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THE MYTH OF IRRATIONALITY

Name: THE MYTH OF IRRATIONALITY
Author: John McCrone
ISBN: 0-7867-0067-X

THE SCIENCE OF THE MIND FROM PLATO TO STAR TREK

by John McCrone ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 15, 1994

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A sometimes intriguing, if uninspired, examination of the history of psychology and the workings of the human mind. McCrone, a science and technology writer based in England, returns to the turf of his previous book, The Ape that Spoke (1991), to examine the mind and the importance of language in shaping our ability to think. He argues that all of our higher faculties are language-driven abilities that we learn as children. McCrone claims that this is distinct from the theory promulgated throughout history about human capacity for creativity and inspiration. He blames Plato for creating the tripartite fiction that the mind is divided into base appetites (the animal in us), rationality, and higher abilities that are the divine spark in us. The myth, perpetuated by Romantics like Rousseau and codified by Freud in his theories of the unconscious, is that some mysterious ability to be irrational allows humans to transcend themselves. In reality, says McCrone, the mind is only a twofold mechanism with its animal, instinctual ``hardware'' and its socially conditioned ``software'' driven by our ability to use language to order the stream of consciousness. Beyond the basics, everything is driven by culture. Language ability must be learned when one is a small child or it can never be fully acquired. As evidence, the author delves into the reported cases of feral children, who have grown up in the wild deprived of human contact. He also examines seemingly ``mysterious'' examples of supposed irrationality, such as dreams, insanity, emotions, and ``peak'' experiences (in which reality is heightened) to demonstrate how they can be explained by his scheme. McCrone claims the stakes are high and that a new view of the mind is sorely needed. Caricaturing his opponents, he does little but rehash the Enlightenment view of the self without bringing much new to the table.

Pub Date: Aug. 15, 1994

ISBN: 0-7867-0067-X

Page Count: 352

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994

Categories:

PSYCHOLOGY

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MASTERY

by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2012

Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...

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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

Categories:

PSYCHOLOGY | SELF-HELP

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THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

by Daniel Kahneman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...

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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.