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It's all in your head reviews
May. 22nd, 2014 09:56 amHey,
So a series of non-fiction books around better brains.
First up Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen. Researchers from the Harvard Negotiation Project discuss emotionally-fraught discussions and how to have them better. They lay out a nice set of principles and guidelines and try to show the numerous hidden agendas at play when problematic conversations come up. There was some stuff I knew, some stuff that was new, but it was all organized pretty well. I think the only thing missing were some exercises to practice with their various suggestions. In particular, being able to step back from snap emotional reactions and being able to steer conversations off of unproductive pathways seem particularly difficult and would benefit from some sort of exercise. It might lend itself to some sort of video game, actually. Anyway, I thought the book was interesting and useful.
Following that, I picked up Fully Present: The Science, Art, and Practice of Mindfulness by Susan L. Smalley, and Diana Winston. I grabbed this because I was interested in reading an overview on mindfulness -- which is apparently the hip new name for meditation. That's basically what I got and about halfway through I realized that I'd apparently picked up a pretty good overview via osmosis. If you've had little/no exposure this would probably be good, but I kept looking for something new and not really finding it.
Finally, there was You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself by David McRaney. This is a book all about the various ways your brain lies to you or fails you. There are a lot of good evolutionary reasons for these failures, but as societies grow more and more complex, they leave you with lots of little blind spots that can cause you to make bad choices. Each chapter in the book covers a different fallacy of the brain. The book is fairly recent and includes a number of new studies that have cropped up in the past 10 years along with classic studies from the 50's, 60's and 70's. So there's an in-depth explanation of what's going on and why it might be happening. At the end, it discusses ways to fight against the fallacies. It's in this final part that the book is weakest. There might only be a couple of paragraphs and it's generally "remember this kind of thing can happen so watch out for it". Not quite the practical how-to one might want. In fact, the final chapter on optimistic overconfidence recommends you embrace that particular fallacy a bit because if you don't delude yourself a little bit even when the odds are against you, you'd probably never achieve anything in life.
Despite not quite delivering on the title, I found the book really engaging and a fun read. Certainly worth checking out if you're curious about the brain and it's activities.
later
Tom
So a series of non-fiction books around better brains.
First up Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen. Researchers from the Harvard Negotiation Project discuss emotionally-fraught discussions and how to have them better. They lay out a nice set of principles and guidelines and try to show the numerous hidden agendas at play when problematic conversations come up. There was some stuff I knew, some stuff that was new, but it was all organized pretty well. I think the only thing missing were some exercises to practice with their various suggestions. In particular, being able to step back from snap emotional reactions and being able to steer conversations off of unproductive pathways seem particularly difficult and would benefit from some sort of exercise. It might lend itself to some sort of video game, actually. Anyway, I thought the book was interesting and useful.
Following that, I picked up Fully Present: The Science, Art, and Practice of Mindfulness by Susan L. Smalley, and Diana Winston. I grabbed this because I was interested in reading an overview on mindfulness -- which is apparently the hip new name for meditation. That's basically what I got and about halfway through I realized that I'd apparently picked up a pretty good overview via osmosis. If you've had little/no exposure this would probably be good, but I kept looking for something new and not really finding it.
Finally, there was You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself by David McRaney. This is a book all about the various ways your brain lies to you or fails you. There are a lot of good evolutionary reasons for these failures, but as societies grow more and more complex, they leave you with lots of little blind spots that can cause you to make bad choices. Each chapter in the book covers a different fallacy of the brain. The book is fairly recent and includes a number of new studies that have cropped up in the past 10 years along with classic studies from the 50's, 60's and 70's. So there's an in-depth explanation of what's going on and why it might be happening. At the end, it discusses ways to fight against the fallacies. It's in this final part that the book is weakest. There might only be a couple of paragraphs and it's generally "remember this kind of thing can happen so watch out for it". Not quite the practical how-to one might want. In fact, the final chapter on optimistic overconfidence recommends you embrace that particular fallacy a bit because if you don't delude yourself a little bit even when the odds are against you, you'd probably never achieve anything in life.
Despite not quite delivering on the title, I found the book really engaging and a fun read. Certainly worth checking out if you're curious about the brain and it's activities.
later
Tom
