Not a solution to the “hard problem,” but an ingenious account of how the brain creates ourselves and our world.
A fresh look at the relationship between our brains and self-identity.
Scientists call consciousness the “hard problem” because other brain functions are easy by comparison. Berns, a professor of psychology at Emory University and author of How Dogs Love Us and What It’s Like To Be a Dog, delivers an expert and thoroughly satisfying exploration of this specific area of neuroscience. As the author points out, everyone identifies themselves via memories strung together with the stories we absorb to link the memories together. “The development of memory has received the lion’s share of attention from researchers,” writes Berns, “but a few psychologists have dedicated their careers to the equally interesting study of how children tell stories.” The brain enters the world in a rudimentary state. No one remembers their birth, and the infant brain stores no memories for its first two years, after which high-arousal events like deaths can make an impression. By age 4, the memory region of the brain, the hippocampus, is almost fully functional. Berns reminds readers that the brain evolved for survival, not accuracy. Despite resources vastly superior to those of a computer, it is incapable of taking in every perception, let alone recording them all. It takes shortcuts, inventing stories about the world based on past experience (“schemas”). Encountering something that doesn’t fit an existing schema, we may change the memory to make it fit or perhaps not remember it at all. “Who you think you are—your notion of ‘self’—is a mere cartoon, just as your notions of other people are cartoon versions of them,” writes the author. Berns ably blends scientific literature with his accounts of his interviews with experts in a variety of fields to make a compelling case that our identities, as well as our perceptions of the world, are ever changing narratives based on highly selective evidence.
Not a solution to the “hard problem,” but an ingenious account of how the brain creates ourselves and our world.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-541-60229-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
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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