Especially informative for parents and educators in preparing children for the challenges ahead.
Challenging the notion that talent is innate.
“The most important gifts we can give our children are confidence in their ability to remake themselves again and again and the tools with which to do that job,” writes Ericsson (Psychology/Florida State Univ.; editor: The Road to Excellence: The Acquisition of Expertise Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports and Games, 2014, etc.), assisted in this book by science writer Pool (Beyond Engineering: How Society Shapes Technology, 1999, etc.). The plasticity of the human brain, coupled with directed training and practice, is the key. Ericsson joins an increasing number of educators who focus on the importance of what he calls “deliberate practice” in achieving expertise in fields such as music and sports. This practice is best begun at an early age, so children can hone specific skills and also gain the ability to “remake themselves again and again,” as circumstances change. This is a matter of practical training, not just the assimilation of abstract knowledge. It demands embarking on a realistic path to achieving a specific goal by achieving mastery of successively more difficult specific skills, and it involves a combination of mental and physical training. The idea that individual differences in ability are not genetically determined or hard-wired into the human brain has only been widely accepted in this century. Previously, talent was thought to be genetically determined so that “learning was just a way of fulfilling one's genetic potential.” Ericsson gives intriguing examples of how the visual cortex in the brain of a blind person as he or she learns Braille develops connections to the fingertips and how Mozart's achievements as a child prodigy were cultivated by his father's intensive training. The author makes a strong case that success in today's world requires a focus on practical performance, not just the accumulation of information.
Especially informative for parents and educators in preparing children for the challenges ahead.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-45623-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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