I checked out about 8 books on epidemiology and illness from the library and have been working my way through them (in general the ones about infectious and zoonotic diseases are the most interesting). Most recently I finished The End of Illness, which I didn’t feel particularly strongly about–too prescriptive to hold my interest, but not devoid of interesting content.
Near the end of the book the author writes, “…sleep acts like a built-in technology app for our brains, cleaning out old files and prepping us to upload new ones.”
Is that really what an app does? It sounds more like a defragging program or a hard-drive cleaner. I kind of expected him to go on to say that digestion is like an app, or breathing, or something–not that any of those make much sense, but what device has only ONE app?–but instead he moves to talking about how we need breaks from our technological devices (except our sleep “app” of course).
In reading about disease and the brain and body, the two most common analogies I see are
immune system fighting disease = a military fighting enemy invaders
and
the brain = a computer hard drive
The epidemiology book that I most thoroughly enjoyed discusses the limitations/inaccuracies of the “war” metaphor for disease. I would like to see something similar for the “hard drive” metaphor of the brain. It’s not an inaccurate analogy; it’s just become so embedded that we don’t notice potential flaws in it.
