It helps to have a brain to think with, but Paul capably shows that there’s much more to the process than all that.
A look at the science behind the parts of our consciousness and ideation that lie outside the body.
Marshall McLuhan famously called media “the extensions of man.” Science writer Paul updates this notion to battle what researchers have called neurocentric bias “and our corresponding blind spot for all the ways cognition extends beyond the skull.” We acquire much information via the processing of the senses into mental furrows and synapses, but we also have other avenues of thinking: for instance, what Paul describes as a well-developed “interoceptive sense.” This involves teaching ourselves how to become more aware of what’s happening in our bodies through an exercise called the “body scan,” imagining that breath occurs elsewhere in the body than in the pulmonary tract. Mindfulness meditation also extends awareness of the parasympathetic nervous system, itself a source of information. Paul examines the well-known effects of walking on mind improvement and the use of gesture to both build memory and to pull words out of the air (or mental databanks, more properly) as we speak. The author uses recently deceased Zappos founder Tony Hsieh as a model for someone who strived to forge “a sense of unity and cohesion among the firm’s employees,” re-creating the as-oneness he experienced at drug-fueled raves. The mind can be expanded, and not necessarily by drugs, by compartmentalizing it so that others store information for us. Intriguingly, Paul explores an experimental learning technique in which students are divided into groups and then assigned to learn a segment of a topic, later combining the information they’ve mastered in an example of “a transactive memory system.” Though less fluent than other popular-science writers such as Malcolm Gladwell and Elizabeth Kolbert, Paul does a good job of drawing together the many extensions of mind that surround us, exhorting readers to “re-spatialize the information we think about.”
It helps to have a brain to think with, but Paul capably shows that there’s much more to the process than all that.Pub Date: June 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-544-94766-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.
Want to get ahead in business? Consult a dictionary.
By Wharton School professor Berger’s account, much of the art of persuasion lies in the art of choosing the right word. Want to jump ahead of others waiting in line to use a photocopy machine, even if they’re grizzled New Yorkers? Throw a because into the equation (“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”), and you’re likely to get your way. Want someone to do your copying for you? Then change your verbs to nouns: not “Can you help me?” but “Can you be a helper?” As Berger notes, there’s a subtle psychological shift at play when a person becomes not a mere instrument in helping but instead acquires an identity as a helper. It’s the little things, one supposes, and the author offers some interesting strategies that eager readers will want to try out. Instead of alienating a listener with the omniscient should, as in “You should do this,” try could instead: “Well, you could…” induces all concerned “to recognize that there might be other possibilities.” Berger’s counsel that one should use abstractions contradicts his admonition to use concrete language, and it doesn’t help matters to say that each is appropriate to a particular situation, while grammarians will wince at his suggestion that a nerve-calming exercise to “try talking to yourself in the third person (‘You can do it!’)” in fact invokes the second person. Still, there are plenty of useful insights, particularly for students of advertising and public speaking. It’s intriguing to note that appeals to God are less effective in securing a loan than a simple affirmative such as “I pay all bills…on time”), and it’s helpful to keep in mind that “the right words used at the right time can have immense power.”
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780063204935
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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