Not turgid enough for academia or lucid enough to be quality popular science, the book is a dense, detailed, often...
This is no self-help book but rather a rigorous scientific analysis of brain function, heavy on research and theory.
LeDoux (Neuroscience/New York Univ.; The Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are, 2002, etc.), who directs the Emotional Brain Institute at NYU and at the Nathan Kline Institute, explains that anxiety is fear in the absence of obvious danger. Modern humans face few deadly perils but “more than make up for their absence with our brain’s capacity to anticipate threats including some that may never happen.” The author stresses that fear is the end product of brain structures that generate no feelings by themselves but detect danger and orchestrate defensive responses that ensure the organism’s survival. Technical advances have given neuroscientists precise tools to investigate these structures, and psychologists have been active in the process as well. The result is a torrent of findings from neuroscientific laboratories that often conflict with psychological theories. LeDoux recounts them in often painful detail and tries, sometimes successfully, to reconcile them. In the final chapters, the author claims to offer new ways to cope. He mentions experimental, mind-altering drugs and describes how various brain structures respond to psychotherapy, and he seems particularly intrigued by the benefits of meditation. However, LeDoux is a scientist (more than 100 pages of notes and bibliography attest to his research), not a media celebrity à la Drs. Phil, Oz, and Weil, so sufferers will find no cheerful advice on banishing worry but plenty of sensible if discouraging qualifiers: “additional research will be necessary,” “not all studies have found this effect,” “this has a promising potential….”
Not turgid enough for academia or lucid enough to be quality popular science, the book is a dense, detailed, often stimulating review of how the brain processes external threats.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-670-01533-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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