How history gets things wrong : the neuroscience of our addiction to stories / Alex Rosenberg.

Author
Rosenberg, Alexander, 1946- [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2018]
Description
289 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), maps ; 24 cm

Availability

Available Online

Copies in the Library

Location Call Number Status Location Service Notes
Firestone Library - Stacks D16.16 .R674 2018 Browse related items Request

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    Summary note
    "This trade book takes on the widely-shared belief that learning the history of something always contributes to understanding it, is often the best way to do so, and sometimes is the only way. The aim is to explain away these three beliefs, to show why historical narrative is always, always wrong, not just incomplete or inaccurate or unfounded, but mistaken the way Ptolemaic astronomy or Phlogiston chemistry is wrong. The resources employed to do this are those of evolutionary anthropology, cognitive science, and most of all neuroscience. Much of the book reports Nobel Prize winning advances in neuroscience in ways that are accessible to the non-specialist and reveals their relevance for our fatal attraction to stories. Although framed as a searching critique of historical narrative as path to understanding and knowledge, the book also provides a report of the current state of play of research in cognitive social psychology, evolutionary anthropology, and the study of the brain at the level of neural detail"-- Provided by publisher.
    Bibliographic references
    Includes bibliographical references (pages 261-272) and index.
    Contents
    • Besotted by stories
    • How many times can the German Army play the same trick?
    • Why ever did Hitter declare war on the United States? : That's easy to explain, too easy
    • Is the theory of mind wired in?
    • The natural history of historians
    • What exactly was the Kaiser thinking?
    • Can neuroscience tell us what Talleyrand meant?
    • Talleyrand's betrayal : in inside story
    • Jeopardy! "question" : "It shows the theory of mind to be completely wrong"
    • The future of an illusion
    • Henry Kissinger mind reads his way through the Congress of Vienna
    • Guns, germs, steel--and all that
    • The Gulag Archipelago and the uses of history
    • The back(non)story.
    ISBN
    • 9780262038577 (hardcover : alkaline paper)
    • 0262038579 (hardcover : alkaline paper)
    LCCN
    2018001232
    OCLC
    1049574907
    Other standard number
    • 40028510898
    Statement on language in description
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