A well-written exploration of the mind-body connection.
A state-of-the-science survey of how our brains enable our bodies to do their work.
When we walk toward a wall, why don’t we smack into it? Because the body has an “intelligence” that enables us to do things like translate signals about distance, materiality, proprioception, and related matters that, writes Grafton (Chair, Neuroscience/Univ. of California, Santa Barbara), “are almost primordial in their simplicity” but that encompass the whole history of evolution, “stretching all the way back to the appearance of the most basic forms of locomotion in vertebrates.” The concept of “physical intelligence” is something that has tended to be studied only in its superlative sense, in the performance of top athletes or persons placed under the most extreme of environmental conditions. In everyday cases, the mental processes used for our actions “are, more than anything, different kinds of learning machines that the brain has available for acquiring and maintaining physically derived knowledge.” A climber and distance hiker, Grafton takes many of his examples from his own experiences outdoors under conditions that sometimes invite taking things for granted but that instead require constant vigilance, the mind connecting sensory information to appropriate responses—appropriate because, so often, doing the wrong thing can lead to disaster. All of this requires sophisticated neural circuitry that in turn yields a kind of “sixth sense” whose discovery has fueled debate among philosophers and brain scientists for decades: “How could a person consciously and willfully move while being utterly unaware of her own body’s movements?” Arriving at an answer deepens our understanding of this sixth sense of movement, which turns out to be more important than the other senses in getting us around in the world. It involves such complex mental processes as being able to “conceptualize dynamic force” and areas of the brain that range from the higher-reasoning cortex to the elemental cerebellum, which "keeps track of a massive list of comparatively minor adjustments or tweaks to each movement to make them work well under a variety of conditions.”
A well-written exploration of the mind-body connection.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4732-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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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