Review: Numb

Title: Numb: How the Information Age Dulls Our Senses and How We Can Get Them Back

Author: Charles R. Chaffin

Genre: Pop Psychology

Trigger Warnings: Moralizing about food, diet culture

Back Cover:

In Numb, distinguished author Dr. Charles R. Chaffin delivers a fun and evidence-based exploration of how you can devote more attention on what you believe is important while ignoring the distractions that increasingly permeate your life. Using research from cognitive, education, positive, and clinical psychology, the book identifies the sources of noise and distraction in this information age and how we can manage it in all aspects of our lives.

You’ll learn about:

• How experiences in technology, from social media to selfies to porn, impact our ability to engage and connect with others
• The news we consume and the impact of confirmation bias, filter bubbles, and tribalism
• How FOMO and choice overload impact our decision-making
• The power of our attention in all aspects of our daily lives

Perfect for anyone interested in the expanding impact of the information age on our collective psyche, Numb helps empower you to use technology and information not as a destination, but as a tool towards authenticity and empowerment.

Review:

This is not technically a book that promised practical actions and then didn’t tell me what to actually do. But the usefulness of the “practical actions” here is limited, and I think this does count as a book whose title lied to me, even if it didn’t technically lie about proposing a solution.

The subtitle of this book is “How the Information Age Dulls our Senses and How We Can Get Them Back.” That subtitle is the main reason I picked up this book. I didn’t feel like my senses were getting dull, but I wanted to read about how they were and how I could fix it. That is not what I actually got in this book.

Charles does not look that old in his author photo (and this book came out six months ago so I assume his picture is fairly up-to-date), but this whole book makes me think of an old man complaining, “You kids and your mobile telephones! Get off your Tweeter apps and talk to your friends face to face, why dontcha!” Now, this is not entirely fair, since I can tell Charles either uses the technologies he complains about or at least knows enough about them to discuss them competently. However, this book feels like a collection of all the “smartphones/social media/the internet are bad” studies and arguments and rationales.

An incomplete list of things that this book complains about:

• Smartphones bad, too distracting
• Push notifications bad, too distracting
• Multitasking bad, you can’t focus
• Social media bad, it makes you feel bad about your life
• Social media bad, it creates echo chambers
• Texting bad, talk to your friends in person
• News bad, it just makes you mad
• Political stuff on the internet bad, let’s just all be friends
• Cameras bad, you focus more on photographing the experience than living the experience
• Porn sites bad, videos don’t make you use your imagination (which is an anti-porn hot take that I have not heard before)

The book never actually gets around to talking about how all of this stuff dulls your senses. It focuses more on attention. It started off really strong, in fact, discussing the attention economy and how so many websites are designed to grab your attention because that’s where they make money and how attention is a zero-sum game and not an infinite resource. Maybe the “senses” that are getting dulled are your ability to focus and pay attention? Regardless, it made some really good points before it buckled down to the complaining.

Now, I don’t entirely disagree with the complaints. I’m not denying that the studies Charles cites happened and got results. And I have noticed personally that consuming a lot of negative news does affect my mood and view of the world and following influencers posting perfect-looking lives on Instagram did make me feel less satisfied with my own life. What I take issue with is the “how to get your senses back” part of the book, where the one and only advice was to get off your phone.

That is the extent of the practical advice here. News makes you angry, stop reading the news. Social media gives you FOMO, get off social media. Phone keeps you distracted, put your phone in another room. The information age is dulling your senses so just opt out of the information age.

I think this book would have felt less like complaining if there was more advice than “get off your phone.” With that being the only advice, it felt like this was the book form of all the rants I’ve seen about “social media is destroying the youth,” “dang kids need to get off their phones and do stuff in the real world,” etc. I think there was promise to the idea, but its complete failure to live up to the “how to get your senses back” part of the subtitle made it feel complaining and largely pointless.

Review: Drunk Tank Pink

Title: Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave

Author: Adam Alter

Genre: Pop Psychology

Trigger Warnings: Institutional racism (mention), sexism (mention)

Back Cover:

Most of us go through life believing that we are in control of the choices we make, that we think and behave almost independently from the world around us, but as Drunk Tank Pink illustrates, the truth is our environment shapes our thoughts and actions in myriad ways without our permission or even our knowledge. Armed with surprising data and endlessly fascinating examples, Adam Alter addresses the subtle but substantial ways in which outside forces influence us–such as color’s influence on mood, our bias in favor of names with which we identify, and how sunny days can induce optimism as well as aggression. Drunk Tank Pink proves that the truth behind our feelings and actions goes much deeper than the choices we take for granted every day.

Review:

I really shouldn’t have read this directly after reading The Extended Mind, because they’re so similar in both tone and content that I’m having a hard time sorting out what information was from each book. The Extended Mind is about using things outside your brain to help you think better, while Drunk Tank Pink is about the way things outside your brain affect your thinking. Different sides of the same coin, basically.

It wasn’t bad information, and in many cases was very interesting. The main ideas covered were nominative determinism, or that your name shapes your destiny, the weather’s profound influence on mood, and how color psychology is influencing you more than you think. According to the book, I’m less likely to be given opportunities because both my first and last name are hard to pronounce and spell, and I likely have such a strong interest in Arabic language and culture because my birth name came from an Arabic root.

That’s one of my big problems with the book – it made these effects out to be absolutely MASSIVE. The bulk of this book is an overview of a bunch of studies on a particular topic (loosely held together with some interpretation and spectacularly bad transitions), and the impression that you get is that if you have a difficult-to-spell name you’ll never succeed, if it’s hot out you’re going to be violent, and if you’re in a pink room you lose all ability to function. I don’t know if the intent was to exaggerate for sensationalism and sales or if that was an unintended effect of less-than-stellar writing, but it seemed like the book was trying to convince me that my environment was really in control and I had no influence on my life.

Drunk Tank Pink was slightly more engaging than The Extended Mind, probably because it spun the studies it discussed into stories instead of just presenting them as studies, but they both cover very similar ideas and both read like an academic literature review rewritten to sell as pop psychology. This book seemed like it was sensationalizing its ideas, though, and I was overall unimpressed.

Review: The Extended Mind

Title: The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

Author: Annie Murphy Paul

Genre: Pop Psychology

Trigger Warnings: Ableism (mentions), racism/racial discrimination (mentions)

Back Cover:

For centuries, we’ve believed that our thoughts happen entirely inside our brains. But in the last decade, new research has revealed that our bodies, our gestures, and our surroundings dramatically impact our intelligence and mental health. For example, did you know that closing your eyes makes you smarter, that half an hour among trees is as effective as a dose of Ritalin at controlling ADHD, that certain hand gestures aid memory, and that negotiators win an average of 80 percent more value when on their own turf? Indeed, as Annie Murphy Paul shows, we are constantly thinking outside our brains.

Like Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences or Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, The Extended Mind offers a dramatic new view of how our minds work, full of practical advice on how to think–and feel–better.

Review:

Don’t read this book like I did. This is not a book that should be started 40 hours into a 60-hour workweek on six hours of sleep and while barely functional and not completely awake. (It has been a rough week at work, can you tell?) This is not a book that you can use to engage your brain and wake you up. You have to be already fully awake and ready to think to grasp this one.

The idea behind this book is that thinking doesn’t all happen in your brain, it also happens in your environment, your body, and between people. I absolutely agree that your body, environment, and interactions affect your thinking. In my writing, I find some of my best ideas while walking and when talking things through with my husband. But I’m not sure that “thinking outside your brain” is the best way to phrase it – it seems more like “using things outside your brain to support your thinking process.” Your body may know things your mind doesn’t, but it still has to end up in your brain for you to be able to use it.

This is not an incredibly practical book. It does offer some recommendations and it is extremely easy to draw out principles from the research, but the main purpose of this book seems to be presenting all the research already done on this topic of “thinking outside the brain.” Since it was published only three months ago (June 2021), it includes all the most recent research. There is a lot of it, and it’s presented well and in a logical order. But it’s difficult to comprehend if you’re half asleep.

To me, this book read like an academic meta-analysis rephrased as pop psychology because pop psychology sells and academic papers don’t. If you’ve ever read an academic literature review, reading this book feels like reading one of those but with fewer long words. It wasn’t horribly boring (although it did drag at times) and once I was fully awake I found the information presented fascinating, ringing true to my own experiences, and likely interesting to apply. However, it wasn’t nearly as engaging as I’d hoped, and if you do choose to read it be prepared to read a LOT of citations.