Despite its title, this book is
not focused on hope and despair.  In fact, it has no focus.  It is true that
the book begins with a very brief chapter on hope and has a slightly longer one
on despair near the end, but its final chapter is on "Human Nature,"
and in between it covers everything from the representational and computational
capacities assumed to be possessed by the human brain to ancient difficulties
understanding time. 

Here is a summary of the book’s
contents:  Part One: The Anatomy of Expectation, contains chapters on
hope, the future, and internal modeling of the external world.  Part Two: The
Machinery of the Mind, covers information processing, learning and memory,
consciousness, and emotion.  Part Three:  A Blueprint for Uniqueness,
surveys human evolution, language, symbolic thought, and time.  Part Four: The
Human Condition, discourses about science and religion, community, despair,
and human nature.

Given such breadth of coverage,
one might be tempted to think of the book as a philosophy of mind, but the
treatment is not philosophical, merely superficial.  Though widely read and
intelligent, the author, a retired professor of psychiatry, is content to skate
on a verbal surface.  As a consequence, his observations are often
platitudinous, if always literate, informed, and sane.  The book presents
currently fashionable thought in psychiatry, but no reader should expect new
insights into any of its many subdivisions.

One could also say that the
various topics in the book are unified by a faith–which I certainly
share–that the ultimate secrets of psychology are locked away in the human
brain.  The trouble, as Reading admits once or twice, is that these secrets are
still largely unknown to us.  To talk of how the brain represents, computes,
and models reality is, therefore, to write checks that are not yet backed by
empirical cash.

That is no doubt why Reading, who
incessantly assures us that cognitive and emotional functioning are workings of
the brain, actually spends a great deal more space describing the phenomenology
of experience€”how things seem to us¾than
summarizing what is known about brain physiology.  I think he might have done
still better to focus on behavior.  In my admittedly reactionary opinion,
cognitive psychology is still too speculative to be regarded as sound and its
claims as settled.

If this sounds like condemnation,
you should reflect that a similar judgment would probably apply to any similar
attempt.  Psychology is too vast a subject and knowledge of its many parts is
still too thin to make a book of this sweep interesting or worthwhile.  Some
day perhaps, such a book will be written; but I doubt that this is it.

© 2004 Max  Hocutt

Dr. Hocutt is Emeritus Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Alabama and author of Grounded Ethics:  The
Empirical Bases of Normative Judgments (Transaction, 2000)

Categories: MentalHealth, Psychology