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    Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind
    Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind
    Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind
    Audiobook6 hours

    Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind

    Written by Gary Marcus

    Narrated by Stephen Hoye

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Are we "noble in reason"? Perfect, in God's image? Far from it, says New York University psychologist Gary Marcus. In this lucid and revealing book, Marcus argues that the mind is not an elegantly designed organ but a "kluge," a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption. He unveils a fundamentally new way of looking at the human mind-think duct tape, not supercomputer-that sheds light on some of the most mysterious aspects of human nature.

    Taking us on a tour of the fundamental areas of human experience-memory, belief, decision making, language, and happiness-Marcus reveals the myriad ways our minds fall short. He examines why people often vote against their own interests, why money can't buy happiness, why leaders often stick to bad decisions, and why a sentence like "people people left left" ties us into knots even though it's only four words long. He also offers surprisingly effective ways to outwit our inner kluge-for example, always consider alternative explanations, make contingency plans, and beware the vivid, personal anecdote. Throughout, he shows how only evolution-haphazard and undirected-could have produced the minds we humans have, while making a brilliant case for the power and usefulness of imperfection.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJun 30, 2008
    ISBN9781400177516

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    Reviews for Kluge

    4/5

    13 ratings11 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Exercise for the reader: Define "rational thought."That was the one problem that I had in reading this well-researched, thought-provoking book. How do we know that certain conclusions are "rational," others "irrational"? We know because, ultimately, our emotions tell us what is valuable and what is not. From there, we use "rational" thought to achieve those ends. But if we changed the emotions, would not what is "rational" change? Therefore any dichotomy between "reason" and "emotion" is largely false, and there are places where author Gary Marcus fails to realize that he has made an unmotivated argument.Yet the general thesis is patently true: Evolution does not produce the best solution to a problem; it merely follows a series of branches that lead in the direction of some sort of "improvement" (properly, something more "fit" than what it replaces). So our whole bodies and minds are full of kludges (a spelling Marcus avoids because that isn't how he pronounces it, but it's how every engineer I know pronounces the word). If you avoid discussions of what is "rational" and simply ask, "Is this the best way to achieve what we want?" then there can be no question: our brains are kludgey.I do have one other gripe, mostly with the material at the end. Marcus assumes that a lot of things that file under "abnormal psychology" (e.g. depression) are the result of kludges, and maladaptive. This really, truly does not follow. A trait can be adaptive or maladaptive depending on context -- or a gene can be adaptive if unreinforced and maladaptive if reinforced. (The classic example of this is sickle cell anemia: One copy of the relevant gene and you're semi-immune to malaria; two copies and you're probably dead.) Major depression, or extreme autism, or out-of-control anxiety, are maladaptive. But mild autism, or minor depression, are associated with great originality and creativity. So our mental "problems" may also be our strengths.Of course, that largely proves the point: If our brains weren't kludged up, we could have the benefits of depression and autism without the social failures and the sadness.Something for the next round of evolution to work on, no doubt.
    • 4/5
      Paradigms in the Cognitive Sciences (especially the less physical ones, like psychology) tend to behave more like fads and trends than systematic research programs. They shape interpretations of data and drive experimental design for a while; five to ten years later something else comes along and most everyone besides the acolytes moves on (c.f. Connectionism). The theoretical interpretations they offer tend to fit some data very well, for a time, while other aspects of the explananda lie in Procrustian beds."Kluge" provides a good example of how this aspect of CogSci peplays out. First of all, it does not help that the book is essentially a magazine or blog article writ (relatively) large (see below). But if the book delivered, as the subtitle suggested, a detailed account of the evolution of the various features and phenomena it brings up, that would be one thing. Instead it essentially provides a different way of THINKING about the experimental results it brings up.There are actually two overarching lessons taught throughout the book: 1) it can be more useful to think of various aspects of the mind NOT as the ideal, "fittest" solutions that Nature could possibly have produced, but instead as rough-and-ready, thrown-together solutions that worked well enough at the time; 2) our minds at the macro-level consist of a slow, deliberative, newer system that is rational, and a fast, reactive, older system that runs instictively. Notably, the latter MAY be explained by the former; but that is an example of one of the hypothetical ideas in "Kluge" rather than something that is PROVEN in the book.The book will be mostly interesting reading for those who like to read about psychology experiments. Not all of it will be new to such readers, though, as the Tversky-Kahneman-type rationality issues probably are not. Not of all of it is well-presented either--the chapter on language, for example, is a mess that seems to work particularly poorly at advancing the overall theses. Marcus weighs in at every turn to tie in the big lessons; sometimes his interpretations are compelling, while other times they smack of shoe-horning. As suggested above, though, the book is perhaps best approached as light synoptic reading, and there is enough diversion in that sense for most people interested in this line of inquiry.
    • 3/5
      Tries to refer to too many disparate things, and ends up not really covering any topic in sufficient depth, or with sufficient rigor. The basic thesis is that the human mind, especially in the ways it doesn't work very well (cognitive biases, mental illness, even things like the haphazard pursuit of pleasure) show the imperfections of evolution: the ultimate kluge. Trouble is, he pretty well says everything he needs to say in the first few chapters, and thereafter the book gets more and more scatty. Hard not to imagine him sitting there writing it, going "Ooh, ooh, I know, I can talk about X!" and five minutes later "Ooh, ooh I can say Y! And Z. And maybe I can winkle A in there too." Whether they advance the argument or not doesn't seem to matter. Neither does questions of how well he can discuss them -- how, for example, do you take a discussion of ambiguity in language seriously, when he doesn't even mention metaphor? (His lack of awareness of the fundamentals of the philosophy of language doesn't stop him trying to rope the subject in. Or taking a swing at Noam Chomsky along the way.) Ultimately the problem is that he just hasn't really planned the book well enough. It's entertaining enough, deals (poorly, but accessibly) with some interesting and important concepts. It certainly shouldn't frighten anyone off popular science books. But others have done it much, much better -- try Daniel Kahnemann (for cognitive biases), Guy Deutscher (language), Steven Pinker (ditto), Robert Sapolsky (evolutionary physiology) and Vilayanur Ramachandran (general weirdness with the way the brain is wired). You'll learn more, and be much more entertained. Or if you like your science light and congenial, try Robert Winston and Oliver Sacks. Better writers, and more knowledgeable.This book, however enthusiastically intentioned, is itself quite a significant kluge. It won't scare the horses, but you can easily find better.
    • 4/5
      Now, if you don’t want to blame your momma anymore, this is the book for you. All those problems -- making those questionable food and partner choices, believing in the devil and not in NASA’s moon trip, making dumb math mistakes, forgetting just about anything sometime—These problems are not your mama’s fault; they are not your fault. Those proto-monkeys and lizards did it. They spawned and recreated, bequeathing you a bottom brain that smolders and cooks up schemes for living in the jungle, not the city. Your brain stays always alert for that big, furry, pointy-toothed thing you have nightmares about, while always ready to grub for smelly roots, tasty rabbit parts and potential breeding partners. We have a lizard brain that is worse than our parents’. Gary Marcus explains our thinking tools as a big kludge—just a pile up of lizard, mammal, and, finally, faulty reasoning circuits that do not play well together. The worst is-- we default to the lizard brain when life gets tough.Most people know how evolution failed us by standing up four-legged hoofers to a life of backaches and, eventually, metal knees. But the million year old brain is just as bad—we react; we don’t plan. We are made to eat, not to do math. It’s a wonder we can even post well-reasoned stuff like this, according to Mr. Marcus. He wrote a slim little offering, but it is a nice intro for the layperson . But I prefer Amos Twersky talking about wacky reasoning and or Eleanor Rosch explaining how we make categories.
    • 2/5
      Whenever I run across something which asserts that we do/think/believe the way we do because of this chemical or that sort of brain wiring, I always find myself looking for an agenda. Or, to quote Robert Anton Wilson: "What the thinker thinks, the prover proves." While Marcus' knowledge of the workings of the human brain is impressive, and his work is informative, I'd have been happier with "Kluge" if there'd been fewer assertions that we only indulge in various belief systems because of our odd wiring.Not that necessarily disbelieve what Marcus has written here, mind you, but I can't help but feel that we simply don't know enough about the human brain even now, to know why we do what we do. That Marcus feels he has enough proof to make some of his cases seems to me to be more a function of Wilson's assertion than any hard scientific evidence.Still, it's a fascinating book, so don't let my problems with it get in the way of reading it. You may find that it fits your world view a bit more cozily than it did mine.
    • 4/5
      Kluge is a slang term for "a clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem." In this new book, psychologist Gary Marcus argues that the human mind itself is a kluge, and then goes on to discuss how this explains why you can't remember the name of that woman from your yoga class when you run into her at the movie theater. The basis of Marcus' argument is that evolution was working with the tools at hand when it whipped up the more complex parts of our brain and that the result—while generally functional—is often far from optimal. In each chapter, Marcus details various maddening brain systems ranging from memory to belief to pleasure and offers intriguing reasons why they so often fail to work as we would like them to. In the chapter on choice, for example, he points out that we often make highly irrational decisions when it comes to money because our mind is basically trying to wing it with a system that was developed not to deal with money but rather with food. Anybody who has ever found themselves staring at the result of some financial indiscretion will well understand that evolution is clearly still working out the kinks on that one. Marcus is not shy about highlighting the fact that klugey nature of our minds does not bode well for arguments in favor of intelligent design. As he discusses how we adapted our existing physiology to deal with the increasingly complex demands of language, it does make one wonder why—if there was an intelligent designer involved—the adaptations to the larynx that gave us more control over our vocalizations also dramatically increased our chances of choking to death. It does seem like there could have been a better way. Though this book does revisit some territory I was already familiar with, his fundamental premise was compelling enough that it added a new dimension of understanding to the things that frustrate me about my own brain. In his final chapter, Marcus makes a good argument that we all need to understand the sloppy shortcuts evolution made with our minds so that we can better defend ourselves against the tendency of advertisers, politicians, cults and the like to exploit the flaws in the system, and he concludes with a useful, 13-point listing of concrete steps we can take to counteract the built-in weaknesses of our klugey brains.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this immensely. Written in everyday language, it changed the way I think about 'me'. The notes inside the jacket say that "Kluge is a controversial ... look at what it means to be human". Controversial it may be, but Gary Marcus puts his case in a way which was, for me, 'enlightening'.
    • 4/5
      Tremendously enjoyable explication of the cobbled-together nature of the human mind. Cogently explains, among other things, how we can't trust our own assessments about, well, nearly everything. The chapter on language is especially fascinating, the chapters that cover rationalizations and happiness are more squirm-inducing than otherwise. Very accessible and full of enough lame jokes and fun asides to keep it from being too scientific. Highly recommended.
    • 3/5
      Reading this book is a bit like reading David Brooks -- while it's pretty interesting for those of us interested, at a shallow level, in sociology and psychology and evolutionary biology, I find myself disagreeing with a lot of what is said.

      "In an ideal world...the parts of our brain that decide which activities are pleasurable would be extremely fussy, responding only to things that are truly good for us. For example, fruits have sugar, and mammals need sugar, so it makes sense that we should have evolved a "taste" for fruit."

      This is just plain old wrong. While the human brain needs glucose, the body can make its own glucose without getting the slightest little bit from fruit.

      While this is just one small example, I feel that this book is a bit carelessly written. Though I did enjoy the Radio New Zealand interview with the author back when it was first published, which is what made me pick up the book when I happened across it in the library. The word 'kluge' is a really useful one, and you might find yourself making use of it in everyday language -- I know I have. I'll upvote that word to be included in everyday language.

      I didn't need any convincing, though, that the human brain is a kluge. And imagining all the ways in which our brains might have been better is a fascinating exercise.

      Also, this version of the book could do with a thorough copy edit. Missing words and inversions kept jumping out at me.
    • 5/5
      Awesome exploration of the evolution of man's thinking process (and lack thereof.) Really makes you think about the way you think.
    • 4/5
      This book takes a quick trip through the human mind and what sort of evolutionary construction could have led to a mind that is a mess of half-developed solutions and new structures built on top of old, connections that twist and turn, and odd, irrational thinking patterns. The author writes well, and does his research. The book is easy to read, though I must say there is nothing in here that I was not already aware of from many other sources. This is a good introductory book for people who are only just beginning to delve into the topic, but it is a bit superficial and unsatisfying for a well-seasoned reader on the subject. It is written at a level that should not be difficult for people who are not particularly schooled in scientific terminology; in fact, I dare say even physicists, with their poor understanding of biology, could actually understand this book. I plan to recommend it to some physicist friends of mine who believe, mistakenly, that they understand biology better than the biologists.