An interdisciplinary approach to human intelligence that blends 20th-century science, modern psychology, Eastern philosophy, and religion. The coauthors of The Quantum Society (not reviewed), Zohar, trained in physics and philosophy, and Marshall, a psychiatrist and a psychotherapist, reunite—in Zohar’s first-person voice, which blends ideas from both authors—to argue that besides traditional intelligence, or IQ, and the emotional intelligence, or EQ, proposed by Daniel Goleman, human beings possess spiritual intelligence, or SQ. Each is linked to a basic neural system in the brain; SQ’s is synchronous 40-Hz oscillations across the brain that bind individual perceptual and cognitive events into a more meaningful whole. Zohar and Marshall’s discussion of the brain includes examination of the so-called “God spot” in the temporal lobes and its relationship to SQ. The spiritually intelligent self is symbolized here as a six-petaled lotus, with the outer edges representing the ego; the middle layer, the associative unconscious, with its store of images, patterns, and relationships; and the center, the core of the self. Alienation from the center—from meaning and purpose—leads, they assert, to spiritual illness, and SQ is the means by which one can achieve spiritual wellness. The authors provide questionnaires by which to determine one’s personality type, six spiritual paths to follow to become more spiritually intelligent, and additional quizzes that assess one’s progress. In an offbeat mix of quantum-field theory and Buddhism, they liken the quantum vacuum, the background energy state of the universe, to “Buddha’s handkerchief,” the center of all things, “the mud out of which the stem of the Lotus of the Self” grows. Further, they propose proto-consciousness as a fundamental property of all matter, like mass, charge, and spin, with full consciousness possessed only by such structures as the human brain. A brave attempt to give New Age attitudes the imprimatur of science. (Illus., not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-58234-044-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
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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