Within the last few decades a dizzying array of scientific
disciplines and "explanations" of the motivating forces behind the
profound enigmas of human behavior have emerged: sociobiology,
cognitive psychology, game theory, experimental psychology,
neurobiology, evolutionary psychology, "existential" neurology,
social psychology, genetics, and other attempts at
interdisciplinary thinking. Each, according to its own reductive
approach, strives to separate, isolate, examine in laboratories and
through experiments extracted from real-life experience, and
thereby "understand" the most complex aspects of being
human--including our subjectivity; morality and altruism; our
economic survival and our irrational biases that affect it; our
innate need for religion and wonder; and the cross-cultural
stalwart, humor.But as Alper argues in his exciting and challenging
new work, this sort of contemporary balkanization of the human mind
actually achieves the opposite of its purpose. Rather than
unraveling and illuminating the "Ur" source of a particular
behavior or mindset, it merely shrinks the richly threaded tapestry
to a single frayed thread dissevered and abstractly disconnected
from the everyday experiential realities of human
existence.Examining the assertions and fallacies of the theories
conceived (or contrived) by some of today's most brilliant
scientists and thinkers (including Dan Ariely, John Barrow, Pascal
Boyer, Frank Close, Nicholas Humphrey, Richard Dawkins, Stanley
Milgram, Oliver Sacks, and Carl Sagan), Alper explores why these
varied attempts at joining the world of experience and the world of
measurement so regularly fail, how consciousness explained is
really a concentrated effort to explain away the subjective
phenomena of consciousness.From the psychic rat to the gorilla in
the room, from British double-agent Kim Philby to comedian Steve
Martin, "The Incredible Shrinking Mind" not only offers a
provocative and entertaining critique, but also a profound and
practical solution: the psychodynamic approach, which takes
seriously the question of meaning and not solely observable
behavior, which combines the quantitative and the experimental with
the human and multidimensional, which seeks to understand not just
how but why. No single equation, no theory, no dazzling fMRI image
of the hidden brain can ever accomplish this for us. It must be
patiently done, one person at a time.
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