A persuasive argument that humans are not bound to suffer from their darkest dreams.
The power of nightmares.
Humans going back to ancient civilizations have tried to interpret and find meaning in our dreams. Dreams have been thought of as divine signals, warnings, and simply things that happen to us. But what if we could seize control of them? In her exploration, sleep expert and neuroscientist Carr deftly guides the reader through the science of sleep, dreams, and how the darkest of our mind inventions can traumatize us in waking hours. Carr has spent hundreds of nights awake and working in the sleep lab during her career, watching others sleep, electrodes placed on their scalps, later working to pull apart their dreams and disturbances. At the heart of her work in the sleep lab lie three questions: Why do we dream? Why do dreams go bad? How can we harness the science of dreaming to improve our health? In her unpacking of these questions, the author carries us through a raft of complicated brain science and sleep studies in compelling, clear writing. At times, the narrative is overly dense with study details that risk losing the nonscientist reader. While most of us have been taught to believe we have no agency over our dreams, Carr argues otherwise. She presents a strong case that we have the power to harness dreams and to guide our brains away from images and stories that might harm us while awake. What unfolds is a detailed manual for the notion of “dream engineering.” Though it may seem far-fetched to some, to those who experience chronic nightmares and lucid dreaming, the concept could introduce a revolutionary practice for healing.
A persuasive argument that humans are not bound to suffer from their darkest dreams.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781250342720
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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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IN THE NEWS
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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