An animated introduction to the neuroscience of sensory perception with broad appeal to artists, musicians, and other...
You don’t need a brain to sense what’s going on around you—though it helps.
Consciousness may be reserved for creatures with more brainpower than paramecia possess, but there are still at least 100 million microbial species that can process sensory information about their environments. “So why all the fuss about brains?” asks genomics researcher DeSalle (co-author: Welcome to the Microbiome, 2015, etc.), curator of the American Museum of Natural History. It’s a good question, one answer to which is that information about how we sense is most often the product of neuroscientific research. Such research tells us, for instance, that in the resting state, our brains trundle along at about 70 millivolts, while when they’re agitated, they go up by 40 millivolts or so, a matter of “action potential” that has bearing on how the nervous, sensory, and motor systems interact. Given that there are 6,393 synapses connecting the 279 cells of the nematode nervous system, our own electronic wiring scheme begins to look impossibly complex. There, again, neuroscience has mapped out how sensory information arrives in the human brain and how it travels along neural pathways depending on what kind it is—if visual, for instance, along “nerve cells coming from the eye [that] are bundled into rather large neural structures, the optic nerves.” There are no end of possibilities for going haywire, but amazingly, we get it right most of the time. DeSalle’s text is written at a high level of scientific sophistication, requiring scientific literacy to follow the argument. Even so, he is light-handed enough to use Spinal Tap guitarist Nigel Tufnel’s this-amp-goes-to-11 shtick to explain “crossmodality,” and he peppers his text with nice bits of learned trivia, such as the different color perception systems of monkeys and human artists, the lack of balance in tree sloths, and the like.
An animated introduction to the neuroscience of sensory perception with broad appeal to artists, musicians, and other consumers and generators of brainpower.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-300-23019-2
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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