This Will Make You Smarter [Hardcover]

Just got this book today, so perhaps I'm breaking a rule by posting a review before finishing the book. However, I love this book's structure and breadth of topics. If you like TED, you'll love this book since both distill topics to their essence by leading experts and both leave the audience more informed but wanting more. That and the price is a bargain.

First off the structure of this book is great. 397 pages of short essays ranging from one to several pages. The table of contents (all 24 pages of it) at the beginning gives you the essay titles, authors, and a short phrase describing the essay. There's also an index in the back if you prefer more topical browsing. This structure makes this book very accessible since you can pick it up and read as much or as little as you have time for.

Each essay is self-contained and distills topics which are easy to get out into the weeds on. As the book's title suggests, rather than just factual essays, the authors try to show how elements from their field of study can be used to alter your thinking or better understand the world around you. Each essay presents its own kind of mini world view, a single data point describing not not what to think but how to think.

The range of topics is amazing as well. From the back cover, topics include:
* cognitive illusions/delusions
* experimentation
* fear of the unknown
* biases
* negotiation
* culture
* paradigm shifts
* the natural world
* technology
* biology
* uncertainty & randomness
* time
* science
* and lots more

I highly recommend this book.

I am enjoying the concise and stimulating essays gathered together in This Will Make You Smarter. There are a number of positive reviews that paint a clear picture of this book, but the skewed one-star review by Open Sesame dated March 6, 2012 compels a rebuttal. This reviewer is apparently knowledgeable enough to judge the book to be devoid of new ideas, yet I expect most readers will find, as I have, an ample number of fresh ideas within their experience to stimulate thinking in new directions. Open Sesame is miffed to have purchased the book upon later discovering that the contents are available for free at the Edge web site, but this information is available through Amazon's "look inside" feature which displays a substantial amount of the book contents and the introduction describes how it was developed through the dialogue at the Edge web site. I find a touch of irony in such a smart individual broadcasting their own blunders. There is also a derisive implication that with the book contents being available online that it would be foolish to order the book; this doesn't recognize the perspective of many people who prefer the format and convenience of reading a physical book over that of reading online. Secret agent Maxwell Smart had a favored phrase that sums up the perspective of Closed Sesame: "He missed it by that much....."

*****
"This constellation of thinkers, influenced by people like Daniel Kahneman, Noam Chomsky..., Steve Jobs, and Sergey Brin, do a great deal to set the intellectual temper of the times. They ask the fundamental questions and shape debates outside of their own disciplines and across the public sphere." --David Brooks: Book Foreword
*

John Brockman, literary agent, author, and host of 'The Edge of human knowledge website', keeps inviting scholars outside their intellectual disciplines, arranges symposiums and debates, encouraging online conversations, in order to bring a think tank together with popular intellect in a 'third culture' network, enhancing their talent and involvement. Many would agree that at least half his clients are truly remarkable thinkers, reports the Guardian, but there is room for disagreement about which half. Brockman, better named by a friend as a 'cultural impresario', presents 150 plus short essays, driving us onto the Cutting Edge, after 'Future Science', his last essays on intellectual research that aroused great interest in his readers.

Brockman proves that you need not be an inspired writer to inspire other thinkers into reforming our outdated concepts and crippled speculation. Featured in his new collection, a marathon of 151 thinkers, allowed to express their human, social, or scientific experiences in a precis essay in a tight space within 397 pages, that average 2.6 pages per thinker! The writers in this book lead some of the forefront fields; in these pages they are just inviting you to an appetizer of what they are thinking, working on, or dreaming to accomplish. Several of these very short essays just highlight how we see the world in an imperfect surroundings, rendering our knowledge is incomplete, because the stock of our own individual reason is small.

Futurist Kevin Kelly admonishing against the fear of failure states, "The chief innovation that science brought to the state of defeat is a way to manage mishaps. Blunders are kept small, manageable, constant, and trackable." Martin Seligman, patron of positive psychology, writes about the five pillars of well-being; Positive Emotion, Engagement, Positive Relationships,..., Meaning and Purpose, while Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, meditates on our tendency to miscalculate the magnitude of impact in some circumstances, which he calls 'focusing illusion'. Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli reminds us uncertainty and meekness are a vital for personal and intellectual growth, "The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt." Just a small sampler!

This fascinating and stimulating collection, by no means makes you smarter, although it increases your analog cognitive power, stretches your imagination and keeps you in the company of the intellectual, humble elites. Maria Popova in her beautiful review of the book says, "my favorite, for obvious reasons, comes from curator extraordinaire Hans-Ulrich Obrist, "To curate, in this sense, is to refuse static arrangements and permanent alignments and instead to enable conversations and relations. Generating these kinds of links is an essential part of what it means to curate, as is disseminating new knowledge, new thinking, and new artworks in a way that can seed future cross-disciplinary inspirations."

Cutting Edge, targets the same celestial goal led by unconfined craving; an avid adventure into knowledge, marked by keen interest and enthusiasm. His new anthology, 'New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking', is such a provocative survey of the ever expanding frontier of knowledge, in a charged capsule format. Brockman's resilient 'catenaccio myth' of Fabian maneuvers, to dismantle the ancient taboo, dissolving classic boundaries of study domains, across great frontiers of knowledge, while avoiding front assaults in favor of wearing down the outmoded classical flanks of Academia. His ascent regain the composure of Dean Summers recent attempt to champion the means of acquiring knowledge, initiated by him in advancing Harvard's Cutting Edge interdisciplinary education mission.