A choice example of science writing that entertains as it educates.
An explication of sleep that not only reveals its mysteries but sings its praises.
For Martin (The Healing Mind, 1998, etc.), a behavioral biologist, sleep is a form of behavior so familiar to us that we take it for granted, remaining woefully ignorant of its significance in our lives. His mission is to enlighten, to share with nonscientists what science has learned about the phenomenon, and to encourage us to value sleep and revel in its pleasures. Sleep deprivation is a sad fact of too many lives in the industrialized world, he notes, and the consequences can be alarming, especially when the sleep-deprived are making life-and-death decisions in hospitals, vehicles, or the corridors of power. Excerpts from Charles Lindbergh’s account of his solo transatlantic flight show just how dangerous sleepiness can be. Martin frequently turns to literature to illustrate his points. His text is larded with apt quotes and examples from Shakespeare, Pepys, Coleridge, Dickens, and a host of others. After a thorough examination of sleep deprivation and its hazards, he considers and explains the mechanisms of sleep, the various factors that promote or prevent sleep, and the nature of dreams. The latter includes a fascinating discussion of lucid, or self-aware, dreams and of how to foster them. Martin looks at various theories of the biological function of sleep, seeing as plausible the idea that the two different stages of sleep are involved in the storage and consolidation of two different kinds of memory: declarative, or “knowing that,” and procedural, or “knowing how.” Students pulling all-nighters before exams are advised to get a good night’s sleep instead. Sleepwalking, nightmares, insomnia, snoring, apnea, and other nighttime problems also get his attention. An unexpected bonus is a capsule history of beds from the elegant royal ones of King Tutankhamen of the 14th century b.c. to Howard Hughes’s mobile bed, a sleeping machine powered by 30 electric motors and equipped with hot and cold running water.
A choice example of science writing that entertains as it educates.Pub Date: July 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-32743-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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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