'Scientific revolution' about unconscious mind

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The Social Animal

The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement

By David Brooks

Random House, 424 pages, $31

TOO much attention has been paid to the wrong part of the human brain, David Brooks argues in his latest, and compelling, book. His thesis in a nutshell: Our reasoning faculties are much overrated.

It's the unconscious mind, the realm of emotion, intuition, biases, personality traits and learned social norms that governs our life decisions, not the historically vaunted rational side of our nature, he maintains.

Brooks is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times and a past contributing editor at Newsweek and The Atlantic Monthly.

His 2000 book, Bobos in Paradise, was a bestseller that added a new word to the language. "Bobos," coined by Brooks, are the smugly wealthy 1990s offspring of the yuppie generation.

Brooks believes we've learned more about the brain in the last 30 years than we did in the previous 3,000, and all recent evidence points to a "scientific revolution" about human nature.

He gathers strands of research from neurology, psychology, brain physiology and behavioural economics and presents them via two avenues -- in a popular-science format, and in a story format starring a couple of fictive characters named Erica and Harold.

He uses the couple's storylines, from cradle to grave, to "illustrate how the recent scientific findings play out in real life."

Though Harold doesn't share any apparent biographical details with Brooks, he's often a surrogate and mouthpiece for him.

This tendency surfaces most transparently, and effectively, in chapters on how the social aspects of a child's upbringing are more determinative of post-secondary academic success than IQ or receipt of any amount of financial assistance.

"The United States has spent over a trillion dollars to try to reduce the achievement gap between white and black students," he writes. "Major universities offer lavish aid packages and some of the richest, like Harvard, waive tuition entirely for those from families making less than $60,000 per year."

But absent a cultural background that inculcates in minority students critical "habits, knowledge and mental traits," what he terms "social capital," they're doomed to failure.

"It's not enough to give a student the chance to go to a community college if, once she gets there, she finds the requirements confusing, the guidance counsellors rude and unavailable, the registration process baffling, the important courses already full, and the graduation requirements mysterious."

The book shares some intellectual turf with Malcolm Gladwell's 2005 bestseller Blink, and in fact briefly references Gladwell's work a couple of times.

But where Blink lauded the benefits of snap decision-making over slower, more reasoned judgments, The Social Animal more broadly, and deeply, celebrates "emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, character over IQ."

Brooks knows how to massage academic research into readable prose and an intriguing package.

While there are spots where he piles on a bit thickly the scientific research into brain function, for the most part he musters his copious research in a way that's accessible, and also witty without being flippant.

Occasionally the studies he cites suggest not so much a divide between reason and emotion, as he would have it, as a porous border between the two.

But these quibbles aside, this is a fascinating roundup of science's latest insights about the brain, learning and achievement.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 26, 2011 J7