Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition] Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00GDKVV4K | Format: PDF, EPUB
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- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 11 hours and 17 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Tantor Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: November 5, 2013
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00GDKVV4K
"Social: Why Our Brains are Wired to Connect," by Matthew Lieberman, is an outstanding and fascinating layperson's guide to the new field of social cognitive neuroscience--an interdisciplinary field that "uses the tools of neuroscience to study the mental mechanisms that create, frame, regulate, and respond to our experience of the social world." In the process of investigating these mechanisms, this science advances our knowledge of the evolutionary path that continue to mold our social brain. The book seeks to answer: why are we wired to connect socially; what advantages did our species gain by evolving along this evolutionary path; how can we use this knowledge to improve society?
This is the perhaps the fifth layperson's guide to neuroscience that I've read in the past few years. Not all have been easy or pleasurable to read. Much of neurology seems inherently difficult, but it doesn't have to be. It the right hands it can be accessible and mesmerizing. In my estimation, this book compares very well to last year's bestselling neuroscience book by V. S. Ramachandran entitled, "The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human." If you are not familiar with Ramachandran, saying this is high praise for Lieberman and this book. After all, Ramachandran is considered one of the leading lights of the academic neuroscience community. He is also a profoundly gifted writer. Lieberman is not far behind; like Ramachandran, he shows an extraordinary ability to convey difficult concepts clearly and personably.
I've always loved psychology. Over my lifetime, I've read at least a master's degree equivalent of academic psychology books.
Let me say up front that I enjoyed this book, but I had some issues with it. Let me say what I did *not* like first, and then what I did.
The title ends "Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect," leading the reader to expect this book to be largely about evolutionary psychology -- explaining *why* the brain does what it does requires investigating the adaptive value of brain features over the history of humans and beyond. That is absolutely *not* what this book is about. Just striking the word "Why" from the title would make it much more appropriate to the book's actual content.
In fact, there were places where I thought the author *should* have dived into the evolutionary mechanics but did not. For example, in the discussion about altruism there was nothing about the fact that altruism is perfectly explained when you stop focusing on individuals as the unit of selection and correctly focus on the genes themselves. No mention of Tit-for-Tat and related strategies, ESSes, or anything of the sort. In fact the author seemed to imply that explanations from other quarters got it wrong, and the book was setting the record straight. Hmmm. In another section the author talked about our social wiring as though it had evolved for the good of the species, but again, evolution operates primarily at the level of genes, not species. A gene or gene combination that makes an organism more successful at reproducing will increase in frequency in a population, that's all -- evolution is not a mystic hand trying to make a better species. A for-the-good-of-the-species argument is not a good one.
The margins of my copy of the book are filled with notes, many of which are objections to conclusions drawn or the way something was presented.
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