Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less

I enjoyed reading this thought-provoking book during my off time. It's a steal for the price! Probably not a book for kids or adolescents though.

I finished reading this book with an armful of “aha’s!” and one question: Why hasn’t this book been the number one bestseller since its publication in May of 2016? It is beyond transformative and that it is not universally acknowledged to be is the best evidence I can offer as to why it should be.Mr. Claxton is a cognitive scientist, in his own words, but apparently has a strong professional background in the psychology of learning, and at least a passing interest in Eastern philosophy.The premise of this book is both brilliant and fairly straightforward, although it is always presumptuous of a reader to stake that claim. Claxton makes a convincing scientific case that the “scientific” perspective—what he calls the “d-mode” (deliberate)—has come to totally dominate our social, commercial, and educational institutions. And while he does not reject this development out of hand, he does make a strong case that the perspective is incomplete and has caused us to overlook the essential humanity and importance of the unconscious—what he calls the “undermind,” the place where intuition, contemplation, and instinct reside.The undermind is not the Freudian subconscious, but is the vast area of thought that is not consciously recognized or understood. This is the tortoise part of thought where slow thinking—slow knowing as he refers to it—is the most effective, and often the only, path to truth. Speed, in these cases—or hareful thinking (my own phrase)—is not just ineffective, but counter-productive. If it is truth that we’re after, the hare, in these cases, is a red herring.Claxton proffers that conscious rational thought and underminded thinking are ideally suited to different problems. As in the case of the Chinese notion of yin and yang, they are complementary, not opposing, modes of thought. One, in fact, cannot exist without the other. (He does not directly make the comparison, to be fair.)There are many ramifications of the one-dimensional pre-occupation we see today. In the world of business, companies have essentially sterilized themselves, finding themselves incapable of timely innovation in fast-paced markets that demand it. For the same reason, moreover, they have destroyed any sense of engagement and belonging in the workplace, stifling both creativity and productivity in the process.My own gestalt in this area while reading this book was that this pre-occupation with conscious reason—big data, statistical analysis, talent management, and financial modeling—is the reason why the work/life question is in the forefront of so many corporate minds, particularly among the young. If we accept the value of tortoise-knowing, the question literally evaporates. We can even work, as I did some four decades ago, in our sleep, without the stress felt today due to our blind focus on deductive reason and the false confidence we place in fast decisions.Claxton is even more concerned, and on point, when it comes to education. We are not preparing our children for a life of learning. We are preparing them to perform on standardized testing, or convincing them that their “abilities” are fixed and cannot be improved upon. Both are unproductive and ultimately inhumane outcomes. We are setting our children up (I have two daughters in high school.) both for failure and for a life of angst and anxiety as they struggle to remain connected in a meaningful way to the world around them.While he doesn’t address these issues directly, I do believe that Claxton has also uncovered a significant root cause of the political division, and the struggle around class, race, gender, and sexual identity that is tearing the very fabric of Western society apart today.The reason is outside the peripheral vision of the hare, but within the sweeping visual arc of the attentive but subconscious tortoise. When we see conscious rationality as both exclusive and all-inclusive, as the hare does, it is a short hop from “I am right,” to, “You are wrong.” There can, as a result, be no diversity at any level.So who would this book benefit? If you ask the hare you will get a short list in return. If you ask the tortoise, however, you will see the value of this book to business people, political leaders, educators, parents, and adolescents. I can’t think of anyone, in fact, who would not benefit from this book.I do not know Mr. Claxton and never heard of him or this book before stumbling across it in the Kindle deal section. I am a voracious reader and was running out of money to satiate my appetite now that $15 is not an uncommon price for a Kindle book. This book was a steal by comparison but is one of the most powerful and thought-provoking books I’ve read this year.

In this wide-ranging, scholarly study, Guy Claxton does a superb job of showing the reader how complex consciousness is, and why, in our awareness, things aren't what they seem to be. You might think from the book's title that this is largely a metaphysical or philosophical discussion. That's hardly the case. Claxton presents numerous results from psychology experiments that show, unequivocally, that we are not primarily rational beings, but rationalizing ones. In other words, we invent reasons to justify doing the things that we do, but these ideas are more likely to be intellectual alibis than the real motivations for our behavior.You may think that you consciously make moment to moment decisions about your life. But Claxton convincingly shows us that the mysterious "undermind," as he calls it, has more to do with who we are and what we do than our conscious, logical, linear mind. The "d-mode", our deliberate thinking style--the one we perfect in our years of schooling-- is the most commonly accepted model of how our minds work. However, the experimental evidence suggests that d-mode thinking has relatively little to do with how we make most of the decisions in our lives. The d-mode actually comes up with plausible reasons that justify our actions, but it isn't the source of those actions. The conscious mind's job is to focus a lot of attention on a particular problem and maintain a coherent sense of ourselves: but these processes all come after the fact of our inner decision-making. In fact, people often seem happier with their decisions in the long run, if they think less about them from the outset. It is in this sense, that "think less" makes one more intelligent.Contrary to our training, Claxton shows us that in many situations, our slower mind is much more effective at running our lives than our more efficient fast mind. The undermind is especially good in ambiguous situations, where information is undefined and uncertain. In our fast-paced lives, we often demand instant results based on objective, linear data-production systems. But Claxton argues that we would often be better off to slow down and let the subconscious solve our problems more spontaneously. This idea is not just a values-based belief: it is backed by empirical studies such as subliminal research experiments and small-group studies. HARE BRAIN, TORTOISE MIND will get you to re-evaluate a lot of assumptions you have about yourself. Who is really in charge of your life? Who are you? These are the sorts of questions that this book evokes and once Claxton gets your attention, he doesn't let go. After presenting the empirical evidence Claxton goes onto to explain their significance in religious thought and social history. But the main point throughout is that we need to respect, cultivate, and develop our intuitive, whole-brain thinking processes. And that wisdom, in the largest sense of the word, is a lot more than bits and bytes that flow through our PDAs and laptop computers. Because what makes for really profound thinking isn't only a profusion of data and information: it is also an awareness of the uncertainty and totality of relationships that sustain life in all its forms. This book is like a bottle of good wine. It just gets better as you keep reading. Claxton encourages us to follow our intuitions and develop ourselves into complete beings rather than logical, numbed, rational robots. Readers who enjoy this book may also appreciate Tor Norretrander's THE USER ILLUSION and Carl Honore's IN PRAISE OF SLOWNESS.(Dr. Simeon Hein is the author of OPENING MINDS and PLANETARY INTELLIGENCE and composer of the CDs EARTH DREAMING and OPENING SKIES.)

Very hard to follow, I read a lot of books but just could not get into this, had to abandon it which is not something I usually do