Sound research and informed speculation best suited to an academic audience.
If you can read the signs, boredom might just be your friend.
Boredom, note the authors, betrays a fundamental human need to be engaged with the world and to have agency in our actions. Taking a psychological approach to a universal condition, Danckert, a cognitive neuroscientist, and Eastwood, a clinical psychologist, seek to unify a fragmented area of inquiry and provide a framework for further study. The authors loosely define boredom as having the desire to do something but being unmoved by the options open to you in the moment. It is a subject full of both obvious and counterintuitive features (a little obvious in some of the authors’ discussions). Boredom is sending us a message, write the authors, and it’s anticipatory, a call to act. But boredom is biological, and our strategies for dealing with it are subject to paradox: “Our drive to avoid the distress of being bored can lead us to some dark places”—e.g., internet addiction and isolation. The authors claim that research suggests boredom is both a transient state and a disposition, that some of us are more prone to boredom than others, and that age is one of many factors—again, rather self-evident. While there is much of value in their presentation and the analyses of the work of other researchers, complete with a bevy of potentially useful insights, lay readers will have to hack through thickets of repetition to find it. With minor variations, Danckert and Eastwood tend to establish the same definitions and make the same points over and over. This is all clearly fascinating to the authors, who demonstrate their enthusiasm, and doubtless to colleagues involved in the subject, but one can’t escape the feeling that this entire book could have been distilled quite effectively into 50 pages.
Sound research and informed speculation best suited to an academic audience. (6 photos; 2 illustrations)Pub Date: June 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-674-98467-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A sharp compendium of dreamy visions that could only have come from the iconic cartoonist’s sleeping mind.
The renowned cartoonist taps into Freud, Jung, and Kabbalah to discuss what happens when the head hits the pillow.
Chast, famed New Yorker cartoonist and winner of the inaugural Kirkus Prize for Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? makes it clear that while your own dreams may be inherently interesting, listening to other’ dreams is markedly not. Thankfully, the author’s thumbnail depictions of dreams that span a cross section of her bedside dream journal bring just enough humor and wit for readers to be charmed instantly. “This book is dedicated to the Dream District of our brains,” writes the author, “that weird and uncolonized area where anything can happen, from the sublime to the mundane to the ridiculous to the off-the-charts bats.” Familiar classics—“alone at a party,” “teeth falling out”—sit alongside the bizarre and hilarious—e.g., “too many birds not enough cages.” Even actor Wallace Shawn, son of former New Yorker editor William Shawn, makes an appearance: “He and I were walking down Main Street in a town in Connecticut and I needed to point something out to him: ‘Look, It’s a Broccoli Patch!’ ” From “Recurring Dreams” to “Nightmares” to “Dream Fragments or Ones That Got Away,” Chast explores beyond the first blush of the strange and personal in dreams. She writes, “here’s what’s interesting: dreams come out of my brain…as I sleep, I am creating them…so why, as they unfold, am I always so surprised?!??” The author reaches for answers beyond Freud and Jung to a wider range of insights from Kabbalah, Aristotle, neuroscientists, molecular biologists, and more. Illustrations and visual storytelling weave together a broad range of content on dreams that offers insight while never feeling burdensome or overly analytical. Easy on the eyes and witty, this book will have readers reaching for their own dream journals.
A sharp compendium of dreamy visions that could only have come from the iconic cartoonist’s sleeping mind.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781620403228
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
Mixing science, metaphors, and philosophy, House provides elegant frameworks for ways to think about thinking.
An exploration of the possibilities of consciousness.
House, a neuroscientist whose research focuses on the nature of free will, tackles a knotty subject in a series of essays on the latest science in the field. He also uses extended anecdotes that put complex concepts into accessible terms even while acknowledging that there are no easy answers in the study of consciousness. Consider different translations of a poem: Each has something relevant to say, but none can entirely capture the essence. House repeatedly returns to a case in which a woman was undergoing brain surgery to address epilepsy. At one point, the surgeons touched a part of the brain that made her laugh. Did this indicate that emotional responses are simply an aspect of the physical matter inside our skulls? In another essay, House discusses his interviews with a man who had a substantial part of his brain removed to get to a tumor, yet he seemed unaffected aside from finding it more difficult to play the piano. The author, whose investigations recall Oliver Sacks, also digs into processes of learning: Is the human mind a learning machine, and did the learning process begin when a certain level of environmental awareness was necessary for survival? Did it develop through stages to its current level? Does it simply absorb sensory inputs, editing out useless or redundant material? House makes an interesting detour to wonder if a society of blind people could deduce the existence of the moon, while other essays look at the functioning of memory and prediction, which takes up a remarkable amount of the brain’s capacity. There is also a theory that consciousness links to movement, which is one of the most essential, if often unconscious, aspects of brain function. Though the author occasionally gets lost in his own musings, he offers readers plenty of fascinating questions about the brain, the mind, and the soul.
Mixing science, metaphors, and philosophy, House provides elegant frameworks for ways to think about thinking.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-15117-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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