A Momentary Taste of Being

Wm. James on the Psychology of Conversion

Ori Brafman, co-author of Click: The Magic of Instant Connections, interviewed You can check out one review of the Click here.

The Secret Powers of Time

One of the few pleasures of traveling away from family is the fact that much reading can be done.  So on the plane flights to and from Chicago, I completed two books.  The first I've already reported on.  The second is for discussion here. Jonah Lehrer is the keeper of The Frontal Cortex blog and the author of one of my all-time favorite nonfiction books Proust Was a Neuroscientist .  This book has joined the ranks of that and both Sway and Click , as an enjoyable, fascinating, and enlightening read.  The title says it all--the book is about how different parts of the brain contribute to decision making and how we must allow them to do so.  It enters into the question of how to make extremely complex decisions and how to make simple ones--and it turns out that the means of making those decisions might be counter-intuitive.  Equally counter-intuitive to divided Western Man is Mr. Lehrer's reference to the emotions and emotional center as the brai...

After I completed my review of Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior , I was offered a review copy of Click:The Magic of Instant Connections , a book about which I had some doubts and reservations because the subject matter wasn't of the same compelling interest (to me) as that of Sway . Nevertheless, I had enjoyed the first book so much, I thought I had nothing to lose and much to gain by taking up the second. And I'm glad that I did.  While the subject matter is not of the same caliber of interest as the first, I found myself gradually warming to the premise.  More than that, the authors indicated that it was their opinion that these magical connections did not have to be happenstance--that there were circumstances and practices that could help cultivate them.  Finally, the magic connections were not all about e-Harmony or e-Chemisty or e-I'm-Desperate-for-Any-Sort-of-Date; indeed, these were in the minority.  Most of the "clicks" described were t...

Jonah Lehrer shows us how: from The Frontal Cortex (blogsite) Jonah Lehrer Psychopaths can teach us a lot about the nature of morality. At first glance, they seem to have perfectly functioning minds. Their working memory isn't impaired, they have excellent language skills, and they don't have reduced attention spans. In fact, a few studies have found that psychopaths have above-average IQs and reasoning abilities; their logic is impeccable. But the disorder is associated with a severe moral deficit. So what's gone wrong? Why are psychopaths so much more likely to use violence to achieve their goals? Why are they so overrepresented in our prisons? The answer turns us to the anatomy of morality in the mind. That's because the intact intelligence of psychopaths conceals a devastating problem: the emotional parts of their brains are damaged, and this is what makes them dangerous. When normal people are shown staged videos of strangers being subjected to...

One of my chief conflicts with Catholicism (despite the fact the I am and remain a Catholic) and with many people in it is not, contrary to what many would have you believe, anti-intellectualism, but a stringent, austere, and deadening anti-emotionalism.  If you should bring an emotional datum into an argument, no matter how pertinent the response is nearly always, "Reason must triumph."  It is refreshing to reflect on the passages below to realize that the triumph of reason is, in fact, the triumph of the emotional life.  The two strands cannot so easily be parted.  The human entity is not intellect and/or emotion but intellect entwined in emotion.  To deny the emotional life is to deny the intellectual life, as these passages demonstrate. How We Decide Jonah Lehrer The simple idea connecting Plato’s philosophy to cognitive psychology is the privileging of reason over emotion. It’s easy to understand why this vision has endured for so long. It raises Homo ...

I don't read a lot of nonfiction and I tend to be very selective about what I do read--it has to amuse me in some way.  This book certainly qualified.  I love books that spell out the obvious and help me codify or qualify observations I have already made.  Sway is that kind of book par excellance .  What Sway sets out to do is to tell us why we sometimes find ourselves doing the oddest, strangest, most counter-intuitive and often counter-productive things. Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman have identified trends in thought or behavior that sometimes dominant our decisions and thought to the point of irrationality: risk aversion, commitment, diagnosis bias, value attribution, fairness, group dynamics.  We've all seen these in action but what Brafman and Brafman do is show us how these trends affect things like fatal airline crashes, losers on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire , the concept of fairness as it varies among cultures, the price of eggs, and the outbreak of ...