Customer Reviews

Reality Check: What Your Mind Knows, But Isn't Telling You

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This book is kind of a random walk down Mr. Weiner's mind. He seems to be quite interested in following the current research in quite a number of scientific areas and then explaining these results to his readers.

If this book has a central theme, it is that the mind is a marvelous thing that you can use to do a lot of things, some good, some not so good. He cautions you, for instance on following the latest (or the earliest for that matter) religious fad that attempts to tell you what to think about everything. He makes it your task to do a 'Reality Check' on what you're being told and to make up your own mind.

Much of the book is on what you might call self help popular psychology. He describes the current research that is being conducted and illustrates how this might be applied in our daily lives. I particularly enjoyed his comments on religion. With 10,000 religions and 33,000 variations of the Christian religion alone, it's hard to imagine that they are all right. And yet the overwhelming percentage of us adopt the religion of out parents, unthinkingly, with no 'Reality Check.'

I really wanted to like this book, but I could not. Weiner has nothing original to say. He has simply read a few popular science books -- good ones, such as How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker -- which you can and should read for yourself. Weiner gives what amounts to a book report, and a bad one at that.

First, Weiner uses childish language and technics, "Hello, hello wake up -- all this is going on in your mind this instant." I don't know about you, but I find that pretty lame.

Even worse, Weiner fails to understand basic concepts that many junior high students do understand. Get this quote:

"Do you have brown eyes? If both your parents have brown eyes, then you will have brown eyes, because the gene that creates brown eyes is dominant over the one that creates blue eyes."

Wrong! The fact that brown is dominant is why the child of two brown eyed parents can have blue eyes. The child of two blue eyed parents, however, will have blue eyes. Shame on Weiner, and shame on his editor for not catching that.

In short, this book is written at a junior high school level, but the author should not be teaching our kids!

This book is as informative as Weiner's other books. It is well written with a hint of humor so the lay person can understand what they are reading. The mind is such a complicated mass that it takes a great deal of guts to try and explain its workings. Obviously Weiner has done a great deal of research in compiling such an informative book. I would just like to say to the two negative reviews posted that it is easy to criticize someone else for trying to educate others on the workings of the mind ... especially if you don't seem to understand it yourself. I would suggest you read the author's other books...Power Freaks and Battling the Inner Dummy.

I picked up this book at the local library because the title and brief description on the cover sounded interesting. I started reading the book and was amazed at how poorly written it was. Typos, bad logic, and a general tone of delivery that made it difficult to continue reading. Later, I skimmed the remainder of the book to make sure I wasn't jumping to conclusions. This book is very bad. I was curious to see what other readers thought of the book on Amazon -- I can only guess that some of these five star reviews are from the author's friends.

In this book, the author offers what he considers to be a realistic view of modern life and the human condition. He calls this a "reality check", but the book definitely does not give the reader a comprehensive, coherent, scientific, and realistic view of the state of world today. Too often those who describe themselves as being "realistic" are highly skeptical of those who have an optimistic view of life, and believe that such people are naive, unintelligent, or ignorant. The "realists" seem to enjoy rubbing peoples faces in the dirt, with the intent of waking them up from their optimistic delirium and showing them "the true nature of things." But cynicism is not equivalent to realism....

Many assertions are made in this book without sound scientific or objective evidence. For example, the author speaks of a "territorial imperative" as if it were a proven and well-substantiated concept in anthropology. The scientific evidence for this concept though is meager, and the author in no way documents any evidence for it anywhere in the book. In relation to this, he speaks in the book of something called the "Simmel effect", named after the sociologist George Simmel, and which asserts that in social groups that are ordered by rank, individuals imitate symbols that designate the higher hierarchal levels and abandon the symbols that designate the lower level ones. The author does not discuss the evidence for the Simmel effect, but does give one reference on the Web that is currently not available. There has been research into the Simmel effect that does show that successful status symbols begin to diminish as soon as they become dominant, but this research involved the use of simulation studies. It would be very interesting and helpful if more empirical studies could be conducted. The author's support for this effect is mostly anecdotal, quoting for example the "tattoo craze" and how some people begin with maybe one or two tattoos and wind up covering their entire bodies in order to gain "status." He does not however indicate how many people have engaged in this behavior. Has he studied or observed a large collection of individuals who do? No statistical data is offered to the reader in this regard. He also offers as evidence for this effect the corporate executives who update their offices, jets, and living space; academics who need to "be first" with research data, and managers who search for someone to demean in order to obtain a "daily status boost." But who are these people that he is referring to? What are their names? How many of them has he observed in this regard?

He also claims that many people have a need for spiritual belief that can "shut out" their ability to ponder complex or difficult concepts. How does he know this? What evidence is there that would allow him to conclude this? How many people is this true of? This question is not merely an academic or semantic one, for if it were true it says that when the brain is engaging in religious speculation that this will interfere with conceptualization in other domains. No evidence is given for this claim, even though one could easily find it plausible. It also makes assumptions on the ability of the brain to engage in parallel tasking and domain-specificity. Given the intense research that has been done in cognitive neuroscience in the last two decades that has attempted to settle whether the human brain is actually modular in its architecture, the author's claim here is very outlandish.

The author's view of history is also unrealistic and cynical. Yes, the twentieth century was unequaled in its unmitigated brutality and the weapons humans used against each other. It would be wrong however to conclude that even though there were over 90,000,000 million deaths in the last century due to war, this number is not comparable to the number of people in that century who did not choose to participate in the killing of others. And if one looks at history, one will notice that the vast majority of people have never taken another life, have never participated in war, and have led lives that are exemplary if judged from true ethical standards. But yet if we are to believe the author, we will hold that humans are a killer species, anxious at all times to due harm to others, and we must engage in focused concentration to avoid our predilection for violence. The author is too focused on the news reports, with their predilection toward bad news, to notice that these reports are anomalous, large deviations from the norm, as compared to the typical events that govern human interactions and human behavior. Indeed the author should himself engage in a "reality check": he will find that things are nowhere near as bad as he believes.

Very insightful, it was most of the information I was looking for. Thought provoking and easy to not technical like reading a car manual, I understood it and enjoyed.

I recommend his other books as well, even though I just stated I find the insightful as well; Power Freaks and Battling the Inner Dummy

What is reality? Can we rely on our brains to tell us what reality is? What about our emotions? Do they come from the brain, some other part of the body, or even from something outside the body such as the soul or spirit? The subtitle of this book is "What your mind knows, but isn't telling you." I believe it would be as accurate to say the book is about what your mind knows but can't tell you because you wouldn't believe it.

The author David L. Weiner writes in a style that is easy to understand even when the things he writes about are not easily understandable. He covers such topics as the anatomy of the brain, how neurons work, the impact of general relativity, and the marvel of DNA. This is one of those books that has so many good pieces of information in it, that you sort of wish it would just on and on explaining everything.

I liked the book especially in those areas where Weiner puts things into perspective such as describing our DNA as a 6 foot long thread that is so thin you could only see it with a scanning electron microscope. Yet contained in that small thread is the whole blueprint of our minds, bodies, and very existence. The difference between any two humans expressed as a percentage of this DNA is so small as to be meaningless even though we spend our entire lives proving to ourselves and others that we are different. Sometimes proving entails the expression of the best in art, music, science, or even politics while at other times that proving entails torture, killing, war, and enslavement.

Another section I found fascinating dealt with religions of the world. Quoting from the World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World, published by the Oxford University Press, Weiner reports that "there are at least 10,000 distinct and different religions across the world, of which 270 have more than 500,000 adherents." And the single largest component of religion is genetics - at least 99.99% of the time you inherit your religion from your parents. In the United States where religion is considered more changeable than in many parts of the world, Weiner states that fewer than 2% convert from one religion to another in any year. I would venture that that is much to high of an estimate.

Although Reality Check won't give you all the answers to life's questions, it will provide you with several hours of interesting reading and dozens of thought provoking questions.

I was looking for insights into how the mind works, or implications of modern science on the mind. The book started off, however, talking about the brain and its functioning. That was interesting to me. But after the first few chapters, it ends up turning into a textbook-like piece, simply classifying and grouping habits of the brain. If it isnt outdated yet, it will be outdated shortly.

Reality Check is an easy-to-read, fresh spin on a scientific view of reality...Weiner offers lots of valuable insights that can be applied to improving the quality of your life both personally and professionally.

I've always enjoyed reading books from this author. I found this book full of great interesting facts. I just love how he takes quite complicated material as a basis for his books and assimulates it in such a way that makes them a pleasure to read along with his personal observations. Just loved it. This first part is rather "deep" but it swings into an easier read and, for me, was really a good read. Thank you Mr. Weiner for writing this book.