For serious students of neurobiology as well as readers interested in philosophical questions of mind and body.
What is the brain? If you answered by describing what the brain does, then this well-crafted overview may not be your cup of gray matter.
The devil may not make us do things, but peer pressure, illness, addiction, and the health of our wallets certainly do. Jasanoff, the director of the MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering, begins his account by stating that his chief interest lies more in “what the brain is rather than what it does.” Though he allows some operational description along the way, he arrives at a suitably open-ended definition: the brain is “a transit point for myriad influences that work jointly on us and through us.” So, the brain is an organ that perceives and organizes perception, but there is a difference between brain and mind, a distinction between what is innate in the physical being and what comes in from the outside world. The definition is biologically grounded, and in that regard, one of the fascinating branches of the author’s discussion concerns the evidence for the notion that an organ or tissue transplant might “change a person’s mind or personality” beyond the obvious one of having a new lease on life. The text can get a touch dense, for matters such as “body-wide emotional responses” and “ventromedial prefrontal cortex damage” resist easy reduction to pop science. Still, Jasanoff writes with admirable clarity as he argues that the modern tendency of neuroscience to take a “brain-centered view” that overlooks external sources of behavior can lead to epistemological dead ends. For instance, if the mere fact of having a brain explains all the things we do, can we hold anyone accountable for crime—anyone, that is, other than the brain itself? The question opens onto a consideration of the brain of the mass shooter Charles Whitman, who suddenly seems a timely presence considering all the mischief brains get into these days.
For serious students of neurobiology as well as readers interested in philosophical questions of mind and body.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-465-05268-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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IN THE NEWS
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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