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You Can Beat Your Brain: How To Turn Your Enemies Into Friends, How To Make Better Decisions, And Other Ways To Be Less Dumb (2013)

by David McRaney(Favorite Author)

3.83 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1780743742 (ISBN13: 9781780743745)

languge

English

genre

Humor

publisher

Oneworld Publications

review 1: As a follow-up to David McRaney's previous book You Are Not So Smart, You Are Now Less Dumb not only has a more positive spin to the title, it's an overall better book. While the former reads much like what it was--a collection of blog posts assembled into book form--the latter is a more fleshed-out examination of how and why we act the way do, with tips on how to be "less dumb", even if some of the tips amount to little more than "Here is some awful behavior you may find yourself engaging in, try to be aware of it."While the book follows the light tone of the first previous entry, each chapter offers more detailed analysis and studies covering many aspects of our social behavior. Some of the things revealed are not exactly revealing (most of the confirmation bias material... more) while others are downright chilling, like the chapter describing mob mentality, complete with examples of people yelling at potential suicide jumpers to jump--and then the jumpers doing just that, resulting in their deaths.This isn't a book that will change your life or make you overhaul the way you conduct yourself around others but it is informative, insightful and may make you that much more aware of the way you act, both positively and negatively. And that's not a bad thing.Recommended.
review 2: Quite simply the most horrid book I have read in a while. The essence of the book is this: you can't trust yourself, you judge based on appearances. Self-enhancement, happiness, optimism are shams to help your mind preserve itself. Memory is fiction, everyone is average and we like to think we're special. Everything we read, learn and do is to aid self-serving, hindsight or confirmation biases. The closest state to reality is depression because you see the world for being what it is: just a place. Gut feelings are not to be trusted. The mind builds narratives to connect unrelated information. We're all clueless organisms on a rock hurtling through space tumbling through chaotic, unrelated events in our lives. Every event is experienced differently by everyone and your mind actually distorts reality just to keep you happy.What's this? The Matrix?The title of the book (I haven't read or intend to read 'You are not so Smart'), is gimmicky, audacious and just about as problematic as the attitude of most journalists with self confessed interests in a wide variety of human affairs. It gets worse when they venture into something as subtle and nuanced as psychology and neuroscientific studies. The greatest dilemma of every journalist is this: at what point does your own subjectivity overtake your objective approach to your work? And that's where McRaney's approach to explaining theories falls. His subjectivity and selective filtering of information seeps through.One of neuroscience's greatest criticism is this: not everything originates in thought, and it fails to recognise human consciousness and how each of us has a unique identity and way of thinking. There is a massive difference between the mind, and the brain. Nothing else would then explain how when we express our thinking through art, literature, music, dance,language, we generate something unique to the individual. Neuroscience unfortunately reduces species into just a mass of atoms, electrical and chemical impulses. Also, the journey into the human mind, is never for posterity. It is always changing, and only meant to lead us up to a point till we discover something unknown, after which it becomes updated. Nothing, is set in stone. The same neuroscientists who're claiming things like Buddhists have just about dipped a toe into the vastness of unconsciousness after a lifetime of meditation, were ones who routinely performed shocking experiments on human brains and minds in the past under military orders. ECT was one of the most widely considered treatments available in the 50s and 60s, till more humane forms of therapies, and ways of understanding human minds took root later.The greatest flaw of this book is the fact that it falls prey to the very biases that neuroscience and psychology has discovered humans are prone to. When you're out to prove a point, you will seek every example possible and put it into your argument to prove it. What's more, millions and millions of exceptions of people breaking through what is considered innate to a species, finds no space in explanations, because it would then just challenge the theories. Have the theories failed? Have people demonstrated tendencies in which the "behaviors" are debunked? Which would do what? Only convince McRaney that his views are stronger? Ideas of common realities, compassion, love, shared feelings, affection between humanity cannot simply be reduced to physical and chemical reactions. McRaney's explanations are perhaps decent to understand generalisations in a species. But never the norm. The greatest ability of the human mind is to learn, and strengthen itself like a muscle over years. It learns when it is venturing into instinctual behavior, or patterned behavior and is able to break out as opposed to other species. Cause and effect are related. Or most of our countries wouldn't really be grappling with consequences of political decisions made decades and centuries ago, as opposed to what the book asserts on everything being unrelated. Intuition has long served all of us. How many times have we done something or not done something on an instinct only to discover that it worked in our favor? How many times have we heeded our emotions to find it a learning experience? How many times have we listened to our heart to find that someone we secretly love has been crushing back on us at the same time? Would McRaney or psychology then reduce it to "an illusion your mind has produced so don't trust yourself?"McRaney's book is not an unbiased exploration of neuroscientific, psychological discoveries then, but a debate which is now thrown open to the world for anyone to challenge. Professional scientists across the world who engage with the domain are never quick to draw conclusions, make grandiose statements that hacks and writers are prone to do. They always acknowledge that there is a huge amount left to understand, and always operate in the realm of doubt, as opposed to the pig-headed certainty rooted in ego that most others who have a self proclaimed interest in the subject do. What McRaney is, is an amateur, and no one qualified, or with a serious interest in humanity itself, to write on the subject. Most information would then be second hand. Pick up any book by a psychoanalyst, neuroscientist, psychologist etc, and you'd see how careful they're with their words and how they use first hand information in their research and books. And every single one of them, debunks the assertions made in the first paragraph and acknowledges human beings as complex creatures and not simply creatures of instinct. And yes, you're definitely not smart if you do buy this book and what's written in it. If Depression is the closest state to reality, McRaney's mind is doing a pitiful job by keeping him happy writing books in an authoritative voice on sensitive subjects which are just the tip of the iceberg, peddling them to the world and minting royalties in illusion. And Depression is not the true state of human mind. Or we wouldn't have other species expressing forms of joy in their daily lives either. And if memory is fiction, wonder what McRaney relied on while writing this book. The wonders of the human mind are not an evening bulletin, or a morning headline or breaking news on Twitter, to be served up in bite sized, digestible information to be grossly misinterpreted. less

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