SEVEN AND A HALF LESSONS ABOUT THE BRAIN

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SEVEN AND A HALF LESSONS ABOUT THE BRAIN

Name: SEVEN AND A HALF LESSONS ABOUT THE BRAIN
Author: Lisa Feldman Barrett
ISBN: 978-0-358-15714-4

by Lisa Feldman Barrett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 17, 2020

Outstanding popular science.

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An excellent education in brain science in seven short chapters and an introduction. Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern who also has appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, clearly knows her neuroscience. However, like in How Emotions Are Made (2017), the author deftly employs metaphor and anecdote to deliver an insightful overview of her favorite subject. Until a few decades ago, scientists divided the brain into three layers. The core consisted of the “lizard brain,” controlling basic drives such as feeding, aggression, and mating. Around 100 million years ago, mammals evolved. A mammal experiences emotions, so evolution added a layer, the limbic system, to govern them. A few hundred thousand years ago, humans acquired an outer layer—the neocortex, or grey matter—that keeps lower levels in check and allows us to be creative, rational, and highly social. In reality, Barrett writes, our brain contains no new parts, and its neurons operate no differently than those of a fish or flea. It is not even the most highly evolved—only superbly evolved for what humans do. Humans are great thinkers, but the author maintains that brains did not evolve to think but to “control your body…by predicting energy needs before they arrive so you can efficiently make worthwhile movements and survive.” Readers will agree that our senses provide essential information for prediction but may be surprised when Barrett explains that experience (i.e., memory) plays an equally vital role. A glass of water relieves your thirst immediately, but it takes 20 minutes for the water to reach your bloodstream. Your brain, predicting correctly, turns off your thirst. The narrative is so short and sweet that most readers will continue to the 35-page appendix, in which the author delves more deeply, but with no less clarity, into topics ranging from teleology to the Myers-Briggs personality test to “Plato’s writings about the human psyche." Outstanding popular science.

Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-358-15714-4

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020

Categories:

HEALTH & FITNESS | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | PSYCHOLOGY

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New York Times Bestseller

ELON MUSK

by Walter Isaacson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 2023

Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.

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Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2023

New York Times Bestseller

A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.

To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.

Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.

Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023

ISBN: 9781982181284

Page Count: 688

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023

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THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

by Daniel Kahneman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...

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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.