A highly readable look at a medical discipline and its potential benefits.
An introduction to neuropsychology combined with a guide to healthy living.
Debut author Koltuska-Haskin is a neuropsychologist with some 30 years of experience in the field. The first half of this slim volume explains the basics of neuropsychology, defining it as a discipline that bridges medicine and psychology with a focus on brain function. A neuropsychological evaluation allows patients to gauge their performance in different cognitive areas and what they might be able to do to improve it. Just about anyone may find value in a neuropsychological evaluation, the author asserts, whether they’re college students, women going through menopause, or people who’ve suffered a traumatic brain injury. The author talks readers through what they can expect from clinical interviews and tests of emotional functioning. The author particularly emphasizes the importance of such tests, noting that “what you don’t know could hurt you.” Koltuska-Haskin devotes the second half of her book to holistic methods to alleviate harm to one’s brain. The author offers advice on maintaining a healthy diet, practicing meditation, and other activities to promote neurological health. She also discusses the many benefits of gardening. The book is brief at fewer than 200 pages, and it progresses in a swift, cheerful manner. The chapters are similarly short with technical jargon kept to a minimum and a consistently positive tone (“When the plants mature, you can see their beauty”). Fans of self-help books will find some points rather familiar, as when a chapter on the importance of gratitude refers to Oprah Winfrey’s well-known gratitude journal. Still, this book contains plenty of immensely useful and easily digestible information for newcomers to neuropsychology.
A highly readable look at a medical discipline and its potential benefits.Pub Date: May 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-948749-61-9
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Golden Word Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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