Susan Greenfield

ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century

How we percieve personal identity says a lot about the sort of society we live in. Current Western society puts a lot of store on personal fulfillment and freedom, whilst in other societies people might seem to be more like cogs in a machine. In ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century Susan Greenfield looks at how our sense of identity relates to the workings of our brains, and at what this can tell us about where our society might be going.

I would say that there are really two books here, one about the future of personal identity, and the other about the relationship between personal identity and society. I wasn't too impressed with Greenfield's treatment of the first topic - it seemed to me that it was very much an outpouring of her worries about the future of society, which seemed to involve a lot of sitting in front of computers rescuing princesses from dragons. Clearly addiction to computer games and the like is a worry, but Greenfield never seems to get to the root of the problem - I felt she didn't really analyse the differences between being engrossed in a computer game and being engrossed reading a classic work of literature.

I felt Greenfield did much better on the second topic. Here she looks at different types of identity There are Somebodies, for whom personal fulfilment is important, although this might be via conspicuous consumptions, Anybodies, whose identities are subsumed into a larger collective, and Nobodies, who live only for the excitement of the moment. The book ends with a look at creativity and how it might be encouraged.

To sum up I would say that this book may well be part of a new way of thinking about individuals and society, and how neuroscience can help us in understanding them, but you shouldn't expect it to be too polished or to get too many answers from it.

Amazon.com info

Hardcover 308 pages
ISBN: 0340936002
Salesrank: 685686
Weight:1.1 lbs

Published: 2008 Sceptre

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Amazon.co.uk info

Hardcover 308 pages
ISBN: 0340936002
Salesrank: 7992
Weight:1.1 lbs

Published: 2008 Sceptre

Amazon price £14.44

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Amazon.ca info

Hardcover 308 pages
ISBN: 0340936002
Salesrank: 10028
Weight:1.1 lbs

Published: 2008 McArthur & Company / Not Applicable

Amazon price CDN$ 22.02

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Product Description
Our individuality is under attack as never before. Two huge new forces new technology and the rise in fundamentalism are in their different ways combining to threaten the control of our own minds and so the whole way our society functions. We have never more urgently needed to look at what we want for ourselves as individuals for our children, and for our future society. This book will draw on the latest findings in neuroscience to show how far we are and can be in control of the development of our brains and minds and the actions we need to take now both to safeguard our individuality and to find the fulfilment which our current unfettered materialism cannot provide. All this inevitably poses many questions about human nature, our past, what makes us individual, the connection between the brain and the mind, what a society of fulfilled individuals would actually mean.all of which this book attempts to answer.

Product Description

Our individuality is under attack as never before. Two huge new forces new technology and the rise in fundamentalism are in their different ways combining to threaten the control of our own minds and so the whole way our society functions. We have never more urgently needed to look at what we want for ourselves as individuals for our children, and for our future society. This book will draw on the latest findings in neuroscience to show how far we are and can be in control of the development of our brains and minds and the actions we need to take now both to safeguard our individuality and to find the fulfilment which our current unfettered materialism cannot provide. All this inevitably poses many questions about human nature, our past, what makes us individual, the connection between the brain and the mind, what a society of fulfilled individuals would actually mean.all of which this book attempts to answer.

where's my body? ***
One of the interesting aspects of these frameworks for identity is the absence of the physical body. As Greenfield is talking about the Consumer Society, which begs us to treat our bodies in terms of having rather than being, this dislocation is strange. Greenfield is enthusiastic - and it is always good to read something written with passion. And, other reviewer: books are three dimensional, highly tactile objects, utterly different from attempting to read or study using an e-book. Try it. I can play computer games for hours, may be it'll be the problems of reading a pdf, but I can only bear an e-book for 30 minutes.

where's my body? ***

One of the interesting aspects of these frameworks for identity is the absence of the physical body. As Greenfield is talking about the Consumer Society, which begs us to treat our bodies in terms of having rather than being, this dislocation is strange.
Greenfield is enthusiastic - and it is always good to read something written with passion.
And, other reviewer: books are three dimensional, highly tactile objects, utterly different from attempting to read or study using an e-book. Try it.
I can play computer games for hours, may be it'll be the problems of reading a pdf, but I can only bear an e-book for 30 minutes.

hotchpotch ***
A hotchpotch of social, educational and technological commentary, with a reactionary emphasis, interspersed with chunks of neuroscience and psychology. The neuroscience is familiar stuff about neurons, synapses, serotonin, dopamine, plasticity, case studies like Phineas Gage and a description of a brain dissection class. The psychology includes discussion of disorders such as schizophrenia and depression. The technological commentary is about Google, Facebook and the fact we're spending more time using mobile phones and screen-based devices. (Well I knew that.) There are questions asked about what the implications are for our future identities but these are mainly left hanging. What I struggled to find were interesting new ideas or explanations to unify the material. I did however find some familiar errors of reasoning. For example, depression supposedly results, among other things, from a paucity of serotonin. Not being a psychologist, I may be missing something, but this doesn't make sense. They've looked inside depressed peoples' brains and found another symptom: low serotonin. But they have no theory to explain it, which means they have no theory of depression. (Low serotonin might actually be acting to reduce depression. Rather like braking correlates with car accidents. Brake pedals don't cause accidents, they generally help prevent them.) The author dislikes video games and is worried about their effect on children. The biggest objection seems to be that they are displayed on a 2D screen. Books are preferable. But wait, don't books consist of 2D surfaces? (i.e. pages) Book readers are solitary humans imbibing a 1D stream of secondhand text. Books were also resisted by parents and reactionaries when they became cheap and popular. And if language is so important, why does the author seem to assume that children won't want to improve it later on? Apparently screen-based life also kills the imagination. The Oompa-Loompas claimed this over 40 years ago and I still want to know why. The reality is that video games are increasingly multiplayer, they involve language and text, and even where this isn't so they require intensive problem solving. This creates knowledge and transferable metaknowledge in the mind of the player, which is the benefit that the author has missed. They aren't "compulsive"; when a player stops improving, he starts to get bored and does something else. ID does contain some interesting facts and snippets. But science is about explanations, and I just can't live in the author's world of socialising, Doystevsky and "good old homework".

hotchpotch ***

A hotchpotch of social, educational and technological commentary, with a reactionary emphasis, interspersed with chunks of neuroscience and psychology. The neuroscience is familiar stuff about neurons, synapses, serotonin, dopamine, plasticity, case studies like Phineas Gage and a description of a brain dissection class. The psychology includes discussion of disorders such as schizophrenia and depression. The technological commentary is about Google, Facebook and the fact we're spending more time using mobile phones and screen-based devices. (Well I knew that.) There are questions asked about what the implications are for our future identities but these are mainly left hanging.

What I struggled to find were interesting new ideas or explanations to unify the material. I did however find some familiar errors of reasoning.

For example, depression supposedly results, among other things, from a paucity of serotonin. Not being a psychologist, I may be missing something, but this doesn't make sense. They've looked inside depressed peoples' brains and found another symptom: low serotonin. But they have no theory to explain it, which means they have no theory of depression. (Low serotonin might actually be acting to reduce depression. Rather like braking correlates with car accidents. Brake pedals don't cause accidents, they generally help prevent them.)

The author dislikes video games and is worried about their effect on children. The biggest objection seems to be that they are displayed on a 2D screen. Books are preferable. But wait, don't books consist of 2D surfaces? (i.e. pages) Book readers are solitary humans imbibing a 1D stream of secondhand text. Books were also resisted by parents and reactionaries when they became cheap and popular. And if language is so important, why does the author seem to assume that children won't want to improve it later on?

Apparently screen-based life also kills the imagination. The Oompa-Loompas claimed this over 40 years ago and I still want to know why.

The reality is that video games are increasingly multiplayer, they involve language and text, and even where this isn't so they require intensive problem solving. This creates knowledge and transferable metaknowledge in the mind of the player, which is the benefit that the author has missed. They aren't "compulsive"; when a player stops improving, he starts to get bored and does something else.

ID does contain some interesting facts and snippets. But science is about explanations, and I just can't live in the author's world of socialising, Doystevsky and "good old homework".