A provocative examination of deep questions—not easy reading but worth sticking with, if only for the fascinating case...
Psychology and philosophy intersect in a study of mental states that raises the question of what we refer to when we say “myself.”
Ananthaswamy (The Edge of Physics, 2010, etc.) based this book on interviews with neuroscientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and a number of people who experience a range of mental conditions that include Alzheimer’s, autism, and schizophrenia. Each of these involves a departure from what we think of as normal consciousness; with Alzheimer’s, for example, the loss of memory can be equated to the erasure of much of what makes the victim a distinct individual. Many schizophrenics report that their actions are directed by someone outside themselves. More interestingly, Ananthaswamy looks at victims of several less-familiar conditions, such as Cotard’s syndrome, in which the patient believes they are dead, or victims of body integrity identity disorder, in which the patient seeks to have a body part amputated because it “doesn’t belong to them.” A network has sprung up to connect BIID patients with surgeons who will remove the offending limb; the author interviewed several who had the operation, and from their reports, it ended their distress. A different perspective on the nature of the self comes from those who report out-of-body experiences. For some of these conditions, researchers have studied brain scans to determine what regions of the brain are involved. Ananthaswamy also spends a fair amount of time on theoretical discussions of the nature of selfhood, which does little to shed light on the issues at stake. Perhaps more useful are literary connections, such as discussions of Dostoyevsky’s portrayal of ecstatic epilepsy, Aldous Huxley’s use of psychedelics, and Buddhist texts that raise the question of what the self is. But the main portions of the book are accounts of the experiences of specific patients, intriguing and disturbing at the same time.
A provocative examination of deep questions—not easy reading but worth sticking with, if only for the fascinating case studies.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95419-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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