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
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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