An uplifting, scientifically supported guide to motivate real and lasting life changes.
Bobinet presents a self-help guide to changing negative behaviors that focuses on a newly researched part of the brain in this nonfiction work.
Based on the latest scientific findings, the author, a physician and health care executive, believes that the way we have previously been taught to change our behaviors and alter bad habits relies too heavily on “performative approaches” that essentially set us up to fail. Per Bobinet, the dopamine rushes that occur when pursuing “SMART” (“specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound”) goals don’t result in long-term success. Instead, scientists have turned their focus to the habenula, a small area located in the brain’s thalamus that “activates whenever there is perceived failure and then, often subconsciously, downregulates one’s motivation to try again.” The author explores how certain activities or events (like making New Year’s resolutions) can actually trigger the habenula in different ways and introduces a new “iterative approach” toward making lasting change that can be remembered through the acronym ITERATES (standing for Inspiration, Time, Environment, Reduce, Add, Togetherness, Expectations, and Swaps). Essentially, Bobinet posits, the key to sustaining behavioral changes is using the brain’s natural neuroplasticity and understanding how the habenula works. Some of what the author discusses is likely to sound familiar to most readers, such as the harmful effect of social media on mental health (especially for adolescents), but there is plenty of information about the habenula that is likely to be new. While scientific descriptions, cited studies, and occasional charts and graphs support Bobinet’s argument, her writing is clear enough to prove easily accessible even to readers with no science background at all. Plenty of anecdotes, as well as a keen insight into people’s internal struggles, transform a straightforward self-help guide into a motivational powerhouse: “You can’t pull up an old habit’s roots simply by forming another one on top; you’re just providing a new highway that you prefer to drive right now.”
An uplifting, scientifically supported guide to motivate real and lasting life changes.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 979-8887503684
Page Count: 208
Publisher: ForbesBooks
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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