A tour-de-force intertwining of the clinical, the personal, the fictive, and the philosophical that doesn’t always satisfy,...
A British neuropsychologist puts himself in the picture here, revealing his idiosyncrasies and worrying the issue of what we mean by “self” rather than simply presenting a random sample of bizarre cases.
To be sure, the bizarre is there. A right-frontal brain injury leaves one man bereft of emotions and hard-put to start anything. Another, with a mirror-image, left-brain injury, is helpless to prevent emotionally gushing behavior. An autistic patient has a touch of idiot savantism; another woman believes she is dead; a stroke victim confabulates, speaking volumes of made-up stories about herself. Through all these cases runs the common thread of an altered self. Like all good neuroscientists, Broks eschews Cartesian dualism; for him, there is no such thing as a soul, no mind, no “I” apart from the “meat” of the brain. Consciousness too, is a puzzle, as is the idea that the body is the embodiment of self: the boundaries are too fuzzy. These ponderings have an unsettling effect on the reader. We share Broks’s doubts that science can master the enigmas and follow him as he pursues other strange behaviors, including hallucinations and out-of-body sensations. An interesting essay on Robert Louis Stevenson points out that the ideas for stories like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde often came to him in vivid dreams. A science-fiction piece ponders what might happen in space travel if, by some mistake the self that was supposed to disintegrate and re-form on Mars doesn’t, so there are two not quite identical self replicas. Broks has been called the new Oliver Sacks, but he’s not. They both display empathy and intellectual curiosity, but while Sacks is always lyrical yet exact, Broks writes like an impressionist painter, splashing his canvas with vivid colors that capture a moment with emotional force and mystery.
A tour-de-force intertwining of the clinical, the personal, the fictive, and the philosophical that doesn’t always satisfy, but certainly keeps the pages turning.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-87113-901-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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