A rich, sophisticated argument that may leave pious souls a little uneasy.
The well-published MIT cognitive scientist and linguist (How the Mind Works, 1997, etc.) takes on one of philosophy’s thorniest problems in this lucid view of what makes humans human.
Against scholars and ideologues of the left and right, Pinker offers a profoundly biological view of human nature, even if his descriptions of what make us tick sometimes sound as if they’re straight out of a software manual. Pinker describes the brain, for instance, as a set of data-processing modules, “with many parts cooperating to generate a train of thought or an organized action. It has distinct information-processing systems for filtering out distractions, learning skills, controlling the body, remembering facts, holding information temporarily, and storing and executing rules.” Far from a tabula rasa, the brain is hard-wired with genetic information millennia old, governing our responses to events: altruism here, perhaps, or violence there. Psychologists believe that the human personality is variable in only five general dimensions, each governed by genetics: “we are to varying degrees introverted or extroverted, neurotic or stable, incurious or open to experience, agreeable or antagonistic, and conscientious or undirected.” (A shy, neurotic, agoraphobic, narcissistic, and wholly unreliable person, then, can take comfort in blaming his or her unpleasant makeup on generations of ancestors.) The implications of the biological view are many and large, and thus are the subject of fierce debate: if we are but a set of electrochemical circuits heavily programmed to behave according to a simple set of rules, then free choice and moral responsibility go out the window. Yet, Pinker remarks before examining the political and philosophical consequences of this position, “Nothing prevents the godless and amoral process of natural selection from evolving a big-brained social species equipped with an elaborate moral sense”—perhaps too much moral sense, he adds. His conclusions won’t please exponents of several camps, Christian conservatives and what he calls “gender feminists” among them, but he ably defends his ground, and with a minimum of jargon and scholarly sophistry.
A rich, sophisticated argument that may leave pious souls a little uneasy.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03151-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
A harrowing tale of one woman's journey into the depths of her own psychosis.
The author of Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (2005) searches for the root of her unbridled anger.
In the prologue, Zailckas sums up the impetus behind her second memoir: “I set out to write an objective book about modern remedies for anger and I ended up with an achingly personal account of why I went looking for remedies in the first place.” The story begins at the author’s low point—fresh from a break-up overseas—and quickly sweeps the reader into her desperate search for acceptance and compassion from a family that had rarely shown either. Her rocker ex-boyfriend—whom she humorously nicknames “the Lark” (“he shared the bird's talents for both singing and flight”)—was not the cause of her rage, however, but rather the entry point that allowed Zailckas to delve deeper into the anger issues that have long haunted her. While the author’s brutal depictions of rage—regularly directed at loved ones and strangers alike—often leaves the reader feeling slightly disgusted by the her egregious behavior, these strong feelings are the result of the reader's investment in the outcome. When Zailckas's therapist asked her to construct a personal ad, the author was unsure how to proceed: “Stunted rage-a-phobe seeks mother substitute for validation eternal? Must enjoy impassivity, mixed messages, and occasional blasts of displaced aggression?” Her sharp sense of self-deprecation, while comically dark, passes far beyond the boundaries of humor into a terrain of frank, and often brutal, self-assessment. Throughout, Zailckas is keenly aware of her inability to cope with anger. While the trajectory of this anger shifts from her boyfriend to her family, with the help of her therapist, she eventually hones in on its true source—her mother. Yet as the reader soon learns, discovering the source of her anger is only the first small step toward ridding herself of the problem.
A harrowing tale of one woman's journey into the depths of her own psychosis.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02230-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
An absorbing survey of knowledge in the relatively neglected area of experimental (as opposed to clinical, or psychotherapeutic) psychology. A cognitive-science researcher at the University of Arizona who also has taught at Yale, Cummins surveys such disparate fields as psychoneurology; human's development, beginning in infancy, of complex symbolic systems (most notably, language and mathematics); human brains and cognitive systems as compared with those of chimpanzees and other highly intelligent animals; and group psychology. In a particularly interesting chapter on the latter, the author introduces us to ``pluralistic ignorance''; this refers to the concept that one person's passivity in the face of another's real crisis (such as a mugging or serious car accident) is reinforced if others also treat the crisis as a nonproblem or at least as one that doesn't concern them. Cummins's chapters detailing scientific findings on the evolution and nature of human language and thinking conclude with the observation that ``except for language, we are dismally poor symbolic thinkers,'' although we're better ``pattern recognizers and classifiers.'' Cummins draws upon and summarizes well an impressively varied amount of scientific data. Her book's only real shortcoming is a tendency sometimes to be nonspecific in reporting on data; she notes, for instance, that characteristic A occurs more frequently than characteristic B without specifying how much more. On balance, though, her style is admirably clear and succinct. Cummins may not be as colorful a writer as, say, Oliver Sacks, but she holds the reader's attention while covering a great deal more ground. Her fine work makes the sometimes dry and forbidding field of experimental psychology accessible and even quite engrossing to the layperson. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13577-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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