Despite his impressive academic qualifications, Wall (Physiology/St. Thomas’s Medical School; Fellow/Royal Society) writes...
Pain is a universal experience, so everyone has strong beliefs on the subject. Wall (Defeating Pain, not reviewed) delivers an expert’s account for the general reader.
Aside from sensitive areas like politics and religion, most intelligent people enjoy discovering everything they believe is wrong. Wall overturns many popular beliefs, but he plays no favorites, and he insists that the medical profession must also rethink its ideas. We learned in medical school that pain occurs when nerve signals from injured tissue stimulate the pain center in the brain, but this turns out to be wrong. Frequently injured tissue is pain-free, but normal tissue hurts (no one suffering a backache believes his back is healthy, for example, but 85 percent of painful backs show no evidence of injury—and for headaches, this number approaches 100 percent). Yet these victims suffer genuine pain. No study reveals a single pain center in the brain; half-a-dozen areas become active when something hurts (areas that govern attention, orientation, planning for action, and bodily processes such as blood pressure and heart rate), but nothing hurts until the brain gives it a thorough evaluation. After explaining the mechanism of pain, the author turns to its relief, and, again, surprises come thick and fast. Morphine is a natural herbal remedy. Not only is it derived from a plant, but its action mimics a natural narcotic-like substance produced by the brain to modulate pain. The chapter on placebos is an eye-opener: they are, in fact, powerful remedies with significant side effects. Reacting to placebos, therefore, is not a sign that one is suggestible or weak-minded, but rather that one expects a certain outcome. Every human reacts to placebos, as do dogs and rats.
Despite his impressive academic qualifications, Wall (Physiology/St. Thomas’s Medical School; Fellow/Royal Society) writes lucidly, using vivid examples, stories from his own life, and a generous dose of personal opinions. Readers may find they know more about pain than those who should be experts—such as their doctors.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-231-12006-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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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