“We do not have bodies, we are bodies,” writes Claxton (Emeritus, Learning Sciences/Univ. of Winchester; The Wayward Mind: An Intimate History of the Unconscious, 2005, etc.) in this challenge to the contemporary view of what it means to be intelligent.
The author presents a strong case that “the proper substrate of the mind is not the brain alone but the entire body…a massive, seething, streaming collection of interconnected communications systems” that govern the interaction of elements within the body and how they relate to the environment as a whole. Claxton’s intent is not to demean the individual's sense of identity or intellectual activity but to enrich it to include practical activities that are often disparaged as menial in comparison to supposedly dispassionate, rational thought processes. This is what he calls “a Cinderella concept [of the body] denigrated and disdained by the fictional Ugly Sisters of Mind and Soul.” A functioning brain depends on not only chemicals—e.g. dopamine, serotonin, estrogen, and testosterone—but also a functioning immune system and sophisticated perceptual apparatus in order to maintain internal functions and responsiveness to environmental challenges. Our perception of the world allows us to plan actions and anticipate danger, intellectual activities critical to our survival and ability to reproduce. The author makes a convincing case that schematic approaches separating mental processes into different kinds of mental faculties are an improvement over the simplistic view of IQ, although they fail to give sufficient value to the practical intelligence necessary to navigate daily life. Consciousness does not reside solely in the brain as such but is “a particularly odd effluvium of perfectly explicable, material processes in the body-brain.” Claxton also discusses how the “neurochemical loops and networks” that “underpin expertise” are too intricate for verbalization, but the attempt to verbalize can foster flexibility and creativity.
A lively, balanced re-examination of the traditional mind-body issue in light of modern advances in neuroscience.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-300-20882-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Categories: PSYCHOLOGY | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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 31, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
Categories: PSYCHOLOGY | SELF-HELP
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