Book review: Elusive Cures

 I'm normally an avid fiction reader, but this summer I've been on a non-fiction kick. I just finished listening to Nicole Rust's new book, Elusive Cures. The premise of the book is the simple, important question: why haven't we made more progress on understanding brain disorders using basic neuroscience? Rust's argument is that the kind of "domino chain" causal model that we use to understand many neural systems is simply mismatched to the nature of how complex systems work. Rust is a cognitive neuroscientist who is known for her work on vision and memory, but she does not lean on these areas in the book, instead broadly surveying the neuroscience of disorders including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and depression. 

Although I'm mostly a cognitive scientist these days, Rust's description of the forward causal model for neuroscience immediately felt familiar from from my grad school neuroscience training. These kinds of causal systems are the ones we've made the most progress on in cognition as well: we have pretty strong models of how visual object recognition, reading, and language processing unfold in time. In contrast, processes that unfold interactively over time, such as mood, are much harder to understand this way. 

I have often been skeptical of the application of complex dynamical systems theory to cognition, though Rick Dale's nice intro for the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science did win me over somewhat. I agree that cognition is a complex dynamical system, but in practice such formalisms can often feel unconstrained. Many researchers using dynamical systems theories don't – for whatever reason – engage in the kind of systematic model comparison and evaluation that I believe is critical for cognitive modeling. 

I heard that same kind of skepticism in Rust's own writing, which made it even more compelling when she made the case for the critical importance of understanding the brain as a complex dynamical system. Her discussion of the role of homeostasis in brain systems in particular was inspiring. It made me wonder why we don't apply the concept of homeostasis more to reason about social systems as well – for example, how communities maintain their educational standards in the face of policy changes or interventions. It's always a pleasure when a book sparks this kind of reflection. 

In sum, I strongly recommend Elusive Cures. I found it thought-provoking and broad, with good descriptions of both individual research findings and sweeping trends. The book feels like the rare "popular" book that also effectively makes a forceful scientific argument. 

Two summer book recommendations

After a long stint primarily reading fiction, I've been on a non-fiction kick recently and just read two books that I would definitely recommend!

Persuasion in Parallel (2022) by Alexander Coppock, a political scientist at Yale, is a scholarly monograph on how political persuasion works. It's a delightful combination of large-scale replications, strong emphasis on effect estimation and causal inference, and really thoughtful discussion of mechanisms. It starts from a replication and re-analysis of Lord, Ross, and Lepper (1979), the seminal work on political persuasion, and goes on to replicate a whole host of more recent studies. Across all of them, the key take-home is that arguments about controversial topics (e.g., gun control, abortion, etc.) operate very similarly across people with very different views: they cause small changes in attitude in the direction of the arguments, regardless of the recipient's initial views. 

In statistical terms, there's very limited heterogeneity across groups in the effect of persuasive arguments. I really appreciated evidence on this heterogeneity question because often students' intuition in psychology is that everything differs based on sociodemographic characteristics; yet this intuition is rarely quantified or challenged. Coppock's analyses take a really important step in this direction. 

The book is short and quite readable (especially given how data-rich it is). It's also very up front about the limitations of the work. There's also a thought-provoking final chapter on Bayesian inference and rational models of belief change that makes a number of connections to computational cognitive science that I enjoyed. Despite being an academic, I am not the sort of person who will sit down on a weekend with a monograph from another discipline for fun; this book was an exception for me because of how interesting, important, and thorough the work is.

On a heavier note, Doctored (2025), by Charles Piller (an investigative reporter with Science), is a screed about scientific misconduct in Alzheimer's research. I'm intimately familiar with replication issues in psychology, but I was still totally horrified to read about the impacts of scientific fraud in the Alzheimer's field. Piller makes a very well-researched and thorough case, working with experts on fraud and scientific reviewers. While a critique of the book by an Alzheimer's authority questions how central the fraudulent work was to the field (Lancet review), I was convinced by the later chapters of Doctored that show how pervasive image falsification has been within the Alzheimer's research enterprise. It's just awful to think that many people have been in dangerous clinical trials due to research misconduct. 

The book was clearly written very fast as there is some redundancy between chapters and a bit of unnecessary stage-setting around various researchers' grandparents (perhaps reflecting a pivot from an earlier vision of the book where certain people were more important to the narrative). But the substance of the scientific critique is so compelling – and honestly terrifying – that I was more than happy to overlook a few minor weaknesses in the prose. Definitely recommend.