More at home in college classrooms than on parents' nightstands.
This book competently covers the details of adolescent brain development but offers few surprises and scant advice.
It’s not really news that the brain continues to develop well into the early 20s. Scholars and journalists have long written about the “unfinished” nature of the teen brain. Here to clarify exactly what that means is Jensen (Neurology/Univ. of Pennsylvania), the mother of two boys who have survived those fraught years between childhood and full adulthood. While the author shares a few stories about her sons’ teen years, this is not a book of anecdotes. Instead, Jensen, with the assistance of Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post writer Nutt (Shadows Bright as Glass: The Remarkable Story of One Man's Journey from Brain Trauma to Artistic Triumph, 2011), lays out the way human brains develop: “back to front” with the impulse-controlling, executive-functioning circuits of the frontal lobe coming in last. If you ever doubted that this was true, the author’s collection of study results will convince you. Meticulously documented and reported, the studies offer proof that it’s not just parents who think their teenagers don’t quite have it all together. Jensen ably explains neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters and so on, offering a vocabulary that provides scaffolding for understanding how the brain grows. The prevalence of medical terminology may engage some readers, but it could easily put off parents who pick up the book based on its subtitle. Individual chapters expound on the biology behind the many perils of the teen years—why it’s such a prime time for getting hooked on drugs and what those drugs do to a developing brain, for instance—but parents looking for guidance on avoiding these pitfalls will be disappointed. Parents and teens may balk at the heavily risk-oriented perspective Jensen takes throughout, which gives regrettably short shrift to the more positive flip side of the teen scene: extraordinary creativity, energy and learning capacity.
More at home in college classrooms than on parents' nightstands.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0062067845
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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