A lively, balanced re-examination of the traditional mind-body issue in light of modern advances in neuroscience.
“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 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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