Todd Siler

Life is short and art is long. The "art" in this case is Todd Siler's book: "Breaking the mind barrier". I think I was deluded when I bought the book because it has "Author of Think like a genius" on the cover....and I think that, subconsciously, I felt I was going to emerge after reading this book.....thinking like a genius. Ala, that must have been the other book because I'm certainly not thinking like a genius after reading the current book. And.....confession......I haven't even read it right through. Normally, I will soldier on through the most boring of books....simply to give the author the chance to prove or redeem themselves. But in this case, I decided that life was too short. (Certainly it's becoming vanishingly short at my age) and I have many books yet to read.
So why did I give up? Well Siler seems to have the idea that we think in metaphors and this is our most creative way of thinking. OK so far so good. And he likens the human brain to the structure of the sun. Welllllll....ok a bit of a stretch ....but he does make the point that it's not really a one to one likeness....there are just elements that we can use as analogies. I guess a difficulty that I have here is: Yes, we can do that (probably with just about anything). You can say it has parts: With the brain he breaks it down into three; ...thinking, believing, acting, And with the sun he breaks the structure down into; the convection zone, the radiative zone and the core.
But one could divide the structure of either the brain or the sun into many more parts or components. And You could pretty much do this with anything else.
I guess, one can get some creative ideas by using these sorts of analogies ....and in fact I've done this sort of thing myself with various workshops I've run. But I don't see it as a profound truth about the way our mind works or how we can improve its working. And on p65 he doubles down. Here he has a picture showing a plot of radiation emission from the Orion nebula and alongside some photographs of the embryonic development of the human brain. He then suggests that: "Imagine, then, the details of star and aa galaxy formation representing our genesis and vice versa. These imaginings are what neurocosmology is all about----the imaginable mapping onto both the possible and the improbable". Well, actually, Todd, I can kind of see where you are coming from but I just can't be bothered making these sort of comparisons and then claiming them as profound insights. Maybe Todd gets a lot out of it but it really smacks of pseudo-science to me; lots of scientific diagrams which vaguely look alike to some other diagram ....and then you draw life lessons from the comparison. (Whereas, if a slightly different scale was used for one diagram it might look totally different). It's all a little bit too much like "Music of the spheres" to my liking.
As you can probably guess by this stage: I didn't like the book..and maybe a lot of others didn't like it either because it was in the remainder box somewhere and I'd bought it for $2.95. And I think I wasted my money. I'm giving it one star because I can't give any less but maybe, if I'd persevered and really made an effort to understand where he was coming from, I might have given it a higher rating. But, as i said at the start: life is short. So one star from me. And it's going back into the charity bin.… (mehr)

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