A fascinating view of mind that mingles culture with biology, creating a richly embroidered, albeit difficult, world.
A neurologist investigates psychogenic disorders, characterized by complex, holistic sets of symptoms that take root in a particular culture and time.
Psychosomatic suffering—“real physical symptoms that are disabling, but which are not due to disease and are understood to have a psychological or behavioural cause”—is no longer considered purely hysterical, framed in Freudian interpretation, or dismissed as simply mysterious. O’Sullivan, a London-based Irish neurologist, marches straight into this deep, strange pocket of experience. A pleasing storyteller, she puts to good use her neurological background while melding it with a closely observed appreciation of environmental, social, and cultural elements in the dissociative process. She introduces a variety of psychosomatic disturbances, beginning with resignation syndrome in Sweden, “a disorder that exclusively affects children of asylum-seeking families,” rendering them in a sleeplike state that is indecipherable with today’s instrumentation. Sadly, explanations “come with the inevitable need to apportion blame, passing judgement on the child and…family.” The author also investigates the aggressive hallucinations experienced by members of the Miskitos peoples of Nicaragua, a foreboding sleeping sickness in Kazakhstan, and many more. All lead the author to the idea of “a cultural concept of distress,” with the body intimately involved in cognition, responding to the environment, the specific circumstances of the moment “and the socially constructed ways of responding to illness.” O’Sullivan keenly explains illness templates that are coded in our brains by our sociocultural environment, so that “when you look for symptoms, you find them.” As the author connects dot after dot, she discusses the role of induced illnesses as a language of distress, in which the members of a specific community understand symptoms as metaphors of personal suffering or a way of exteriorizing a conflict. Doctors, she writes, “still struggle to appreciate the magnitude and reality of the interaction between mind, body, and the environment.”
A fascinating view of mind that mingles culture with biology, creating a richly embroidered, albeit difficult, world.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4837-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
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
IN THE NEWS
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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