Elastic Flexible thinking in a time of change

Leonard Mlodinow, 1954-

Book - 2018

"From the best-selling author of Subliminal and The Drunkard's Walk, a groundbreaking new look at the neuroscience of change--and how elastic thinking can help us thrive in a world changing faster than ever before. With rapid technological innovation leading the charge, today's world is transforming itself at an extraordinary and unprecedented pace. As jobs become more multifaceted, as information streams multiply, and as myriad devices place increasing demands on our attention, we are confronted every day with a plethora of new challenges. Fortunately, as Leonard Mlodinow shows, the human brain is uniquely engineered to adapt. Drawing from cutting-edge research in neuroscience and psychology, Mlodinow takes us on a fascinati...ng and illuminating journey through the mechanics of our own minds as we navigate the rapidly shifting landscapes around us. With his keen acumen and rapid-fire wit, Mlodinow gives us the essential tools to harness the power of elastic thinking in an endlessly dynamic world"--

Saved in:

2nd Floor Show me where

612.8/Mlodinow
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor 612.8/Mlodinow Checked In
Subjects
Published
New York : Pantheon Books [2018]
Language
English
Main Author
Leonard Mlodinow, 1954- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
ix, 252 pages ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9781101870921
  • Confronting change. The joy of change
  • How we think. What is thought? ; Why we think ; The world inside your brain
  • Where new ideas come from. The power of your point of view ; Thinking when you're not thinking ; The origin of insight
  • Liberating your brain. How thought freezes over ; Mental blocks and idea filters ; The good, the mad, and the odd ; Liberation.
Review by New York Times Review

THE GREAT BELIEVERS, by Rebecca Makkai. (Viking, $27.) A novel that ricochets between Chicago in the mid-1980s, an era when AIDS was a death sentence, and present-day Paris, where the shadow of its contagion still looms over a mother in search of her errant daughter. THE PERFECT WEAPON: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age, by David E. Sanger. (Crown, $28.) This encyclopedic account by a Times correspondent traces the rapid rise of cyberwarfare capabilities and warns that ideas about how to control them are only beginning to emerge. SLAVE OLD MAN, by Patrick Chamoiseau. Translated by Linda Coverdale. (New Press, $19.99.) Set in plantation-era Martinique, this novel is a kind of action pastoral, tracing a slave's desperate escape from a savage master and his monstrous mastiff. His exhilarating flight evokes the shock of freedom with tactile immediacy. AMERICAN EDEN: David Hosack, Botany and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic, by Victoria Johnson. (Liveright, $29.95.) The doctor to the infamous Hamilton-Burr duel also created a legendary botanical garden for early America, now buried far beneath Rockefeller Center. Johnson tells his story. DAMNATION ISLAND: Poor, Sick, Mad & Criminal in 19th-Century New York, by Stacy Horn. (Algonquin, $27.95.) A detailed consideration of the appalling history of the East River penitentiaries and asylums where the city once held its undesirables in forcible exile. ELASTIC: Flexible Thinking in a Time of Change, by Leonard Mlodinow. (Pantheon, $28.95.) "Elastic thinking" is the ability to stretch beyond the bounds of our preconceptions and other deeply held beliefs. Mlodinow tries to understand how this happens in the brain, what it takes to arrive at human creativity, innovation and independent thought. SEARCHING FOR STARS ON AN ISLAND IN MAINE, by Alan Lightman. (Pantheon, $24.95.) In tightly composed essays, a noted astrophysicist and novelist argues that science need not be in conflict with spirituality. An elegant and moving paean to our quest for meaning in an age of reason. THIS LITTLE ART, by Kate Briggs. (Fitzcarraldo, paper, $20.) Briggs, a translator of Roland Barthes, here offers a philosophical meditation on the perils and pleasures of her vocation, one she compares to Robinson Crusoe's efforts to fashion a table - an act of "laboriously remaking an existing thing." FOX & CHICK: The Party and Other Stories, by Sergio Ruzzier. (Chronicle, $14.99; ages 5 to 8.) Friendship can be challenging as well as comforting. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review

Mlodinow (The Upright Thinkers, 2015) continues his exploration into the workings of the human mind with this deeply researched and well-sourced treatise on how ideas come to form in undercurrent thinking. His specific phrase of bottom up thinking belies the common belief that all ideas are consciously structured and put into motion with similar awareness. Mlodinow bases his findings on how the brain's reward center reacts to new conditions and options. By understanding this nimbleness of the brain, we can better maneuver through life and expand our thought processes. With the excess of change the modern world has to offer, this volume makes for fascinating reading. However, it is like a transcript of an extended TED talk, including all the anecdotes and asides meant to amuse the audience. Alas, the playful analogies often fall flat on the page to distracting effect. Still, historical insights abound, including the revelations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the origins of the EEG and PET scans, and an answer to thinking outside the box. Mlodinow fans will enjoy another journey into how we think.--Ruzicka, Michael Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review

In theoretical physicist Mlodinow's (Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior) latest work, he describes how our minds work and how we can approach our thought process to meet the needs of an ever-changing world. We learn the different roles of analytical or rote thought compared to elastic thinking, how they work together in our minds, and how we can take advantage of that information. Mlodinow makes the science of thought easily accessible and entertaining. This audiobook, read by the author, is hard to set aside. The examples are entertaining but also highly relevant to the point at hand. Illustrations are available in an accompanying PDF. VERDICT Recommended for any listeners curious about how their minds work. ["With elements of self-help and business writing and including entertaining anecdotes and turns of phrase, this fantastically accessible science writing about the brain can be enjoyed by anyone. Of particular interest to those wishing to understand how to cope with the pace of change in the modern world": LJ 2/1/18 starred review of the Pantheon hc.]-Eric D. Albright, Tufts Univ. Lib., Boston © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

With the world changing so rapidly, our thinking must change as well. This ingenious account by bestselling science writer Mlodinow (Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, 2012, etc.) describes how we think and how we might do it better.Business writers often argue that humans hate change. What they actually hate, the author insists, are the painful consequences often associated with changee.g., getting fired. In their absence, we love change and actively seek it. According to one expert in evolutionary anthropology, "we [humans] jump borders. We push into new territory even when we have resources where we are. Other animals don't do this." This "neophilia" confronts us with new problems, but humans are superb problem-solvers. Mostly, we solve them through analytical thinking, a top-down, step-by-step approach based on facts or reason. This works fine in most cases, and it is also how higher animals and computers work, but true creativity requires what Mlodinow calls elastic thinking. Nonlinear, operating largely in the unconscious, and more emotion driven, it's a bottom-up process that considers unusual and even bizarre ideas, resulting in genuine creativity essential in art and business and, increasingly, in our personal lives. Mixing a century of psychology and brain research with descriptions of fascinating cutting-edge technology and anecdotes from his own life, the author delivers the latest findings on how the brain takes in, processes, filters, andif we apply a few techniquesimproves on the perceptions that pour in. As he writes, "the world today is a moving target," and we must be better prepared as a result.Readers looking for advice on business success or personal growth will find pearls of wisdom, but this is not Mlodinow's focus. He sticks firmly to a few ideas already showing their age (that computers will never be truly intelligent), but mostly this is top-quality popular neuroscience. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Introduction The Demands of Change On July 6, 2016, Niantic, a forty-person startup company founded by ex-employees of Google's "Geo" division, launched Pokémon Go, an "augmented reality" game that employs a phone's camera to let people capture virtual creatures that appear on their screens as if they exist in the real world. Within two days the app had been installed on more than 10 percent of all Android phones in the United States, and within two weeks it had thirty million users. Soon iPhone owners were spending more time each day on Pokémon Go than on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, or Twitter. Even more impressive, within days of the game's release, the words Pokémon Go drew more searches on Google than the word porn. If you're not a gamer, you might roll your eyes or shrug at all that, but in the business world, the events were hard to ignore: The game generated an astonishing $1.6 million in revenue each day from domestic Apple users alone. Just as important, it added $7.5 billion to Niantic's market value virtually overnight, and within a month it had doubled the stock price of Nintendo, the company that owns the Pokémon trademark. In its first six months of existence, more than six hundred million people downloaded the Pokémon Go app. Contrast that with some of  the greatest successes of the early 2000s. Facebook launched in 2004, but it didn't hit the thirty-million-user mark until 2007. The hugely popular World of Warcraft game, also released in 2004, took six years to climb to its peak of twelve million subscribers. What seemed like pedal-to-the-metal growth back then became, ten years later, life in the slow lane. And though no one can predict what the next big new thing will be, most economists and sociologists expect that society will only continue to morph faster in the foreseeable future. But to focus only on the speed of Pokémon Go 's ascent is to miss much of the point. The game's massive success might not have been predictable, but neither was it accidental. In creating the app, Niantic made a series of innovative and forward-thinking decisions concerning the use of technology, such as piggybacking on the GPS and camera capabilities of a cell phone and leveraging cloud computing to power the app, which provided a built-in infrastructure and a capacity to scale. The game also took advantage, like nothing before it, of app-store economics, a business model that hadn't even been invented when World of Warcraft launched. In that now familiar approach, a game is given away free of charge and makes its money by selling add-ons and upgrades. Maintaining that revenue stream was another challenge. In the interactive entertainment industry, a game can start out popular and still have the shelf life of raw oysters. To avoid that fate, Niantic surprised many with a long campaign to aggressively update the app with meaningful features and content. As a result, a year after its launch, 65 million people were still playing the game each month, and revenues had reached $1.2 billion. Before Pokémon Go, the conventional wisdom was that people didn't want a game that required physical activity and real-world interaction. And so, despite all the innovation in Silicon Valley, the Pokémon Go developers were often admonished that gamers just "want to sit and play." But the developers ignored that widely held assumption, and by leveraging existing technologies in a novel way, they changed the way game developers think. The flip side of the Pokémon Go story is that if your thinking is not deft, your company can quickly sink. Just look at BlackBerry, Blockbuster, Borders, Dell, Eastman Kodak, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Sun Microsystems, Sears, and Yahoo. And they are just the tip of the iceberg--in 1958, the average life span of companies in the S&P 500 was sixty-one years. Today it is about twenty. We have to face analogous intellectual challenges in our daily lives. Today we consume, on average, a staggering 100,000 words of new information each day from various media--the equivalent of a three-hundred-page book. That's compared with about 28,000 a few decades ago. Due to innovative new products and technologies, and to that proliferation of information, accomplishing what was once a relatively straightforward task can now be a bewilderingly complex journey through a jungle of possibilities. Not long ago, if we wanted to take a trip, we'd check out a guidebook or two, get AAA maps, and call the airline and hotels, or we'd talk to one of this country's eighteen thousand travel agents. Today, people use, on average, twenty-six websites when planning a vacation, and must weigh an avalanche of offers and alternatives, with prices that not only change as a function of when in the day you wish to travel but also as a function of when you are looking. Simply finalizing the purchase once you've decided has become a kind of duel between business and customer, with each vying for the best deal, from his or her vantage point. If you didn't need a vacation when you started planning one, you might by the time you are done. Today, as individuals, we have great power at our fingertips, but we must also routinely solve problems that we didn't have to face ten or twenty years ago. For instance, once, while my wife and I were out of the country, my daughter Olivia, then fifteen, gave the house sitter the night off. Olivia then texted us asking if she could invite "a few" friends over. "A few" turned out to be 363--thanks to the instant invitations that can be communicated over cell phones on Instagram. As it turned out, she wasn't entirely to blame--it was an overzealous friend who posted it--but it's a calamity that wouldn't have been possible when her brothers were that age, just a handful of years earlier. In a society in which even basic functions are being transformed, the challenges can be daunting. Today many of us must invent new structures for our personal lives that account for the fact that digital technology makes us constantly available to our employers. We must discover ways to dodge increasingly sophisticated attempts at cybercrime or identity theft. We have to manage ever-dwindling "free" time so that we can interact with friends and family, read, exercise, or just relax. We must learn to troubleshoot problems with home software, phones, and computers. Everywhere we turn, and every day, we are faced with circumstances and issues that would not have confronted us just a decade or two ago. Much has been written about that accelerating pace of change and the globalization and rapid technological innovation that have fueled it. This book is about what is not so often discussed: the new demands on how we must think in order to thrive in this whirlwind era--for as rapid change transforms our business, professional, political, and personal environments, our success and happiness depend on our coming to terms with it.  There are certain talents that can help us, qualities of thought that have always been useful but are now becoming essential. For example: the capacity to let go of comfortable ideas and become accustomed to ambiguity and contradiction; the capability to rise above conventional mind-sets and to reframe the questions we ask; the ability to abandon our ingrained assumptions and open ourselves to new paradigms; the propensity to rely on imagination as much as on logic and to generate and integrate a wide variety of ideas; and the willingness to experiment and be tolerant of failure. That's a diverse bouquet of talents, but as psychologists and neuroscientists have elucidated the brain processes behind them, those talents have been revealed as different aspects of a coherent cognitive style. I call it elastic thinking.  Elastic thinking is what endows us with the ability to solve novel problems and to overcome the neural and psychological barriers that can impede us from looking beyond the existing order. In the coming pages, we will examine the great strides scientists have recently made in understanding how our brains produce elastic thinking, and how we can nurture it.  In that large body of research one quality stands out above all the others--unlike analytical reasoning, elastic thinking arises from what scientists call "bottom-up" processes. A brain can do mental calculations the way a computer does, from the top down, with the brain's high-level executive structures dictating the approach. But, due to its unique architecture, a biological brain can also perform calculations from the bottom up. In the bottom-up mode of processing, individual neurons fire in complex fashion without direction from an executive, and with valuable input from the brain's emotional centers (as we'll be discussing). That kind of processing is nonlinear and can produce ideas that seem far afield, and that would not have arisen in the step-by-step progression of analytical thinking.  Though no computer and few animals excel at elastic thinking, that ability is built into the human brain. That's why the creators of Pokémon Go were able to quiet the executive functions of their brains, look beyond the "obvious," and explore entirely new avenues. The more we understand elastic thinking and the bottom-up mechanisms through which our mind produces it, the better we can all learn to harness it to face challenges in our personal lives and our work environments. The purpose of this book is to examine those mental processes, the psychological factors that affect them, and, most important of all, the practical strategies that can help us master them. Excerpted from Elastic: The Science of Flexible Thinking--In a Time of Change by Leonard Mlodinow All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.