The Value of a Vowel

THE USER ILLUSION: CUTTING CONSCIOUSNESS DOWN TO SIZE

By Tor Norretranders

Translated by Jonathan Sydenham Viking

280 pp., $29.95

A select few may have actually spun the wheel and clapped along with Vanna; fewer still are those who realize that the value of a letter is actually inversely proportional to its frequency. Your immediate wealth increases when five "S"s appear on the board, but in the long run, those "S"s really won't narrow down the identity of word as much as a single "Q" might.

How do we define the value conferred by a bit of information such as a single letter? Are we aware that we constantly discard gargantuan volumes of information without recognizing their worth? In The User Illusion, a didactic tome employing examples from physics to poker, Danish author Tor Norretranders addresses these questions and explores their relationship to human consciousness within the context of a booming Information Age.

At first glance, Norretranders--heralded as Denmark's leading science writer--appears to be simply the latest author dazzled by the brilliant approach of a new millenium. In this finde-de-siecle, so-called Information Age, where URLs serve as book titles, books like The Roaring 2000s are appearing on shelves to herd the masses in the right direction. You can already see them approaching, regiments of technology gurus marching onward with laptops under their arms and PalmPilots in hand, ready to take every bit of information you have and compile it into terabyte-sized chunks.

It comes as no surprise that The User Illusion is also user-friendly. First published in 1991, the Danish version sold more than 100,000 copies, a number equivalent to 2% of the population of Denmark. Even so, Norretranders' book possesses a motive more noble than self-help and survival in the new millenium; its nobility is supplemented by his elegant use of principles drawn from mathematics and physics.

Those who do not enjoy descriptions of scientific conferences or are not terribly enthralled by the second law of thermodynamics will find it difficult to move beyond "Computation," the first part of Norretrander's book. The author lingers on science's failed attempts to exorcise "Maxwell's Demon." an imaginary creature who can create heat without doing any work, thus circumventing the second law by simply separating molecules based upon their relative velocities. Norretranders gives a more common-place analogy, whereby one can heat a room simply by opening the window to let fast molecule in and slow molecules our; in the end, however, Norretranders simply concludes that we can never achieve this "because of our own inadequacies, not the universe's...we are too big and clumsy." On the whole, the first part of the book revolves around these kinds of inadequacies.

Once this daunting part lays the foundation for the author's discussion of consciousness, the book actually begins to fulfill the promise of its subtitle. Entitled "Communication, "the second part of The User Illusion moves past the infinite algorithms of part one to discuss issues of consequence to the general reader. Some terminology barriers still exist, since Norretranders is quite the neologist. Words like "exformation"--used to describe explicitly discarded information--pepper his phrases, as do psychological acronyms like SZQ, used for "subjektives Zeitquant." or psychological moment.

The allure of "Communication." as well as the last two sections, "Consciousness" and "Composure" lies in Norretranders' seamless melding of science with simple anecdotes. The User Illusion is a very comprehensive treatise, exploring consciousness in the reading of Greek epic poems, in musical performance and in the hitting of a baseball; also included are discussions of nuclear warfare, as are the requisite brain diagrams and reaction graphs.

Some of the book's impact was apparently lost in translation, as many of Norretranders' metaphors come across as laughable oddities. In one particularly comical description, the author attempts to emphasize the fact that consciousness "consists of information no less than a person who consumes large amounts of food can be said to consist of food." What follows is a discussion that employs hot dogs as its central motif; the paragraph ends with Norretranders asserting, "Consciousness does not consist of hot dogs but consists of hot dogs that have been apprehended. That is far less complex." Even if such an example does detract from the author's previously-established scientific authority, is nevertheless inspires a welcome bit of comic relief.

The User Illusion was obviously not written in the interests of the average "Wheel of Fortune" viewer, but beyond the book’s grand foray into consciousness lies a simple admonition: redundancy hurts, for less is much, much more. Do not say more than necessary; do not toss superfluous words into written communication, and, if you are a game show contestant with any shred of sensibility, never buy the vowels, You will just be wasting your money, and it does not take a world-class physicist or mathematician to realize that what the letter following that "q" must be. Norretranders' advice, upon distillation, condenses into pure common sense.