Full of delightful insights, this book is thoroughly researched and compulsively readable.
An absorbing account of how language wires the brain.
Marian, director of Northwestern’s Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Lab, is an expert on the relationship between language and the human brain. In this eye-opening account, she describes the results of decades of research in accessible, engaging prose. Some of the most intriguing conclusions are related to bilingualism and multilingualism, which have been shown to delay Alzheimer’s, increase the brain’s gray matter, and positively impact social cognition in children. Bilingual babies can better distinguish between musical notes, suggesting that the powerful effects of multilingualism on the brain are present even in nonverbal areas. Furthermore, languages bring cultural connotations, memories, and connections. “Learning another language doesn’t just give you different words or more words,” writes the author. “It rewires your brain and transforms it, creating a denser tapestry of connectivity.” This radical transformation means that multilinguals communicate and even vote differently depending on which language they are using, allowing them to become a somewhat different version of themselves. Memories and emotions differ across linguistic and cultural experience and have clear manifestations in bilinguals. For example, people tend to be more emotional when speaking in their native language. On the individual level, being bilingual improves creativity, executive function, and aging. Socially, politically, and psychologically, understanding how languages affect the brain is just as essential, especially in the U.S., where more than 350 languages and dialects are spoken. “Engaging with a variety of languages,” writes the author, “gives us crucial abilities that the human race will need to heal burgeoning social discord and to formulate solutions to looming global problems.” Thoroughly researched and carried by Marian’s own experiences as a multilingual who speaks fluent Romanian, Russian, and English, the narrative is both fascinating and fluid.
Full of delightful insights, this book is thoroughly researched and compulsively readable.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9780593187074
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
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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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
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