Do try this at home
If brain books mostly make your grey matter hurt, then this one at least forces a smile.
Iprobably “thought” of the first sentence of this review before I was conscious of it. Or not. I’m not sure. In fact, the more I read popular science books about how the brain works, the fewer clues I have about how or why I do anything. After a few chapters of Mariano Sigman’s The Secret Life of the Mind, “I” feel like I’m just an unwitting puppet dancing to the tune of my social conditioning and frontal cortices.
In an epilogue to the book, the author explains that his goal is to make human thought transparent. I’m sorry, but I’m more confused than ever.
I had a similar reaction to Daniel Kahneman’s best-seller, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Great! Endless clever experiments to tell me I’m irrational and have no idea what’s really behind most, if not all, of my judgments and decisions. Now what? According to Sigman, revealing and understanding our predispositions can help us change them. I’m not so sure, and neither is Kahneman. “It’s not a case of ‘read this book and then you’ll think differently’,” he said in an interview with the Guardian. “I’ve written this book, and I don’t think differently.” Either way, this work has been a gold mine for advertisers and PR people, who by now can push our buttons far better than we ourselves can.
The Secret Life of the Mind is an entertaining mishmash of science and psychology with something for everyone.
It’s hard for the lay reader to judge Sigman’s account of the state of brain science, which appears to be advancing faster than our ability to make sense of it. Amid a smattering of contemporary neuroscience, there are some less-recent theories to which he appeals, some of them far from settled science. Such as the Chomskyian claim that humans are hardwired for grammatical language and Julian Jaynes’s idea that ancient writings offer insight into the evolution of human consciousness – “that only 3000 years ago the world was a garden of schizophrenics”.
The book is a mostly entertaining mishmash of science and psychology that’s so wide-ranging it’s got something for everyone. As for me, when the loss of my free will started to bite, I tried the trick on page 56 of holding a pencil lengthwise between my teeth. “Inevitably, your lips will rise in an imitation of a smile. This is obviously a mechanical effect, not a reflection of an emotion. But that doesn’t matter – it still gives a certain sense of well-being.”