David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bobos in Paradise, has long explored and explained the way we live. Now, Brooks turns to the building blocks of human flourishing in a multilayered, illuminating work grounded in everyday life.
This is the story of how success happens. It is told through the lives of one composite American couple, Harold and Erica -- how they grow, push forward, are pulled back, fail, and succeed. A scientific revolution has occurred -- we have learned more about the human brain in the last thirty years than we had in the previous three thousand.
The unconscious mind, it turns out, is most of the mind -- not a dark, vestigial place but a creative and enchanted one, where most of the brain’s work gets done. This is the realm of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, personality traits, and social norms: the realm where character is formed and where our most important life decisions are made. The natural habitat of The Social Animal.
Bio
David Brooks
David Brooks became an op-ed columnist for The New York Times in September 2003. He had been an editor at The Wall Street Journal, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, and a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Atlantic.
Currently a commentator on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, he is also the author of Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense. His latest book is The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement.
He has contributed essays and articles to many publications, including The New Yorker, Forbes, The Public Interest, The New Republic, and Commentary.
He is a frequent commentator on National Public Radio, CNN's "Late Edition," and "The Diane Rehm Show."
Interdisciplinary study that attempts to explain the cognitive processes of humans and some higher animals in terms of the manipulation of symbols using computational rules. The field draws particularly on the disciplines of artificial intelligence, psychology (seecognitive psychology), linguistics, neuroscience, and philosophy. Some chief areas of research in cognitive science have been vision, thinking and reasoning, memory, attention, learning, and language processing. Early theories of cognitive function attempted to explain the evident compositionality of human thought (thoughts are built up of smaller units put together in a certain way), as well as its productivity (the process of putting together a thought from smaller units can be repeated indefinitely to produce an infinite number of new thoughts), by assuming the existence of discrete mental representations that can be put together or taken apart according to rules that are sensitive to the representations' syntactic, or structural, properties. This “language of thought” hypothesis was later challenged by an approach, variously referred to as connectionism, parallel-distributed processing, or neural-network modeling, according to which cognitive processes (such as pattern recognition) consist of adjustments in the activation strengths of neuronlike processing units arranged in a network.
Medical specialty concerned with nervous system function and disorders. Clinical neurology began in the mid-19th century, when mapping of the functional areas of the brain first began and understanding of the causes of conditions such as epilepsy improved. The development of electroencephalography in the 1920s aided in the diagnosis of neurological disease, as did the development of computerized axial tomography in the 1970s and nuclear magnetic resonance imaging in the 1980s. In addition to dealing with physical disorders (e.g., tumours, trauma), neurology is unique among medical specialties in its intersection with psychiatry. Greater understanding of the brain chemistry of disorders such as schizophrenia and depression has led to a wide array of effective drugs that nevertheless work best in conjunction with psychotherapy. Side effects of drug or surgical therapy can be serious, and many nervous system disorders have no effective treatment.
Scientific discipline that studies mental processes and behaviour in humans and other animals. Literally meaning “the study of the mind,” psychology focuses on both individual and group behaviour. Clinical psychology is concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. Other specialized fields of psychology include child psychology, educational psychology, sports psychology, social psychology, and comparative psychology. The issues studied by psychologists cover a wide spectrum, including learning, cognition, intelligence, motivation, emotion, perception, personality, and the extent to which individual differences are shaped by genetics or environment. The methods used in psychological research include observation, interviews, psychological testing, laboratory experimentation, and statistical analysis.
Science of society, social institutions, and social relationships, and specifically the systematic study of the development, structure, interaction, and collective behaviour of organized human groups. It emerged at the end of the 19th century through the work of Émile Durkheim in France, Max Weber and Georg Simmel in Germany, and Robert E. Park and Albion Small in the U.S. Sociologists use observational techniques, surveys and interviews, statistical analysis, controlled experiments, and other methods to study subjects such as the family, ethnic relations, schooling, social status and class, bureaucracy, religious movements, deviance, the elderly, and social change.
Always enjoy David Brooks. As we have increasingly embraced technology, we have moved away from the importance of connection, subsuming face to face interaction with texting, and proximity with the illusion that it can be replaced by communication. As a parent of a twenty-something adult, who uses social media and texting for 90% of all communication, I see the struggle with the lack of social cues and body language which enriches understanding. Misunderstanding of intent and meaning corresponds with nearly all their "communication".
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