my mind on books

Psychological essentialism has been getting some attention lately as a result of Paul Bloom’s recent book How Pleasure Works. See, for example, Jonah Lehrer on essentialism in ‘How Pleasure Works’ at the Frontal Cortex, or the discussion between Bloom and Peter D. Kramer at Slate.
(How Pleasure Works at amazon.co.uk)

When I saw Lehrer’s review I happened to be reading another book that draws on essentialism, this time to explain irrational beliefs: SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable by Bruce M. Hood. (Supersense at amazon.co.uk) A paperback edition is to be issued later this month with the title The Science of Superstition: How the Developing Brain Creates Supernatural Beliefs.

Here is an excerpt from SuperSense (p246-247):

Throughout this book I have been arguing that beliefs in the supernatural are a consequence of reasoning processes about natural properties and events in our world. This includes a mind design for detecting patterns and inferring structures where there may be none. Our naive theories form the basis of our supernatural beliefs, and culture and experience simply work to reinforce what we intuitively hold to be correct. This is why the sense of being stared at is such an interesting model for the origin and development of supernaturalism. Children are not told that humans can detect unseen gaze. In fact, it’s not something they readily report that they can do. Nevertheless, young children and many adults think that vision works by something leaving the eyes. So when they experience episodes of seeming to detect unseen gaze, this belief simply emerges naturally as an unquestioned ability. It is not even considered supernatural by most people. Children were not told to think this. This model shows how the combination of intuitive theories, pattern detecting, and eventual support from culture produces a universal supernatural belief.
I think that something very similar may be going on for other supernatural beliefs. The notion of psychological contamination we examined in earlier chapters emerges naturally out of psychological essentialism, which has its roots in our naive biological reasoning. Again, this way of thinking is not something that we teach our children. Intuitive dualism and the idea that the mind can exist independently of the body is another. All of these ways of thinking are both naturally emerging and yet supernatural in their explanations of the world.
… We may put away childish things, as Corinthians suggests, but we never entirely get rid of them. Education can give us a new understanding and even progress to a scientific viewpoint, but development, distress, damage, and disease show that we keep many skeletons in our mental closet. If those misconceptions involve our understanding of the properties and limits of the material world, the living world, and the mental world, there is a good chance that they can form the basis of adult supernatural beliefs.

Bloom’s earlier book is Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human, originally published by Basic Books in 2004. (Descartes’ Baby at amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

All humans see the world in two fundamentally different ways: even babies have a rich understanding of both the physical and social worlds. They expect objects to obey principles of physics, and they’re startled when things disappear or defy gravity. Yet they can also read emotions and respond with anger, sympathy, and joy.

In Descartes’ Baby, Bloom draws on a wealth of scientific discoveries to show how these two ways of knowing give rise to such uniquely human traits as humor, disgust, religion, art, and morality. How our dualist perspective, developed throughout our lives, profoundly influences our thoughts, feelings, and actions is the subject of this richly rewarding book.

Another book on psychological essentialism is The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought (Oxford in Cognitive Development) by Susan Gelman (Oxford University Press, 2005). (The Essential Child at amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

Essentialism is the idea that certain categories, such as “dog,” “man,” or “intelligence,” have an underlying reality or true nature that gives objects their identity. Where does this idea come from? In this book, Susan Gelman argues that essentialism is an early cognitive bias. Young children’s concepts reflect a deep commitment to essentialism, and this commitment leads children to look beyond the obvious in many converging ways: when learning words, generalizing knowledge to new category members, reasoning about the insides of things, contemplating the role of nature versus nurture, and constructing causal explanations. Gelman argues against the standard view of children as concrete or focused on the obvious, instead claiming that children have an early, powerful tendency to search for hidden, non-obvious features of things. She also attacks claims that children build up their knowledge of the world based on simple, associative learning strategies, arguing that children’s concepts are embedded in rich folk theories. Parents don’t explicitly teach children to essentialize; instead, during the preschool years, children spontaneously construct concepts and beliefs that reflect an essentialist bias. Essentialist accounts have been offered, in one form or another, for thousands of years, extending back at least to Aristotle and Plato. Yet this book is the first to address the issues surrounding essentialism from a psychological perspective. Gelman synthesizes over 15 years of empirical research on essentialism into a unified framework and explores the broader lessons that the research imparts concerning, among other things, human concepts, children’s thinking, and the ways in which language influences thought. This volume will appeal to developmental, cognitive, and social psychologists, as well as to scholars in cognitive science and philosophy.

The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives by Rosalind Cartwright (Oxford University Press, 2010)

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

In January of 1999, an otherwise nonviolent man under great stress at work brutally murdered his wife in their backyard. He then went back to bed, awakening only when police entered his home. He claimed to have no memory of the event because, while his body was awake at the time, his mind was not. He had been sleepwalking.

In The Twenty-four Hour Mind, sleep scientist Rosalind Cartwright brings together decades of research into the bizarre sleep disorders known as parasomnias to propose a new theory of how the human mind works consistently throughout waking and sleeping hours. Thanks to increasingly sophisticated EEG and brain imaging technologies, we now know that our minds do not simply “turn off” during sleep. Rather, they continue to be active, and research has indicated that one of the primary purposes of sleep is to aid in regulating emotions and processing experiences that occur during preceding waking hours. As such, when sleep is neurologically or genetically impaired or just too short, the processes that good sleep facilitates–those that usually have a positive effect on our mood and performance–can short circuit, with negative results that occasionally reach tragic proportions. Examining the interactions between conscious and unconscious forms of thinking as they proceed throughout the cycles of sleeping, dreaming, and waking, Cartwright demystifies the inner workings of the human mind that trigger sleep problems, how researchers are working to control them, and how they can apply what they learn to further our understanding of the brain. Along the way, she provides a lively account of the history of sleep research and the birth of sleep medicine that will initiate readers into this fascinating field of inquiry and the far-reaching implications it will have on the future of neuroscience. The Twenty-four Hour Mind offers a unique look at a relatively new area of study that will be of interest to those with and without sleep problems, as well as anyone captivated by the mysteries of the brain–and what sleep continues to teach us about the waking mind.

See also: Author’s website

The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home by Dan Ariely (Harper, 2010) has a release date of June 1, according to Amazon.

(kindle ed)

(already available at amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

The provocative follow-up to the New York Times bestseller Predictably Irrational

• Why can large bonuses make CEOs less productive?
• How can confusing directions actually help us?
• Why is revenge so important to us?
• Why is there such a big difference between what we think will make us happy and what really makes us happy?

In his groundbreaking book Predictably Irrational, social scientist Dan Ariely revealed the multiple biases that lead us into making unwise decisions. Now, in The Upside of Irrationality, he exposes the surprising negative and positive effects irrationality can have on our lives. Focusing on our behaviors at work and in relationships, he offers new insights and eye-opening truths about what really motivates us on the job, how one unwise action can become a long-term habit, how we learn to love the ones we’re with, and more.

Drawing on the same experimental methods that made Predictably Irrational one of the most talked-about bestsellers of the past few years, Ariely uses data from his own original and entertaining experiments to draw arresting conclusions about how—and why—we behave the way we do. From our office attitudes, to our romantic relationships, to our search for purpose in life, Ariely explains how to break through our negative patterns of thought and behavior to make better decisions. The Upside of Irrationality will change the way we see ourselves at work and at home—and cast our irrational behaviors in a more nuanced light.

See also: author’s website

video intro for the book:

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr (W.W. Norton, 2010)

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

The best-selling author of The Big Switch returns with an explosive look at technology’s effect on the mind. “Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply?

Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind”—from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer—Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways.

Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic—a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption—and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection.

Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes—Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive—even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.

See also: Excerpt at Wired.com, Website for the book, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” at theatlantic.com

The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons (Crown, 2010)

(Kindle edition)

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

Reading this book will make you less sure of yourself—and that’s a good thing. In The Invisible Gorilla, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, creators of one of psychology’s most famous experiments, use remarkable stories and counterintuitive scientific findings to demonstrate an important truth: Our minds don’t work the way we think they do. We think we see ourselves and the world as they really are, but we’re actually missing a whole lot.

Chabris and Simons combine the work of other researchers with their own findings on attention, perception, memory, and reasoning to reveal how faulty intuitions often get us into trouble. In the process, they explain:

• Why a company would spend billions to launch a product that its own analysts know will fail
• How a police officer could run right past a brutal assault without seeing it
• Why award-winning movies are full of editing mistakes
• What criminals have in common with chess masters
• Why measles and other childhood diseases are making a comeback
• Why money managers could learn a lot from weather forecasters

Again and again, we think we experience and understand the world as it is, but our thoughts are beset by everyday illusions. We write traffic laws and build criminal cases on the assumption that people will notice when something unusual happens right in front of them. We’re sure we know where we were on 9/11, falsely believing that vivid memories are seared into our minds with perfect fidelity. And as a society, we spend billions on devices to train our brains because we’re continually tempted by the lure of quick fixes and effortless self-improvement.

The Invisible Gorilla reveals the myriad ways that our intuitions can deceive us, but it’s much more than a catalog of human failings. Chabris and Simons explain why we succumb to these everyday illusions and what we can do to inoculate ourselves against their effects. Ultimately, the book provides a kind of x-ray vision into our own minds, making it possible to pierce the veil of illusions that clouds our thoughts and to think clearly for perhaps the first time.

See also: Website for the book