It’s no match for Jesse Sheidlower’s fluent, fun The F Word (1995), but Bergen’s study is still a winner for the...
An examination of the sub rosa language that sets us all atwitter—and athwart.
What is it about the F-word, the N-word, and the C-word (supply your own, as long as it’s got four letters) that provokes rage, disgust, and embarrassed laughter? Bergen (Director, Language and Cognition Laboratory/Univ. of California, San Diego) observes that they fire up parts of the brain that other words don’t excite in quite the same way; profanity, he writes, “gets encoded differently in the brain.” That makes the study of vulgar language a topic of special interest for neuroscientists, who can connect those bad words to responses along the neural pathway. A word is sounded, Bergen schematizes, and then converted into electrical signals, whereupon “different parts of the temporal lobe then extract information about the speech sounds that make up the word and then send modified signals to a region called Wernicke’s area, which is believed to associate the sequence of sounds that you’ve heard with their meaning,” and so forth. Something unusual happens in that area when bad language is heard. Bergen doesn’t sort out nature and nurture quite neatly enough: it’s sometimes less that children have potty mouths, he writes, than that adults have “potty ears.” A little more reference to the anthropological literature might have helped, but all the same, it’s clear that elements of both are involved in parsing how to interpret “give a fuck,” to say nothing of the more fiery, more dangerous iterations of terms surrounding race, incest, and other taboo or sensitive areas. What is certain, as the author notes, is that such words are indeed capable of harm, and, therefore, we as social and legal beings have some interest in regulating them. Using them, he observes memorably, “is the linguistic analog of closing your eyes and swinging in full knowledge that there’s a nose within arm’s reach.”
It’s no match for Jesse Sheidlower’s fluent, fun The F Word (1995), but Bergen’s study is still a winner for the psycholinguistics nerd in the house.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-465-06091-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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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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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