SEVEN AND A HALF LESSONS ABOUT THE BRAIN

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SEVEN AND A HALF LESSONS ABOUT THE BRAIN

Name: SEVEN AND A HALF LESSONS ABOUT THE BRAIN
Author: Lisa Feldman Barrett
ISBN: 978-0-358-15714-4

by Lisa Feldman Barrett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 17, 2020

Outstanding popular science.

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An excellent education in brain science in seven short chapters and an introduction. Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern who also has appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, clearly knows her neuroscience. However, like in How Emotions Are Made (2017), the author deftly employs metaphor and anecdote to deliver an insightful overview of her favorite subject. Until a few decades ago, scientists divided the brain into three layers. The core consisted of the “lizard brain,” controlling basic drives such as feeding, aggression, and mating. Around 100 million years ago, mammals evolved. A mammal experiences emotions, so evolution added a layer, the limbic system, to govern them. A few hundred thousand years ago, humans acquired an outer layer—the neocortex, or grey matter—that keeps lower levels in check and allows us to be creative, rational, and highly social. In reality, Barrett writes, our brain contains no new parts, and its neurons operate no differently than those of a fish or flea. It is not even the most highly evolved—only superbly evolved for what humans do. Humans are great thinkers, but the author maintains that brains did not evolve to think but to “control your body…by predicting energy needs before they arrive so you can efficiently make worthwhile movements and survive.” Readers will agree that our senses provide essential information for prediction but may be surprised when Barrett explains that experience (i.e., memory) plays an equally vital role. A glass of water relieves your thirst immediately, but it takes 20 minutes for the water to reach your bloodstream. Your brain, predicting correctly, turns off your thirst. The narrative is so short and sweet that most readers will continue to the 35-page appendix, in which the author delves more deeply, but with no less clarity, into topics ranging from teleology to the Myers-Briggs personality test to “Plato’s writings about the human psyche." Outstanding popular science.

Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-358-15714-4

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020

Categories:

HEALTH & FITNESS | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | PSYCHOLOGY

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THE 48 LAWS OF POWER

by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998

If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.

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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.

Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.

If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-670-88146-5

Page Count: 430

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY

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THE LAWS OF HUMAN NATURE
by Robert Greene

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MASTERY
by Robert Greene

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Drake Producing 48 Laws of Power Show

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STRONG FEMALE CHARACTER

by Fern Brady ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 6, 2023

An unflinching self-portrait.

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The tumultuous life of a bisexual, autistic comic.

In her debut memoir, Scottish comedian Brady recounts the emotional turmoil of living with undiagnosed autism. “The public perception of autistics is so heavily based on the stereotype of men who love trains or science,” she writes, “that many women miss out on diagnosis and are thought of as studious instead.” She was nothing if not studious, obsessively focused on foreign languages, but she found it difficult to converse in her own language. From novels, she tried to gain “knowledge about people, about how they spoke to each other, learning turns of phrase and metaphor” that others found so familiar. Often frustrated and overwhelmed by sensory overload, she erupted in violent meltdowns. Her parents, dealing with behavior they didn’t understand—including self-cutting—sent her to “a high-security mental hospital” as a day patient. Even there, a diagnosis eluded her; she was not accurately diagnosed until she was 34. Although intimate friendships were difficult, she depicts her uninhibited sexuality and sometimes raucous affairs with both men and women. “I grew up confident about my queerness,” she writes, partly because of “autism’s lack of regard for social norms.” While at the University of Edinburgh, she supported herself as a stripper. “I liked that in a strip club men’s contempt of you was out in the open,” she admits. “In the outside world, misogyny was always hovering in your peripheral vision.” When she worked as a reporter for the university newspaper, she was assigned to try a stint as a stand-up comic and write about it; she found it was work she loved. After “about a thousand gigs in grim little pubs across England,” she landed an agent and embarked on a successful career. Although Brady hopes her memoir will “make things feel better for the next autistic or misfit girl,” her anger is as evident as her compassion.

An unflinching self-portrait.