Celebrates the brain’s complexity and wonder even as it demonstrates that you can get to know your mind better than you ever...
An enthusiastic invitation to explore your mind from science writer Johnson (Emergence, 2001, etc.), who takes a lucid trip through the country’s brain labs.
With the help of brain-imaging techniques and neurochemical analyses, the author believes, the tools are at hand to “open wide the mind’s cage-door,” as Keats put it. Johnson begins with biofeedback, used in lie-detector tests and in measuring brain wave activity. He quickly learns that anytime he makes a passing joke his adrenaline levels shoot up. He also learns that he can control selected brain-wave patterns and that some practitioners are using feedback devices to help kids with attention deficit disorder learn to focus. Johnson’s quest for self-knowledge eventually leads him inside an MRI brain scanner, which shows a very focused medial frontal gyrus (high-level executive function) while he is experiencing a moment of writing creativity. As these self-revelations accumulate, Johnson articulates a modular theory of the brain. There are varieties of subsystems common to our evolutionary heritage, he states; how they are orchestrated is a function of our individual hereditary and lived experience. Emotional centers are critical, deepening memories and affecting cortical reasoning activities. For example, Johnson still feels queasy when he sees a clear blue sky, because that weather pattern was etched deep into his memory on September 11, 2001. Neurochemicals like serotonin, noradrenaline, dopamine, oxytocin, endorphins, and sex hormones fuel all brain activities. Johnson explains their roles, offering an interesting aside on the “fight-or-flight” reaction to a threat, which applies to men but not necessarily to women, who may react to danger by seeking social support or “tending,” especially if they need to protect offspring. Johnson concludes the text with arguments that neuroscience is not ultrareductionist, and that even Freudian ideas can be reconciled with today’s insights.
Celebrates the brain’s complexity and wonder even as it demonstrates that you can get to know your mind better than you ever thought.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-4165-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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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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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