There have been many recent books on the workings of the mind, and while this one doesn’t quite stand out with the best of...
An exploration of recent discoveries in neuroscience and the ways in which we perceive and interpret the world.
The good news is that good news is received and processed in one part of the brain. The bad news is that bad news is received and processed in another region. Why? Sigman, the founder of the Integrative Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Buenos Aires and director of the Human Brain Project, ventures explanations for this apparent mystery, but more, he enfolds a few lessons on the controversial thesis that optimists and pessimists have different kinds of brains, much as conservatives and liberals are said to be wired differently. The author is an experimentalist with training in physics, supporting these softer interpretations with hard-edged results. One of the most on-point parts of the book is Sigman’s discussion of the application of neuroscience to general education. Dyslexia, by the author’s account, is more a phonological than a visual problem, leading him to declare, “you cannot read without being able to pronounce,” and adding, “the phonological awareness system can be stimulated before reading begins,” preparing children for reading with word games and other activities. In the larger sphere, learning a second language in very early childhood helps shatter prejudices, for even then, children discern accents and tend to trust those who sound more like them than linguistic outsiders do. The takeaway is that “revealing and understanding these predispositions can be a tool for changing them.” The idea that through its relative plasticity the child brain can be molded for the better is not new, but Sigman’s pointed examples of rational (and not so rational) decision-making, consciousness, mental states, and learning (“culture travels like a highly contagious virus”) are backed by the latest research.
There have been many recent books on the workings of the mind, and while this one doesn’t quite stand out with the best of the pack, it rewards readers with many useful insights.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-54962-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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
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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