Each semester, the Writing University hosts the 5Q Interview series with authors from the University of Iowa Press. We sit down with UI Press authors to ask about their work, their process, their reading lists and events. Today we are speaking with Edward Ziff, co-author with Israel Rosenfield, of From Chaos to Stability (University of Iowa Press, 2024).
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Can you tell us a little bit about your new book From Chaos to Stability?
Our book is about the function of the brain. We argue that we live in a world that is chaotic and often unpredictable, and the book presents our thesis that the brain invents a simplified world to help us navigate this chaos and conduct our daily activities. There are no colors in nature, only electromagnetic radiation of varying wavelengths. Likewise, without an animal brain to interpret them, words and sentences would be just a jumble of sounds, whistles, grunts, and silences. By creating something that is not there, the brain helps us understand and manipulate our environment. We discuss how the brain relates these sensory perceptions to form memory and how breakdown of this process causes clinical syndromes, such as failure to recognize friends and family or inability to interpret written words and numbers. We also discuss how writers and artists have incorporated similar concepts into their writings and paintings and we relate this understanding of the brain to recent advances in genetics and quantum physics.
What was the inspiration for this work?
The book of arose from conversations with my late co-author, Israel Rosenfield, who had a long career of writing about brain function in a refreshing and creative way. Israel’s perspective was both philosophical and clinical, while as a neurobiologist, my perspective has been molecular and functional. During a friendship that lasted 50 years, these complementary backgrounds fueled numerous discussions that led to the current book. Israel always insisted that we write for the non-specialist, which was the style of a rather novel and provocative book that we previously coauthored about DNA and is the style that we have maintained in the current work. In this spirit, we are grateful that the award winning illustrator, Fiammetta Ghedini, has contributed illustrations to the book that are always enlivening and often fanciful.
Do you have any plans for readings or events for this book, either in person or virtual?
Not yet.
What are you reading right now? Any books from other university or independent presses?
Right now, my reading is focused on the scientific literature and how the brain converts the many diverse types information received from the physical world into what we might cell a biological form of language that is based on neuron activity, common to all brain regions and that, in the end, makes possible sensory perception. I’m also interested in how newly recognized mechanisms of human evolution may alter brain development in long lasting ways, driven by changes in today’s society and the resulting changes in day-to-day life.
What is your writing routine? Do you have a daily routine?
I divide my time between reading and writing about consciousness and I currently working with collaborators on two writing projects. One is based on my interest, noted above, in how the environment may influence brain function in a heritable way, and the second presents a hypothesis for why the physical and mental configurations of consciousness are so challenging to understand.
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Thank you!
Edward Ziff received a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from Columbia University and a PhD in Biochemistry from Princeton University. As a postdoctoral student in Cambridge with Nobel Prize winner, Fred Sanger, he conducted early genome sequencing studies. Ed served on the faculties of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratory in London and Rockefeller University in New York where Ed conducted research on cancer and gene expression. He then joined New York University School of Medicine, where he researched brain function and neurological disease as an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and as Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, currently with Emeritus status. Together with Israel Rosenfield, the coauthor of his most recent book, “From Chaos to Stability…”, Ed wrote articles on evolution and neuroscience for The New York Review of Books, as well as a popular book on DNA. Ed has also written about Autism Spectrum Disorder and creativity. A native of New York City, he currently resides in New York’s Catskill region.
Israel Rosenfield taught at the City University of New York. His books include Freud’s Megalomania, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a longtime contributor to the New York Review of Books.