Insightful stuff for readers immersed in the labyrinthine world of neuroscience.
How a collection of identical cells takes in information and generates intelligence.
Entrepreneur and computer engineer Hawkins’ enthusiasm comes through in TED talks and an earlier bestseller (On Intelligence, 2004), and neuroscientists take him seriously—though readers new to the subject may have a more difficult time digesting the complex information. The author focuses on the neocortex. Only mammals have one, but all animals possess a deeper “reptilian” brain designed to ensure survival and reproduction. The neocortex allows humans to “devote our lives to philosophy, mathematics, poetry, astrophysics, music, geology, or the warmth of human love, in defiance of the old brain’s genetic urging” that we should be spending time “fighting rivals and pursuing multiple sexual partners.” Hawkins adds that all thoughts and actions result from activity and the connections among neurons. Every element of intelligence—seeing, touching, language, thought—is fundamentally the same. The author’s intriguing thousand brains theory maintains that identical structures called “reference frames” occur throughout the neocortex. All take in sensory information “to model everything we know, not just physical objects,” and “all knowledge is stored at locations relative to reference frames.” Nothing enters our skull but electrical spikes, so this model is a simulation. It’s usually accurate, but humans perceive lots of nonsense and false beliefs, which have become threats to our long-term survival. Modern life remains a battle between the neocortex (knowledge) and the old brain (competition, survival). Usefully, Hawkins then applies his theory to machine intelligence. Computers store knowledge but lack reference frames and the ability to model: “Nothing we call AI today is intelligent.” Humans are intelligent because we can learn to do practically anything. Computers do one thing, although they do it far better than humans. There is no “deep learning,” only access to immense amounts of data, and future intelligent machines will be more like humans, and “success…could be a machine that has the abilities of a five-year-old child.” Richard Dawkins provides the foreword.
Insightful stuff for readers immersed in the labyrinthine world of neuroscience.Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5416-7581-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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