A provocative examination of deep questions—not easy reading but worth sticking with, if only for the fascinating case...
Psychology and philosophy intersect in a study of mental states that raises the question of what we refer to when we say “myself.”
Ananthaswamy (The Edge of Physics, 2010, etc.) based this book on interviews with neuroscientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and a number of people who experience a range of mental conditions that include Alzheimer’s, autism, and schizophrenia. Each of these involves a departure from what we think of as normal consciousness; with Alzheimer’s, for example, the loss of memory can be equated to the erasure of much of what makes the victim a distinct individual. Many schizophrenics report that their actions are directed by someone outside themselves. More interestingly, Ananthaswamy looks at victims of several less-familiar conditions, such as Cotard’s syndrome, in which the patient believes they are dead, or victims of body integrity identity disorder, in which the patient seeks to have a body part amputated because it “doesn’t belong to them.” A network has sprung up to connect BIID patients with surgeons who will remove the offending limb; the author interviewed several who had the operation, and from their reports, it ended their distress. A different perspective on the nature of the self comes from those who report out-of-body experiences. For some of these conditions, researchers have studied brain scans to determine what regions of the brain are involved. Ananthaswamy also spends a fair amount of time on theoretical discussions of the nature of selfhood, which does little to shed light on the issues at stake. Perhaps more useful are literary connections, such as discussions of Dostoyevsky’s portrayal of ecstatic epilepsy, Aldous Huxley’s use of psychedelics, and Buddhist texts that raise the question of what the self is. But the main portions of the book are accounts of the experiences of specific patients, intriguing and disturbing at the same time.
A provocative examination of deep questions—not easy reading but worth sticking with, if only for the fascinating case studies.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95419-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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