Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind | Gary Marcus

Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind | Gary Marcus | Makes you think about thinking!

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	Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind Gary Marcus Houghton Mifflin Co, 2008 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 66 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Interesting Insight Into The Human Mind

Gary Marcus is an NYU psychologist, I would add an 'evolutionary' psychologist after reading this book, who has written an excellent tome that describes human behavior from an evolutionary standpoint. A Kluge is a clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem (from the front cover of the book). Marcus discusses our lower brain functions, some would say our reptilian brain, how it controls our emotions and reflexes, and how it oftentimes conflicts with our higher cortical reasoning. The author gives many examples of how these two systems mismatch, and this conflict is at the root of much of human behavior and irrationality, fascinating indeed. Topics include anchoring, framing, confirmation bias, the focusing illusion, an ambiguous linguistic system, mental contamination, mental disorders, self control, false memory, and more. There is a lot to learn here, very informative, and seems very much 'on the mark', I will add.

One aspect of the book that I did not care for much was the extensive use of footnotes at the bottom of pages, I thought that this information should have been incorporated into the text for a better 'flowing' style, the footnotes for me were a distraction. I cannot say that this book was a page turner, but it was well worth reading.

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Makes you think about thinking!

If you have ever wondered why you can't remember to pick up milk from the store on the way home after your spouse asked you to, this book answers the question. Or if you can't find your keys two minutes after you put them down. Or if you can remember the lyrics to a TV sitcom theme song from 20 years ago, but you can't remember your PIN number. Contrary to what some might say, our brains are inefficient, poorly organized, and cobbled together from millions of years of different evolutionary forces. In a very entertaining and easy-to-read book, Gary Marcus reveals why so often emotion wins out over reason, why our brains are so dependent on context, and how much our memory is different from a computer's, and why that's important.

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It Might be evidence of its own Conclusion

This book is its own best argument for the haphazard, meandering quality of the human brain and the human thinking process.

The book itself has some strong points and raises some issues that appear to be somewhat profound, but in the end, from this reviewer's perspective it vastly overreaches the evidence presented and attempts to draw conclusions in an authoritative manner that are a huge stretch. Up front, the author jumps to the material of Richard Dawkins and other popular books in the realm of atheism in an apparent effort to piggy back upon or appropriate some of the controversy or success perhaps of these works, to make comments in the realm of this populist field. While I don't agree with the author's position in that regard, that is not the basis of my evaluation of his book.

Strong general appeals are made within the book to logic and the idea that if there were a teleological goal in the creation of man and the human mind, according to the author, it would be expected that such a purposeful design should have rendered a better result. In particular, the human mind is contrasted to the human invention of the computer, which the author holds up as a more efficient and effective method of memory recall. Think about that. The human mind in effect invented and refined the computer to a specialized purpose, which of course is going to handle the tasks it is created to do more efficiently than the human mind, otherwise there would be no purpose in creating it. It begs the question by analogy that if because simple physical tools such as the lever improve the function of the human arm, that that means the human arm is deficient in whole because it doesn't measure up to the specialized application in this regard.

With these types of elements interspersed throughout the book, this reader found it to have a quality of an entertaining professor giving a lecture who perhaps would be popular with students because of his style and idiosyncracies, but at the end of the lecture would leave the hall feeling entertained but somehow wondering what the substance was. It meanders, repeats some of the stretches of logic as if repeating them somehow makes them more true and seems geared to try to make a point outside of the field it purports to be examining.

All in all, I think an objective reader will glean a few nuggets and interesting facts, but the experience of this book will leave them a little flat. There is just too little presented to justify some of the reaches attempted.

3 Stars

Bart Breen

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Kluge, occasionally entertaining, but not "true wisdom."

NYU Professor of Psychology Gary Marcus, with the help of some of his students, gives us his take on what he considers to be The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind in his new book Kluge (A clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem). Prof. Marcus elaborates on some of the material traditionally found in undergraduate Organizational Psychology or Organizational Behavior courses. His book is certainly more entertaining and practical than the traditional texts forced on undergraduates and decidedly less expensive.

Marcus tells us that "No intelligent and compassionate designer would have built the human mind to be quite as vulnerable as it is." Evolution is responsible for the kluge-like construction of our brain and all its attendant faults and failings. For example, he tells us that "Memory is arguably the mind's original sin.... Yet it is ... wildly unreliable.... To build a truly reliable memory ... evolution would have had to start over."

Unfortunately, what we believe is more often than not just as mistaken as our memory. Marcus says that we "never evolved a proper system for keeping track of what we know and how we've come to know it, uncontaminated by what we simply wish were so." Consequently, concerning the way we make choices, "We can be rational on a good day, but much of the time we are not."

As Bertrand Russell tells us, "It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this." Russell would not find any support for human rationality in Kluge. Human beings are a flawed species. At the end of his book Prof. Marcus gives us some advice about what we can do to mitigate the Kluge which is our mind in a chapter titled "True Wisdom." As some reviewers have already noted, not much "true wisdom" will be found in a chapter that would more appropriately be found in a self-help book, not something written by a scholar/scientist with a Ph.D. from MIT. Kluge is more likely to be found on Oprah than at NYU. Perhaps that's just what Prof. Marcus wants.

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