Maybe a little too overemphatic on the virtues of imagery, but on the whole a useful corrective to word-driven worldviews.
We all need a strong dose of nonverbal imagery to make us better learners, copers, and all-round human beings, asserts Robertson (Psychology/Trinity College) in a work that’s half do-it-yourself, half explanatory neuroscience.
It’s all well and good that we are early weaned to the Word, states the Dublin-based author, but in the process we lose a rich store of imagery from eyes, ears, touch, taste, and smell that could enrich our lives and improve thought, memory, health, creativity, and all manner of mental and physical skills. Robertson leads with Robert Graves’s poem “The Cool Web,” which contrasts children’s raw sensuous experiences with our learned “cool web of language [that] winds us in,” and uses this as a refrain throughout chapters reviewing how the brain processes language, sensory input, memory, and emotion. He also provides tests designed to stretch readers’ abilities at imagery, sometimes by guided reading, other times by asking what connections a person can make from arbitrary collections of words, letters, or shapes. The author makes the point that storing images along with verbal details facilitates memory and learning by expanding the neural circuitry engaged in the processes. He acknowledges that imagery can be a two-edged sword for the nervous speaker who imagines paralyzing stage fright or the dental phobic who hears the whine of the drill, and that memories can be implanted by the interrogators of young children or criminal suspects. In later chapters, Robertson discusses how imagery can reduce stress, control pain, mitigate effects of cancer treatment, and improve athletic skills. He comments that hypnosis appears to tap into an individual’s readiness to experience the sensations suggested by the hypnotist. In the final section he discusses the sense of self and alternative states of subjective reality. He concludes with an argument that science and religion are intrinsically incompatible, insofar as one is logic-based and the other image-driven.
Maybe a little too overemphatic on the virtues of imagery, but on the whole a useful corrective to word-driven worldviews.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30657-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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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