An accessible and intriguing call to rethink the traditional college student’s experience.
Two neuroscientists make a compelling case that higher education must move beyond classroom learning.
Stellar and Eggan, both neuroscientists with backgrounds as “rat scientists,” bring a distinctive perspective to higher education, drawing on their expertise in decision-making behavior to argue for cultivating what they call “professional wisdom.” As they define it, professional wisdom is “a combination of intellectual and intuitive reasoning that grows out of both academic knowledge and practical application.” In other words, practical wisdom is the maturity that allows students to go beyond classroom theories and facts to apply knowledge persuasively and effectively in the world. Developing this skill, the authors argue, requires going beyond the classroom and engaging in hands-on opportunities, such as internships, volunteer work, shadowing, and study abroad programs. Stellar, who served as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northeastern University, saw firsthand how experiential learning shaped students’ choices in an institutional model where classwork was integrated with extended, paid internships. The authors ground their argument in neuroscience and insight from such diverse thinkers as Confucius, Pascal, and Harvard social psychologist Dan Gilbert. Most important to their argument is the concept of fast and slow thinking originated by Daniel Kahneman in his bestselling Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011). Kahneman distinguishes between the brain’s fast, intuitive system and its slower, rational system, a model the authors use to show how higher education has long privileged deliberation while overlooking the intuitive and emotional processes that also shape decision-making. Against this imbalance, they argue for the importance of direct experiences, which generate implicit emotional responses that students can later reflect on consciously and explicitly in order to make wiser choices for themselves. To bring this to life, the authors provide a range of useful examples—both real and fictive—illustrating how professional wisdom develops through practice and reflection in real-world contexts. In later chapters, the authors then extend this argument to the challenges of remote learning and AI, urging educators to design assignments and use new tools in ways that keep students engaged and growing in professional wisdom.
Throughout, the authors balance science with real-world examples, the occasional fictional anecdote or thought experiment, and persuasive argumentation. They explain the workings of the brain in an accessible way, pitched to the general reader who may have only a passing knowledge of neuroscience, though some familiarity with brain regions helps. Occasionally, the prose becomes more technical: “We have connectivity from the deeper, emotional implicit brain and the higher, more sophisticated and analytical explicit brain. And these regions communicate. The ultimate decision that is made is a result of combining our inner limbic information with our more sophisticated cortex for evaluation and analysis.” While the book seems aimed at those working in higher education, it remains a fascinating, useful read for high school students considering college, as well as parents, advisers, and anyone interested in how learning truly works.
An accessible and intriguing call to rethink the traditional college student’s experience.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9781646872046
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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