Excellent Book Review

The book is Outliers, the author is Malcolm Gladwell. The review is here.

A great bit is:

"Most successful people also have a phenomenal ability to consciously focus their attention. We know from experiments with subjects as diverse as obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferers and Buddhist monks that people who can self-consciously focus attention have the power to rewire their brains."

I intend to read this as soon as I can. A review will follow.

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Cost of Smarts

The best paragraph I read today comes from the NY Times.
"Research on animal intelligence also makes me wonder what experiments animals would perform on humans if they had the chance. Every cat with an owner, for instance, is running a small-scale study in operant conditioning. I believe that if animals ran the labs, they would test us to determine the limits of our patience, our faithfulness, our memory for terrain. They would try to decide what intelligence in humans is really for, not merely how much of it there is. Above all, they would hope to study a fundamental question: Are humans actually aware of the world they live in? So far the results are inconclusive."
Read on here.

What is Intelligence?

Are we really more stupid than people in the past who are reputed to have had more common sense?
Are we leading the way in abstract thought?
James R. Flynn's new book "What Is Intelligence?" might, indeed, just answer these questions.



graph per amazon