For midlifers eager to “create a new habit of mind,” Hagerty is a rousing cheerleader.
An upbeat look at the joys of middle age.
Now in her 50s, journalist Hagerty (Fingerprints of God: What Science Is Learning About the Brain and Spiritual Experience, 2010), a former NPR correspondent on law and religion, debunks the idea of midlife crisis, “defined as an existential fear about impending death and lost opportunities.” From interviews with an astonishing number of middle-aged men and women and the psychologists, sociologists, physicians, geneticists, and neuroscientists who study them, Hagerty has found positive responses to her own urgent question: “how does one thrive at midlife?” The experience of middle age, she has discovered, “is more mountaintop than valley,” characterized not by depression but by optimism and renewal, happiness and growth. Organized chronologically, Hagerty’s investigation tackles a new theme for each month, including friendship, love, work, illness, sense of purpose, and, not surprisingly, memory loss. She focuses on fear of dementia, delving into scientific research and submitting to a number of brain exercises and tests; in the end, she is persuaded that even those “biologically destined to have the physical plaques and tangles of Alzheimer’s disease” will not necessarily show signs of the debility; furthermore, she believes, stimulating the mind “can build up neural defenses.” This stimulation can take the form of engaging in a challenging new activity, such as digital photography, learning a language, or quilting. A brain, some researchers insist, “can learn new skills, sharpen…memory, even grow new brain cells” throughout a person’s life. Equally important are social connections and romance. One research psychologist who studies the neurobiology of romantic love recommends injecting novelty into long-term marriages to get “a little dopamine-driven reward.” The author ends with 16 suggestions for aging well and living exuberantly. “Happiness is love,” she writes. “Full stop.”
For midlifers eager to “create a new habit of mind,” Hagerty is a rousing cheerleader.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59463-170-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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