An intriguing look at how what enters our ears shapes our minds.
Liberace or Lyle Lovett? What we listen to speaks volumes about us.
In this blend of neuroscience and audiophilia, Rogers, who describes herself as “one of the very few successful female record producers in the profoundly male-dominated industry,” has spent a lot of time thinking about the meaning of listening to music. One of her great conversation starters is a “record pull,” asking the person or people you’re with to play their favorite tunes and, in turn, putting yours on the table in a fearless exercise in “self-discovery.” The records you offer have predictive value. For example, if you like David Bowie, you might like Lou Reed—whom Rogers declined to work with on the grounds that she was a little too methodical for the improvisational project he had in mind. Writing with neuroscientist Ogas, Rogers identifies seven dimensions that shape our understanding and appreciation of music, four of them musical (melody, lyrics, rhythm, and timbre) and three “aesthetic” (authenticity, realism, and novelty). Some are obvious: The songs we walk away humming or dancing to catch us in just the right way. The aesthetic dimensions are subtler. On the matter of authenticity, Rogers holds up the example of the supremely horrible band the Shaggs, who made up in fearlessness what they couldn’t muster in musical skill (“Incompetence. Embarrassing, unsalvageable, breathtaking incompetence”). Interestingly, Rogers argues that nature and nurture play roles in determining musical taste. We have a certain genetic propensity for some kinds of music, but more to the point, it’s experience and exposure that help shape our tolerance for novelty (Zappa or Stockhausen, anyone?) and desire for believability (Hank Williams versus, say, Milli Vanilli). Refreshingly, Rogers urges that we rid ourselves of snobbery, for musical taste is broadly various: “It is the limitless diversity of listener profiles that fuels the infinitely rich art form we love.”
An intriguing look at how what enters our ears shapes our minds.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-393-54125-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
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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