A little of the gee-whiz stuff goes a long way, but Lotto’s provocative investigation into the mysterious workings of the...
What is reality? Whatever you make of it, it would seem, to go by this sprightly look into the nature of things.
Lotto (Neuroscience/New York Univ.), founder of the London-based Lab of Misfits and a popular TED talker, ventures into fascinating and puzzling territory in this book of popular science. The author examines the difference between reality, whatever that might be, and perception, our way of sensing and ordering the world, and he locates a meaningful gap between the two in which nearly anything can happen. Contemporary philosophers are inclined to doubt the existence of reality, period, but Lotto sidetracks that to look head-on at our subjective interpretations, backing his observations with explications of the experiments—some resembling magic tricks—that he has conducted in such matters as “body transfers” and dreaming. He peppers his thoughts with Buckminster Fuller–esque exclamations (“Illusions themselves…are an illusion!” “Celebrate doubt!”) that sometimes seem faux-naif, especially in the context of his already telegraphic, elliptical (and ellipses-laden) prose: “But this won’t be easy…because you’re a frog…when it comes to perception.” Among Lotto’s most valuable contributions to our lay understanding of perception and thinking is his formulation of perception as an “ecology,” meaning “the relation of things to the things around them, and how they influence each other.” Given the differences between ecologies from one brain to the next, it’s a wonder we can agree on anything. The author closes with thoughts on genius and creativity, observing, usefully, that “creativity is in fact a very basic, accessible process” that can be enhanced by changing the questions we ask and the assumptions we make, as well as by changing our educational modes (“creativity in education…gets crunched into a competitive economic model”).
A little of the gee-whiz stuff goes a long way, but Lotto’s provocative investigation into the mysterious workings of the mind will make readers just that much smarter.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-30019-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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
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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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