Fodder strictly for the if-you-want-to-believe-it-it’s-true crowd.
Indefatigable seventh-sense investigator Sheldrake mines his earlier works on prescient and telepathic abilities to update followers on his latest data and theories.
Never had a sense of being stared at? According to Sheldrake (Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, 1999, etc.), this puts you in a minority—along with those who shrug off déjà vu experiences as coincidence, can recall many times when they thought of a long-lost friend who didn’t telephone soon after, or do not find Fido waiting patiently at the door when arriving at an odd hour. This is not to say that there aren’t seemingly paranormal events worth studying. Some animals do display disturbed behavior before earthquakes; herd/homing/flight formation and migratory behaviors of many species are impressive; social insects do seem to act as one body. However, science can explain at least some of these behaviors by detailing the exquisite sensory mechanisms of various species, including an awareness of magnetic fields, and acute olfactory, vibratory, or infrared sensibility, and probably more to be discovered. One does not have to resort, as Sheldrake does, to “morphic fields” that stretch out from one body to co-mingle with another (especially among people who are emotionally close) or invoke a new (actually old) theory of vision that recognizes the role of light entering the eye but goes on to assert that the eye then projects outward to create the visual world as we see it, a notion that affords the eye power to exert malignant influences (as in the “evil eye”). As always, there are reports galore of positive responses to questionnaires on what people believe, countless controlled experiments where the probability of the positive result occurring by chance is one in a zillion, and the favorite caveat is that if, for example, a staring experiment didn’t bear fruit it was because the starer was not very good.
Fodder strictly for the if-you-want-to-believe-it-it’s-true crowd.Pub Date: March 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-609-60807-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
A riveting look inside the human brain and its quirks.
Acclaimed British neurologist Sacks (Neurology and Psychiatry/Columbia Univ.; The Mind’s Eye, 2010, etc.) delves into the many different sorts of hallucinations that can be generated by the human mind.
The author assembles a wide range of case studies in hallucinations—seeing, hearing or otherwise perceiving things that aren’t there—and the varying brain quirks and disorders that cause them in patients who are otherwise mentally healthy. In each case, he presents a fascinating condition and then expounds on the neurological causes at work, drawing from his own work as a neurologist, as well as other case studies, letters from patients and even historical records and literature. For example, he tells the story of an elderly blind woman who “saw” strange people and animals in her room, caused by Charles Bonnet Syndrome, a condition in with the parts of the brain responsible for vision draw on memories instead of visual perceptions. In another chapter, Sacks recalls his own experimentation with drugs, describing his auditory hallucinations. He believed he heard his neighbors drop by for breakfast, and he cooked for them, “put their ham and eggs on a tray, walked into the living room—and found it completely empty.” He also tells of hallucinations in people who have undergone prolonged sensory deprivation and in those who suffer from Parkinson’s disease, migraines, epilepsy and narcolepsy, among other conditions. Although this collection of disorders feels somewhat formulaic, it’s a formula that has served Sacks well in several previous books (especially his 1985 bestseller The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat), and it’s still effective—largely because Sacks never turns exploitative, instead sketching out each illness with compassion and thoughtful prose.
A riveting look inside the human brain and its quirks.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-95724-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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