Psychopharmacologist Siegel (Fire in the Brain, 1992) hosts his readers on a trip through the minds of the mentally ill, and in some cases makes the journey himself, providing a travelogue. Siegel's greatest virtue is his ability to understand his subjects' paranoia, and he explains how he often became ``infected'' with it himself, sometimes accidentally and sometimes by purposefully repeating his subjects' experiences, such as the train trip of Mario N., who had a cocaine-related paranoid episode on a train that led him to shoot his sister and allow his infant nephew to die from dehydration; listening to police surveillance tapes, Siegel re-creates the conditions of sleep and sensory deprivation that Mario experienced. Siegel does not shy away from personal asides during these stories, nor from the occasional wisecrack (in a disclaimer in the introduction he calls this humor ``a defensive projection''). He profiles a graduate student named Mark Steiner who invites him to see Hitler's brain in a basement laboratory, only to reveal that he has programmed a computer to respond to questions exactly as Hitler—whose paranoid pathology Siegel convincingly describes—would have. Eddie Tolman wears underwear made of aluminum foil to defend himself against the electronic rays that he believes are being aimed at him, a belief that most likely stems partly from the accidental deaths of his pet hamsters when he was a child. Elderly Lillian Rush believes that her dentist has implanted devices in her teeth that cause her to hear whispering noises. Siegel also reports on a series of subjects experiencing paranoid reactions from cocaine use: some feel bugs on them, others see worms, dwarves, and sadistic cats attacking. This is the least interesting group, since their experiences are all fairly similar. Scary and often gruesome, but fascinating.
Pub Date: June 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-517-59239-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1994
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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