier and that I have a bit more
energy. I will have my next cholesterol test in another month or so and will see how quickly and to what extent I am progressing at that time.

Replacing Aging

“An impressive overview of how regenerative medicine may reverse aging and reboot the brain.”

The Fantastic Voyage

Ray and Terry outline how modern medical technology is opening up the possibilities of controlling our body structures so as to promote greatly expanded life spans.

The Plant Based Solution: America’s Healthy Doc’s Plan to Power Your Health

Dr. Joel Kahn’s “The Plant-Based Solution” is an incredible source book to bring you up to date and to the cutting edge of our knowledge.

Our understanding of the whole foods plant based (WFPB) diet is expanding at an ever increasing rate.
It is difficult to always keep up with this progress. Dr. Joel Kahn’s “The Plant-Based Solution” is an
incredible source book to bring you up to date and to the cutting edge of our knowledge. If there is any
book on this subject that you read, and own, and use, and refer to, and get recipes from, this is the
book!

The author, Dr. Joel Kahn, is a brilliant, multi-faceted individual:
He is an M.D. having graduated from University of Michigan. He is an accomplished cardiologist who has done thousands of stent insertions and who runs his own cardiology clinic
He has been a vegan for over 40 years and follows a Whole Foods Plant Based (WFPB) diet, low
in added oils and gluten-free.

He is a scientist with a deep knowledge of nutrition and the advances in this field. He is a restauranteur with vegan restaurants in the Detroit area. He is an activist continually attempting to convert the institutions and the people around him to a healthy lifestyle, trying continually to present the logical and the ethical arguments in support of
his case. He is an animal rights supporter with strong ethical reasons for being so. And, he is a gourmet chef.

All of these aspects of his personality and his work come through in this book.

Introductory Segments
The many praises of the leaders in the WFPB diet, the Introduction and the first chapter set the stage
for this inspiring presentation of Dr. Kahn’s “Plant Solution”. They also include the first instances of his
“Plant Rant” feature where he vents the frustration that so many of us feel with respect to our health,
pharmaceutical and food systems.

Chapters 2 through 11
In these chapters Dr. Kahn explores the impact of a WFPB diet on the treatment of the many forms of
disease that plague our society: heart disease, cancers, diabetes, etc. As he provides the information
he draws on his wide range of experience to augment the presentations with case studies, the science of plant based nutrition, the statistics that support the arguments, what foods are most beneficial,
details of how to prepare foods, and, of course, his “Plant Rants”. I was pleased to see that he includes
comments on the microbiome, something not often included in books of this genre but one whose
importance is gradually being better appreciated. He also discusses the issues he has with the ethical
and nutritional positions taken by governments and institutions with respect to diet. Why, for example,
do hospitals serve foods recognized internationally as carcinogenic, in their cafeterias and wards? It is
impossible to read this information and in any way logically conclude that you should be eating animal
based products!

Chapters 12 through 14
In these chapters Dr. Kahn goes beyond the normally covered topics in a Plant Based book to address
briefly the issues of
longevity (not just increasing healthspan but also lifespan). He talks of the blue zones, caloric
restriction, and other factors besides nutrition that play in the achievement of a long life, the incredible plight of animals in the food systems that we have created in our modern world.
Have we no respect for the lives of our fellow creatures on this earth? When so many of our religions in the world preach respect of the lives of other animals how can we ethically allow this abuse to happen?
and, finally, some information on the impact of our animal based nutritional systems on the
biosphere. The damage that we do to the earth through these practices is tragic and may in the not too distant future create the collapse of many aspects of our environment
As usual in his exposition, Dr. Kahn provides many pointers to documentary information in books,
journals, videos and the internet.

Recipes!
The last part of the book gives a 21 day menu program for converting to a WFPB diet. This is an
excellent set of recipes. However, we think that unless: you are a true gourmand and do a lot of cooking, or
you have a chef on staff who can do vegan cooking you might find the menus daunting. No fear. There is no need to fret. Select a few of the recipes that you are comfortable with and use those. Gradually expand over time to include other recipes in what
you eat. (after your 21 days there is no way you abandon your WFPB diet!)

The Pleasure Trap

Of all the books that I have read and reviewed in our Viva*Sparkle quest for understanding and furthering health, nutrition and longevity, this book stands above and alone for its unifying of all of these areas.

BOOK-AUTHOR
Douglas J. Lisle Ph.D. and Alan Goldhamer D.C.

This book is a MUST READ!
Of all the books that I have read and reviewed in our Viva*Sparkle quest for understanding and furthering health, nutrition and longevity, this book stands above and alone for its unifying of all of these areas. While other books are particularly effective in dealing with some aspects of those fields, Lisle and Goldhamer, in this illuminating presentation, bring all of those aspects together to provide the
solution to our pressing health problems and a blueprint for the personal empowerment to achieve that solution.

Christine and Kenneth Scott (in the Viva*Sparkle T’s) with co-author Doug Lisle at Plantstock 2016
This exciting book addresses the greatest health problem of modern times. For the past many decades
(going back at least as far as the 1950s) we have seen an ever decreasing level of health in our
modern societies. We now have epidemics of premature deaths from cardiovascular diseases and cancers which kill upwards of 75% of our populations. Other diseases are increasing, too, so that upwards of 90% of our population dies from disease, prematurely.

The solution to reversing this ever increasing death rate has been known for several decades and increasingly understood since at least the 1980s. The epidemics that cause these diseases are known to be due to nutritional errors. We are eating the wrong foods and it is killing us! The food we eat, the
so-called Standard American Diet (a diet high in animal protein, sugar, salt and processed foods) needs to be changed And we do know what foods we should be eating, what is increasingly called the Whole Foods Plant Based Diet (a diet based on fruits and vegetables with no processed foods, added sugar, added salt or added oils). Why, with this knowledge, have the epidemics not been stopped and eradicated? This is
the great issue that the authors address.

Their presentation deals with providing a solution that works
at the individual level – it will provide you with the knowledge that you need to achieve health and to
avoid the modern diseases that plague our society, diseases such as heart disease, cancers, diabetes,
obesity, osteoporosis . . . More importantly it shows the changes that need to be made to nutrition in
our society so as to greatly improve the quality of life of our older citizens and significantly decrease the massive expenditures on our medical and pharmaceutical systems.
The authors explain how it is that humans, unique among all species, have created an environment in
which the foods that we eat counteract our natural defenses against disease. And then they lead us
through the steps so that we can understand how to avoid such destructive ‘nutrition’. It is a fascinating journey that will empower the reader to significantly improve their health and to likely ensure that they do not succumb to early death.

The solution they provide is based on a foundation of psychological understanding of how our bodies
respond to nutritional stimuli. We are naturally wired to want the fats, animal protein, sugar, salt and
processed foods – foods that were scarce throughout biological time, until the last 50 to 100 years or
so. And our food processing industry builds on this natural desire to addict us to such foods – foods that cause the range of ‘modern’ diseases which kill us. Understanding these responses can give us the tools that we require to counteract bad nutrition and a variety of various kinds of addiction – the ‘Pleasure Trap’ of which they write.

Read this book to regain your health, your life, your future. And keep re-reading it until it works for you!

The Price of Immortality

Fintech projects are strict. We bring our innovative approach to it.

Read my Book

“Rethinking Longevity” is a disruptive exploration into the deeply ingrained beliefs about the inevitable cycle of life and death.

Ken's Book Club

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

This fascinating book is really three books in one. It is well written and fairly easy to read.

Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime

An exciting book in which Aubrey and Michael structure the problem of ending aging into an cellular engineering task with seven major thrusts.

Lifespan

In this groundbreaking book, Dr. David Sinclair, leading world authority on genetics and longevity, reveals a bold new theory for why we age.

Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease

Seldom, if ever, have I read a more compelling argument. Dr. Esselstyn’s presentation of the rational for a plant based diet is clear, concise and demands action.

Replacing Aging

“An impressive overview of how regenerative medicine may reverse aging and reboot the brain.”

The Fantastic Voyage

Ray and Terry outline how modern medical technology is opening up the possibilities of controlling our body structures so as to promote greatly expanded life spans.

The Plant Based Solution: America’s Healthy Doc’s Plan to Power Your Health

Dr. Joel Kahn’s “The Plant-Based Solution” is an incredible source book to bring you up to date and to the cutting edge of our knowledge.

The Pleasure Trap

Of all the books that I have read and reviewed in our Viva*Sparkle quest for understanding and furthering health, nutrition and longevity, this book stands above and alone for its unifying of all of these areas.

The Price of Immortality

Fintech projects are strict. We bring our innovative approach to it.

Read my Book

Start your journey to rejuvenation

Quick Links

Contact Us

Simplifying IT
for a complex world.

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Services

Business Challenges

Digital Transformation

Security

Automation

Gaining Efficiency

Industry Focus

Ken's Book Club

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

This fascinating book is really three books in one. It is well written and fairly easy to read.

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime

An exciting book in which Aubrey and Michael structure the problem of ending aging into an cellular engineering task with seven major thrusts.

Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime

Lifespan

In this groundbreaking book, Dr. David Sinclair, leading world authority on genetics and longevity, reveals a bold new theory for why we age.

Lifespan

Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease

Seldom, if ever, have I read a more compelling argument. Dr. Esselstyn’s presentation of the rational for a plant based diet is clear, concise and demands action.

Prevent and Reverse Hearth Disease

Replacing Aging

“An impressive overview of how regenerative medicine may reverse aging and reboot the brain.”

Replacing Aging

The Fantastic Voyage

Ray and Terry outline how modern medical technology is opening up the possibilities of controlling our body structures so as to promote greatly expanded life spans.

The Fantastic Voyage

The Plant Based Solution: America’s Healthy Doc’s Plan to Power Your Health

Dr. Joel Kahn’s “The Plant-Based Solution” is an incredible source book to bring you up to date and to the cutting edge of our knowledge.

The Plant Based Solution: America’s Healthy Doc’s Plan to Power Your Health

The Pleasure Trap

Of all the books that I have read and reviewed in our Viva*Sparkle quest for understanding and furthering health, nutrition and longevity, this book stands above and alone for its unifying of all of these areas.

The Pleasure Trap

The Price of Immortality

Fintech projects are strict. We bring our innovative approach to it.

The Price of Immortality

Read my Book

Start your journey to rejuvenation

Quick Links

Contact Us

Simplifying IT for a complex world.

Platform partnerships

Services

Business Challenges

Digital Transformation

Security

Automation

Gaining Efficiency

Industry Focus

Simplifying IT
for a complex world.