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Reality Check: What Your Mind Knows, But Isn't Telling You Paperback – August 5, 2005
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- Print length303 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPrometheus
- Publication dateAugust 5, 2005
- Dimensions6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
- ISBN-101591023025
- ISBN-13978-1591023029
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- Publisher : Prometheus (August 5, 2005)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 303 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1591023025
- ISBN-13 : 978-1591023029
- Item Weight : 14.7 ounces
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,169,247 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,222 in Medical Cognitive Psychology
- #4,935 in Cognitive Psychology (Books)
- #6,693 in Evolution (Books)
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- Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2005This book is as informative as Weiner's other books. It is well written with a hint of humor so the lay person can understand what they are reading. The mind is such a complicated mass that it takes a great deal of guts to try and explain its workings. Obviously Weiner has done a great deal of research in compiling such an informative book. I would just like to say to the two negative reviews posted that it is easy to criticize someone else for trying to educate others on the workings of the mind ... especially if you don't seem to understand it yourself. I would suggest you read the author's other books...Power Freaks and Battling the Inner Dummy.
- Reviewed in the United States on August 14, 2005In this book, the author offers what he considers to be a realistic view of modern life and the human condition. He calls this a "reality check", but the book definitely does not give the reader a comprehensive, coherent, scientific, and realistic view of the state of world today. Too often those who describe themselves as being "realistic" are highly skeptical of those who have an optimistic view of life, and believe that such people are naive, unintelligent, or ignorant. The "realists" seem to enjoy rubbing peoples faces in the dirt, with the intent of waking them up from their optimistic delirium and showing them "the true nature of things." But cynicism is not equivalent to realism....
Many assertions are made in this book without sound scientific or objective evidence. For example, the author speaks of a "territorial imperative" as if it were a proven and well-substantiated concept in anthropology. The scientific evidence for this concept though is meager, and the author in no way documents any evidence for it anywhere in the book. In relation to this, he speaks in the book of something called the "Simmel effect", named after the sociologist George Simmel, and which asserts that in social groups that are ordered by rank, individuals imitate symbols that designate the higher hierarchal levels and abandon the symbols that designate the lower level ones. The author does not discuss the evidence for the Simmel effect, but does give one reference on the Web that is currently not available. There has been research into the Simmel effect that does show that successful status symbols begin to diminish as soon as they become dominant, but this research involved the use of simulation studies. It would be very interesting and helpful if more empirical studies could be conducted. The author's support for this effect is mostly anecdotal, quoting for example the "tattoo craze" and how some people begin with maybe one or two tattoos and wind up covering their entire bodies in order to gain "status." He does not however indicate how many people have engaged in this behavior. Has he studied or observed a large collection of individuals who do? No statistical data is offered to the reader in this regard. He also offers as evidence for this effect the corporate executives who update their offices, jets, and living space; academics who need to "be first" with research data, and managers who search for someone to demean in order to obtain a "daily status boost." But who are these people that he is referring to? What are their names? How many of them has he observed in this regard?
He also claims that many people have a need for spiritual belief that can "shut out" their ability to ponder complex or difficult concepts. How does he know this? What evidence is there that would allow him to conclude this? How many people is this true of? This question is not merely an academic or semantic one, for if it were true it says that when the brain is engaging in religious speculation that this will interfere with conceptualization in other domains. No evidence is given for this claim, even though one could easily find it plausible. It also makes assumptions on the ability of the brain to engage in parallel tasking and domain-specificity. Given the intense research that has been done in cognitive neuroscience in the last two decades that has attempted to settle whether the human brain is actually modular in its architecture, the author's claim here is very outlandish.
The author's view of history is also unrealistic and cynical. Yes, the twentieth century was unequaled in its unmitigated brutality and the weapons humans used against each other. It would be wrong however to conclude that even though there were over 90,000,000 million deaths in the last century due to war, this number is not comparable to the number of people in that century who did not choose to participate in the killing of others. And if one looks at history, one will notice that the vast majority of people have never taken another life, have never participated in war, and have led lives that are exemplary if judged from true ethical standards. But yet if we are to believe the author, we will hold that humans are a killer species, anxious at all times to due harm to others, and we must engage in focused concentration to avoid our predilection for violence. The author is too focused on the news reports, with their predilection toward bad news, to notice that these reports are anomalous, large deviations from the norm, as compared to the typical events that govern human interactions and human behavior. Indeed the author should himself engage in a "reality check": he will find that things are nowhere near as bad as he believes.
- Reviewed in the United States on September 26, 2005Very disappointing. Summing this book up in one sentence would read - "We're all genentically so similar it makes no difference, all religions are bunk, why don't we all hold hands and love each other?"
To elaborate a little, this book is a loose collection of ideas strung together by dubious inferences derived from incomplete and poorly referenced source concepts that atttempts to reduce the highly complex to the banal.
We read about how "psychopaths" and personality disorders are biological in origin (essentially), so these people can't help their behaviour, but oh wait, they have a choice so their actions really are their fault (just like WW1, in the author's view, was all Kaiser Wilhelm's fault).
We read that religion is the result of a "reglion center" in the brain, religions cause wars, there's so many of them none of them are right, and the author has never met anyone who pratices what they preach so all religions are bunk and the source of much discord, the inference being we should discard them in favour of...? A rather pathetic and trite "conversation" with a theologian is also presented as evidence as to why religion holds no answers (ignoring the billions who could present a more cogent argument either pro or con religion off the cuff than the one presented).
The reader is invited to engage in anthropomorphism in examining the social behaviour of various groups of apes and monkeys with the author wondering why we can't be more like them (ummm, because I'm human and a good deal more complex? (and besides which, I have no desire to live in a tree and spend my time grooming others for fleas)).
We also take a trip to the stars - or rather we don't - as the author rambles for some time about how far away stars are, how we could never get there, Einsteins theory of relativity and so on ad nauseam - what this has to do with holding hands and being nice to each other I don't know, but I suspect it's about being stuck on this rock together.
The books essentially trails to a distinctly uncompelling end after meandering around enormous issues that have plagued the best and brightest throughout the ages all the while cavalierly dimissing this or that point of view in favour of poorly supported author opinions, derived, as mentioned, from odd-ball bits of information loosely strung together.
I rarely write reviews, preferring to let others (and myself for that matter) read and digest materials independent of prejudice. In this case, I was so annoyed about the quality of the arguments and the tenuous support for them that I felt compelled to make my opinion public. Read it for yourself if you enjoy being irritated - be warned, however, that when you're finished you'll be wishing you'd spent your money on something more productive, like video games, or renting National Lampoon's Vacation etc.
- Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2005This book is kind of a random walk down Mr. Weiner's mind. He seems to be quite interested in following the current research in quite a number of scientific areas and then explaining these results to his readers.
If this book has a central theme, it is that the mind is a marvelous thing that you can use to do a lot of things, some good, some not so good. He cautions you, for instance on following the latest (or the earliest for that matter) religious fad that attempts to tell you what to think about everything. He makes it your task to do a 'Reality Check' on what you're being told and to make up your own mind.
Much of the book is on what you might call self help popular psychology. He describes the current research that is being conducted and illustrates how this might be applied in our daily lives. I particularly enjoyed his comments on religion. With 10,000 religions and 33,000 variations of the Christian religion alone, it's hard to imagine that they are all right. And yet the overwhelming percentage of us adopt the religion of out parents, unthinkingly, with no 'Reality Check.'