There’s nothing earthshaking in Burnett’s observations, but he offers a pleasing tour of the brain and its feel-good...
Entertaining exploration of the neurophysiological basis for Aristotle’s most prized state of being: happiness.
To give a human a happy brain, give him or her lots of dopamine or some of the other chemicals we secrete in dosages far above what morphine can deliver. By the account of neuroscientist and stand-up comic Burnett (Medical Education/Cardiff Univ.; Idiot Brain: What Your Head Is Really Up To, 2016, etc.), setting those natural endorphins into motion is the trick. The author sometimes tries too hard to unburden heavy scientific exposition with some gee-whiz efforts at lightheartedness. Still, he delivers meaty, even weighty observations on the gray-matter gymnastics that, for instance, make us fall in love with awful people and, to all appearances to the outside world, allow us to content ourselves with that choice by blinding us to the reality. Burnett’s description of the neurochemistry of love and its affiliated emotions (“it may not be as pleasurable as sex, but it’s a lot less effort too”) is worth the price of admission. So, too, is his depiction of the emotional workings of the adolescent and then, later, the aging brain, when the reward pathways mature in such a way that some of the things that formerly brought us pleasure seem quaint and silly—a process that we share with rats and other primates. Burnett is at his funniest when he is subtle: “older people voting en masse to recreate the quasi-fictional romanticised world of the past doesn’t really do much good for anyone (see ‘Brexit’).” The book is at its best when the author points to obvious conclusions without being too obvious about it: If what makes us happiest in the end is the approval of others, it’s plain to see, on that account, why those who are widely disapproved of are so miserable.
There’s nothing earthshaking in Burnett’s observations, but he offers a pleasing tour of the brain and its feel-good longings.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-65134-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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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