New World New Mind

by Robert Ornstein, Paul Ehrlich

Overview

Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich explain that we are causing our own problems because we have created a world where our basic mental functions are no longer suitable. We evolved over a period of millions of years to survive in small tribal families on the wild grassy plains of East Africa. Now the way we live has nothing to do with that time and place, but the mental tools that were developed to survive on the savanna have remained unchanged. These instincts were wonderfully adapted to the environment that shaped them. But that world, the world that made us, is gone. Now these same instincts are causing us to destroy the world that we made. The threats we face are of our own making, and we can unmake them. If people learn how we have come to this point, we can restore our hope for the future. New World New Mind describes the way our minds have evolved, and offers suggestions for how to cope with who we are in the world we live in now. Recent decades have seen remarkable progress in many areas. For example, despite the abject suffering of millions of people, it is nonetheless true that there has been unprecedented alleviation of poverty and disease for the world's poorest people. There are so many promising and astonishing advances in medicine, technology, and the social and physical sciences that if we give ourselves a chance to survive, our species could enter a golden age.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948013000
Publisher:	Malor Books
Publication date:	09/01/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	1,006,996
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Considered one of the foremost experts on the brain, Robert Ornstein was an internationally renowned psychologist and author of more than 20 books on the nature of the human mind and brain and their relationship to thought, health, and individual and social consciousness. Perhaps best known for his pioneering research on the bilateral specialization of the brain, Ornstein continually emphasized the necessity of "conscious evolution" and the potential role of the right hemisphere in expanding our horizons to meet the challenges of the 21st century. He taught at Stanford University, Harvard University and the University of California, San Francisco. His books have sold over six million copies worldwide, have been translated into dozens of languages and used in more than 20,000 university classes. He founded the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge (ISHK) in 1969 and served as its president until his death in December of 2018.
Paul R. Ehrlich is Bing Professor Emeritus of Population Studies in the Department of Biology of Stanford University, and is president of Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER I

The Threat Within the Triumph

SECTION I

THE WORLD THAT MADE US AND THE WORLD WE MADE

CHAPTER 2

The World That Made Us

CHAPTER 3

The World We Made

SECTION 2

THE MATCHED AND THE MISMATCHED MIND

CHAPTER 4

Caricatures of Reality: How the Mind Is Mismatched

CHAPTER 5

Where Defaults Harm: Daily Life Decisions

CHAPTER 6

Outgrowing the Truth Fairy: Medico-, Psycho-, and Mystico-Therapies

CHAPTER 7

Managing a World Long Gone: The Old Mind in

Politics, the Environment, and War

SECTION 3

NEW WORLD NEW MIND

CHAPTER 8

The Beginnings of Real Change

CHAPTER 9

A Curriculum About Humanity

CHAPTER 10

Changing the World Around Us

APPENDIX

Notes and Sources

INDEX

Editorial Reviews

"New World New Mind has a compelling message of urgent importance. It both diagnoses the psychological causes of the current planetary crisis and points to a way out. If we don't act on this information, our grandchildren may never forgive us."

-Daniel Goleman, The New York Times, Author of Emotional Intelligence

"We will never look at our world and ourselves in the same way again after reading this book. New World New Mind is an astonishing synthesis of biological, social, and historical knowledge, one that points the direction for the future evolution of our society."

-Terrance Leighton, Professor of Microbiology and Biochemistry, University of California at Berkeley

"An important and urgent prescription for sanity... Their engagingly written, continually provocative synthesis effectively demonstrates how we use crude mental caricatures to manipulate a social and physical environment gone haywire."

-Publishers Weekly

"The book is a remarkable synthesis of biological, cultural, social, and historical knowledge which offers explanations, illustrations, ideas, and statistical information and possible solutions to our need for conscious evolution in the twenty-first century."

-Education Forum

From the Publisher