Name: The Social Animal
Rating: 4.8 (6 reviews)
Author: David Brooks

5 (Perfeito)

In this amazing book the author succeeds in crafting a story of a couple, from womb to death, and explaining what was happening inside their brains and bodies, filled with researches, studies and so on, at every moment. Awesome, very well written, from both an artistic and scientific point of view. “Emotion assigns value to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations.” “The truth is, starting even before we are born, we inherit a great river of knowledge, a great flow of patterns coming from many ages and many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past, we call genetics. The information revealed thousands of years ago, we call religion. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago, we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago, we call family, and the information offered years, months, days, or hours ago, we call education and advice.” “That is to say, people don’t develop first and create relationships. People are born into relationships—with parents, with ancestors—and those relationships create people. Or, to put it a different way, a brain is something that is contained within a single skull. A mind only exists within a network.” “We are smart because we are capable of fuzzy thinking.” “This Harold, which some philosophers celebrate as the epitome of innocence and delight, was really a prisoner of his impulses. Freedom without structure is its own slavery.” “Instead, parents just have to be good enough. They have to provide their kids with stable and predictable rhythms. They need to be able to fall in tune with their kids’ needs, combining warmth and discipline. They need to establish the secure emotional bonds that kids can fall back upon in the face of stress. They need to be there to provide living examples of how to cope with the problems of the world so that their children can develop unconscious models in their heads.” “All of us, from cradle to grave, are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figures.” “His Saturday-evening scenes were getting out of hand, she said. And this led to one of those comic misunderstandings that are woven into the fabric of childhood. Harold had never heard the expression “out of hand” before, and for some reason he imagined his punishment for crying would be that they would chop off his hands. He imagined some tall thin man in a long coat and long scraggly hair with stiltlike legs sweeping in with great scissors.” “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” “Ms. Taylor had guided Harold through a method that had him surfing in and out of his unconscious, getting the conscious and unconscious processes to work together—first mastering core knowledge, then letting that knowledge marinate playfully in his mind, then willfully trying to impose order on it, then allowing the mind to consolidate and merge the data, then returning and returning until some magical insight popped into his consciousness, and then riding that insight to a finished product.” “Most diets fail because the conscious forces of reason and will are simply not powerful enough to consistently subdue unconscious urges.” “It also emphasizes the power of small and repetitive action to rewire the fundamental mechanisms of the brain. Small habits and proper etiquette reinforce certain positive ways of seeing the world.” “Aristotle was right when he observed, “We acquire virtues by first having put them into action.” “She was reminding herself that she had a say in triggering which inner self would dominate her behavior. All she had to do was focus her attention on one internal character rather than another.” “The sense of identity that children brought to the first lesson was the spark that would set off all the improvement that would subsequently happen. It was a vision of their future self.” “What do those lines connecting people consist of?” In a few special cases, it’s love. But in most workplaces, and most social groups, the bonds are not that passionate. Most relationships are bound by trust.” “Harrison dismissed her with a wave of the hand. Different countries excelled at different things because of different government regulations. Change the regulations and you change the cultures. Erica tried to argue that regulations emerge from cultures, which are deeper and longer lasting.” “Harrison’s mistake was to equate IQ with mental ability. The reality is that intelligence is a piece of mental ability, but it is not the most important piece.” “Raw intelligence is useful for helping you solve well-defined problems. Mental character helps you figure out what kind of problem you have in front of you and what sort of rules you should use to address it.” “Wisdom doesn’t consist of knowing specific facts or possessing knowledge of a field. It consists of knowing how to treat knowledge:” “If I were to distill one main lesson from the research described in this book, it is that we are pawns in a game whose forces we largely fail to comprehend. We usually think of ourselves as sitting in the driver’s seat, with ultimate control over the decisions we make and the direction our life takes; but, alas, this perception has more to do with our desires—with how we want to view ourselves—than with reality.” “Whether someone has a network of good relationships or is alone in the world is a much stronger predictor of happiness than any other objective predictor.” “He couldn’t bring out his best self alone. He could only do it in conjunction with other people.” “All human beings go through life with a fully operational status sonar. We send out continual waves of status measurements and receive a stream of positive or negative feedback signals that cumulatively define our place in society.” “All day long the status sonar hums along—a stream of pluses, minuses, and neutrals building in the mind, producing either happiness, anxiety, or doubt. The status sonar isn’t even a conscious process most of the time; it is just the hedonic tone of existence.” “The problem is, nobody’s status sonar is accurate. Some people are status exaggerators.” “Aron argues that love is not an emotion like happiness or sadness. Love is a motivational state, which leads to various emotions ranging from euphoria to misery. A person in love has the keenest possible ambition to achieve a goal. A person in love is in a state of need.” “When one of the models accurately anticipates reality, then the mind experiences a little surge of reward, or at least a reassuring feeling of tranquility. When the model contradicts reality, then there’s tension and concern.” “The main business of the brain is modeling,” “The desire for limerence drives us to seek perfection in our crafts. Sometimes, when we are absorbed in some task, the skull barrier begins to disappear. An expert rider feels at one with the rhythms of the horse she is riding.” “In these sublime moments, internal and external patterns are meshing and flow is achieved.” “meld with the special other—love. This drive, this longing for harmony, is a never-ending process—model, adjust, model, adjust—guiding us onward.” “Moreover, the rationalist method was founded upon a series of assumptions. It assumes that social scientists can look at society objectively from the outside, purged of passions and unconscious biases. It assumes that reasoning can be fully or at least mostly under conscious control. It assumes that reason is more powerful than and separable from emotion and appetite. It assumes that perception is a clear lens, giving the viewer a straightforward and reliable view of the world. It assumes that human action conforms to laws that are akin to the laws of physics, if we can only understand what they are. A company, a society, a nation, a universe—these are all great machines, operated through immutable patterns of cause and effect. Natural sciences are the model that the behavioral sciences should replicate.” “Sometimes imagination grows too luxuriant. Sometimes reason grows too austere.” “Level 1 evolved to protect us from immediate pain,” “The unconscious understands the world by building generalizations.” “Epistemological modesty is an attitude toward life. This attitude is built on the awareness that we don’t know ourselves. Most of what we think and believe is unavailable to conscious review. We are our own deepest mystery. Not knowing ourselves, we also have trouble fully understanding others.” “most business meetings aren’t about creating new plans, they are about maneuvering a group of managers so that they buy into a basic approach.” “Every move is a partial failure to be corrected by the next one.” “many scientists now believe that moral perceptions are akin to aesthetic or sensual perceptions, emanating from many of the same regions of the brain.” “Having a universal moral sense does not mean that people always or even often act in good and virtuous ways. It’s more about what we admire than what we do, more about the judgments we make than our ability to live up to them.” “We tell stories about those who violate the rules of our group, both to reinforce our connections with one another and to remind ourselves of the standards that bind us together.” “In short, government had tried to fortify material development, but had ended up weakening the social and emotional development that underpins it.” “As British philosopher Phillip Blond has written, the individualist revolutions did not end up creating loose, free societies. They produced atomized societies in which the state grows in an attempt to fill the gaps created by social disintegration.” “Without a healthy social fabric, politics became polarized. One party came to represent the state. The other came to represent the market.” “In a densely connected society, people can see the gradual chain of institutions that connect family to neighborhood, neighborhood to town, town to regional association, regional associations to national associations, and national associations to the federal government. In a stripped-down society, that chain has been broken and the sense of connection gets broken with it. The state seems at once alien and intrusive.” “Everything came down to character, and that meant everything came down to the quality of relationships, because relationships are the seedbeds of character.” “In his view, government should not run people’s lives. That only weakens the responsibility and virtue of the citizens. But government could influence the setting in which lives are lived. Government could, to some extent, nurture settings that serve as nurseries for fraternal relationships. It could influence the spirit of the citizenry.” “Harold pointed out that the hardest political activity—warfare—depended on the softest social skills—listening, understanding, and building trust. Victory in this kind of war is not about piling up dead bodies; it is about building communities.” “Art, as Wordsworth put it, is emotion recollected in tranquility.” “It’s said that people who go into therapy do it either because they need tightening (their behavior is too erratic) or because they need loosening (they are too repressed).”

The Social Animal - The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement

David Brooks

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