Illuminating reading for anyone interested in the human brain.
The veteran teacher of a popular psychology course writes a book on what he taught, and it’s delightful.
Bloom, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale and author of Against Empathy and The Sweet Spot, begins with a series of compelling questions: Are we rational? What makes us happy? What do feelings accomplish? What did Freud get right? He then follows with a series of lucid stand-alone chapters that can be read in any order. He warns readers not to expect pop psychology’s emphasis on man’s “transcendent or spiritual nature.” Modern psychology is materialist (the mind as a physical entity), evolutionary (shaped by natural selection), and causal (driven by the forces of genes, culture, and experience). The author illustrates his points by discussing consciousness. Although no one fully understands it, many philosophers see consciousness as a biological phenomenon akin to digestion. Computers simulate thought processes by storing, processing, and manipulating information. They do this with dazzling speed, but it’s only a simulation, not the real thing. Talking about uploading “consciousness” into a computer is meaningless; “your consciousness is the product of your physical brain; lose the brain, lose the consciousness.” An early chapter on Freud will jolt most readers with news that he remains a major figure of university study—in the English department. Psychology students may never hear his name. Many of his ideas seem wacky; he provided little proof, and most have failed to survive the passage of time. Bloom adds that a major exception is Freud’s notion of an unconscious mind at war with itself—unnerving evidence that we are not in full control of our lives. Consistently engaging, Bloom checks all the boxes with sections on the other great men (Descartes, Skinner, Piaget) and important subjects, including language, learning, perception, and memory. Humans possess amazing abilities in this area, but our eagerness to believe nonsense is off the charts.
Illuminating reading for anyone interested in the human brain.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780063096356
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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