An accessible and intriguing call to rethink the traditional college student’s experience.
Two neuroscientists make a compelling case that higher education must move beyond classroom learning.
Stellar and Eggan, both neuroscientists with backgrounds as “rat scientists,” bring a distinctive perspective to higher education, drawing on their expertise in decision-making behavior to argue for cultivating what they call “professional wisdom.” As they define it, professional wisdom is “a combination of intellectual and intuitive reasoning that grows out of both academic knowledge and practical application.” In other words, practical wisdom is the maturity that allows students to go beyond classroom theories and facts to apply knowledge persuasively and effectively in the world. Developing this skill, the authors argue, requires going beyond the classroom and engaging in hands-on opportunities, such as internships, volunteer work, shadowing, and study abroad programs. Stellar, who served as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northeastern University, saw firsthand how experiential learning shaped students’ choices in an institutional model where classwork was integrated with extended, paid internships. The authors ground their argument in neuroscience and insight from such diverse thinkers as Confucius, Pascal, and Harvard social psychologist Dan Gilbert. Most important to their argument is the concept of fast and slow thinking originated by Daniel Kahneman in his bestselling Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011). Kahneman distinguishes between the brain’s fast, intuitive system and its slower, rational system, a model the authors use to show how higher education has long privileged deliberation while overlooking the intuitive and emotional processes that also shape decision-making. Against this imbalance, they argue for the importance of direct experiences, which generate implicit emotional responses that students can later reflect on consciously and explicitly in order to make wiser choices for themselves. To bring this to life, the authors provide a range of useful examples—both real and fictive—illustrating how professional wisdom develops through practice and reflection in real-world contexts. In later chapters, the authors then extend this argument to the challenges of remote learning and AI, urging educators to design assignments and use new tools in ways that keep students engaged and growing in professional wisdom.
Throughout, the authors balance science with real-world examples, the occasional fictional anecdote or thought experiment, and persuasive argumentation. They explain the workings of the brain in an accessible way, pitched to the general reader who may have only a passing knowledge of neuroscience, though some familiarity with brain regions helps. Occasionally, the prose becomes more technical: “We have connectivity from the deeper, emotional implicit brain and the higher, more sophisticated and analytical explicit brain. And these regions communicate. The ultimate decision that is made is a result of combining our inner limbic information with our more sophisticated cortex for evaluation and analysis.” While the book seems aimed at those working in higher education, it remains a fascinating, useful read for high school students considering college, as well as parents, advisers, and anyone interested in how learning truly works.
An accessible and intriguing call to rethink the traditional college student’s experience.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9781646872046
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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