A frightening diagnosis of a corrosive plague by an articulate expert in the field.
Something has gone seriously wrong with American society, and the root cause is digital technology.
As the director of a mental health clinic and a one-time heroin addict, Kardaras understands the nature of addiction. As he shows, social media and computer games can be as addictive and toxic as any chemical, leading to anxiety, depression, and despair. In his 2016 book, Glow Kids, the author examined the impact of the internet on children. Here, he takes a broader view, looking not just at teenagers and adults, but at society as a whole. Though he has seen many patients with borderline personality disorder, he believes that it is dramatically underreported. Many intense users of technology have fallen into a pattern of binary thinking, able to see only extremes and suffering from a lack of empathy. They are perpetually angry, fearful, and impulsive—all signs of BPD. Others have a deep sense of self-loathing and frustration, terrified that they will never meet the standards of the media influencers they follow. This has also led to political polarization, isolation, and a breakdown of long-standing social contracts. Added to the mental troubles are the physical effects of spending so much time glued to screens, particularly obesity and diabetes. Kardaras emphasizes that the effects of addiction are known by the tech companies, but they choose to do nothing because their profits are based on it. “I freely concede that we have achieved wondrous advancements in our technological abilities,” he writes. “But our species is deteriorating; we’re getting weaker, both physically and mentally.” As a therapist, he offers a plan for breaking the cycle of addiction, focused on finding a meaningful purpose and building real-life social connections. The difficulty with this is that it only works for those who want to recover, and the reality is that most tech addicts—like any other category of addict—won’t admit the problem.
A frightening diagnosis of a corrosive plague by an articulate expert in the field.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27849-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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
IN THE NEWS
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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