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Multimind
This reprint of Robert Ornstein's classic presents a startling new concept of how the human mind works -- a readable and accessible introduction to the new science of the mind, where different parts of the mind are thought to come to the fore to handle different situations. This means that 'we' are not the same person from moment to moment and have different memories and abilities in different situations.
The book has a wonderful new cover from the drawings of Ted Dewan.
If there is one book to read on the nature of the human mind, this is it!' --Paul Ehrlich
'Bob Ornstein's tour de cortex is smashing--battering barriers between domains of knowledge that have traditionally been isolated because they have been viewed by scholars as unrelated. But in this far-ranging journey nothing of mind is alien to the intrepid adventurer seeking similarities, continuities, and universals of human experience. You will find yourself in the fast lane of a mobius strip whizzing past and then side-by-side with internal and external reality, evolution and suicide, TWITS and CREEPS...' --Philip Zimbardo
The book has a wonderful new cover from the drawings of Ted Dewan.
If there is one book to read on the nature of the human mind, this is it!' --Paul Ehrlich
'Bob Ornstein's tour de cortex is smashing--battering barriers between domains of knowledge that have traditionally been isolated because they have been viewed by scholars as unrelated. But in this far-ranging journey nothing of mind is alien to the intrepid adventurer seeking similarities, continuities, and universals of human experience. You will find yourself in the fast lane of a mobius strip whizzing past and then side-by-side with internal and external reality, evolution and suicide, TWITS and CREEPS...' --Philip Zimbardo
222 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 28, 1986
About the author
Robert Ornstein
28 books93 followersPsychologist Robert Ornstein's wide-ranging and multidisciplinary work has won him awards from more than a dozen organizations, including the American Psychological Association and UNESCO. His pioneering research on the bilateral specialization of the brain has done much to advance our understanding of how we think.
He received his bachelor's degree in psychology from City University of New York in 1964 and his Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1968. His doctoral thesis won the American Institutes for Research Creative Talent Award and was published immediately as a book, On the Experience of Time.
Since then he has written or co-written more than twenty other books on the nature of the human mind and brain and their relationship to thought, health and individual and social consciousness, which have sold over six million copies and been translated into a dozen other languages. His textbooks have been used in more than 20,000 university classes.
Dr. Ornstein has taught at the University of California Medical Center and Stanford University, and he has lectured at more than 200 colleges and universities in the U.S. and overseas. He is the president and founder of the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge (ISHK), an educational nonprofit dedicated to bringing important discoveries concerning human nature to the general public.
Among his many honors and awards are the UNESCO award for Best Contribution to Psychology and the American Psychological Foundation Media Award "for increasing the public understanding of psychology."
He received his bachelor's degree in psychology from City University of New York in 1964 and his Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1968. His doctoral thesis won the American Institutes for Research Creative Talent Award and was published immediately as a book, On the Experience of Time.
Since then he has written or co-written more than twenty other books on the nature of the human mind and brain and their relationship to thought, health and individual and social consciousness, which have sold over six million copies and been translated into a dozen other languages. His textbooks have been used in more than 20,000 university classes.
Dr. Ornstein has taught at the University of California Medical Center and Stanford University, and he has lectured at more than 200 colleges and universities in the U.S. and overseas. He is the president and founder of the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge (ISHK), an educational nonprofit dedicated to bringing important discoveries concerning human nature to the general public.
Among his many honors and awards are the UNESCO award for Best Contribution to Psychology and the American Psychological Foundation Media Award "for increasing the public understanding of psychology."
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 25, 2020
Ornstein, a psychologist, sets out on this mundane task of studying how the human mind works and soon discovers that a human being does not have a mind as in singular, but a collection of minds, hence his groundbreaking and upending concept of Multimind.
In a nutshell, in my layman's interpretation, our mind is analogous to a library with different bookshelves, with different compartments, with all sorts of books containing all sorts of instructions. Now, the name of the game is finding the right book at the right time without turning the library upside down which is easy said than done since we are not entirely in control of the librarian who in this case is the brain. The funny thing is the librarian has the prerogative of disposing off certain books not just without our permission, but our knowledge as well. So, you might end up looking for a book that is no longer in the library.
I enjoyed this book very much considering I had thought I was punching above my weight and the author was going to make mincemeat of me, but instead his brilliance, which is quite evident across the pages, guided me like a lighthouse guiding a lost ship in the sea of darkness, and slowly drove his point home. Ornstein distils his ideas so easily that one doesn't necessarily need to have a scientific bearing to grasp what he saying.
In a nutshell, in my layman's interpretation, our mind is analogous to a library with different bookshelves, with different compartments, with all sorts of books containing all sorts of instructions. Now, the name of the game is finding the right book at the right time without turning the library upside down which is easy said than done since we are not entirely in control of the librarian who in this case is the brain. The funny thing is the librarian has the prerogative of disposing off certain books not just without our permission, but our knowledge as well. So, you might end up looking for a book that is no longer in the library.
I enjoyed this book very much considering I had thought I was punching above my weight and the author was going to make mincemeat of me, but instead his brilliance, which is quite evident across the pages, guided me like a lighthouse guiding a lost ship in the sea of darkness, and slowly drove his point home. Ornstein distils his ideas so easily that one doesn't necessarily need to have a scientific bearing to grasp what he saying.
October 16, 2014
Foreshadows Minsky's "Society of Mind" although with a more human dimension as opposed to AI. An excellent reminder that we are beyond even our own understanding and that our brains do not evolve as quickly as we'd like, severely limiting what we are actually capable of. Humbling, actually. Nice to hear Freud's model of the mind acknowledged as a step forward but then dismissed as too simplistic, given more recent research (Gardner et al) and also nice to read that dualism (mind/body) is not the only way. Now on to selfless wisdom from the Sufis...
September 18, 2024
A ‘NEW PERSPECTIVE ON THE HUMAN MIND’
Robert Ornstein (born 1942) is a psychologist, researcher and writer, perhaps best known for his work on left brain/right brain studies. He has taught at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute, and been professor at Stanford University. He is also chairman of the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge, and has promoted modern Sufism (e.g., Idries Shah). He has written/edited other books such as 'Symposium on Consciousness,' 'On The Experience Of Time,' etc.
He wrote in the first chapter of this 1986 book, "Together with the reviews of evidence on mind and brain, intelligence and personality, I wish to present a new perspective on the human mind, one that encompasses the philosophical arguments, the challenges from Freud and from the discoveries from evolution, the new evidence from brain sciences and cognition, the problems of intelligence and personality and multiple personality. I hope this viewpoint will allow many who now see only myriad opposing and conflicting small and useless minor theories to understand that many of the conflicts have been caused by looking at the mind as if it had only one aspect, the aspect that is most highly prized in schools." (Pg. 13)
He states, "The idea that we have one rational mind seriously undersells our diverse abilities. It oversells our consistency, and it emphasizes the very small, rational islands in the mind at the expense of the vast archipelago of talents, opportunities, and abilities surrounding them. We often assume that our own mind is a reasonable and stable, somewhat solid device. It is not. It moves, it careens from one idea to another, and it is surprisingly inconsistent and unstable." (Pg. 17)
He means by "multimind": "Instead of a single, intellectual entity that can judge many different kinds of events equably, the mind is diverse and complex. It contains a changeable conglomeration of different kinds of 'small minds'---fixed reactions, talents, flexible thinking---and these different entities are temporarily employed---'wheeled into consciousness'---and then usually discarded, returned to their place, after use." (Pg. 25)
He suggests, "The multimind model leads to a different vision of the mind. In a sense, it assumes that the mind is a kind of bastard hybrid system: a collage comprising many fixed and innate routines, all of which serve the mental operating policies that stretch over millions of years, millions of organisms, and millions of situations." (Pg. 81)
He points out, "The normal strategies of the mental operating system---simplification, exclusion of information---make us continually overreact from the little information we finally do select and allow to enter consciousness... Whatever enters consciousness is greatly overemphasized. It does not matter how the information enters... all that gets in is overemphasized. We ignore more important or more valid evidence that is available to us and focus on what we already know." (Pg. 104)
He admits, "There seems to be an apparent conflict in the minds of many people about how one person could write from apparently divergent viewpoints. I wrote earlier, in The Psychology of Consciousness and The Mind Field, about the unexpected possibilities of the development of consciousness. But later, in The Amazing Brain and in this book, I make the strong claim that the brain is an incoherent, bizarre, and ramshackle device and that we have great difficulty in controlling our minds... It is not, I hope, that I am becoming less coherent and precise in my middle age. It is just that my constant object of inquiry, the human mind, has come more clearly into view." (Pg. 175)
He concludes, "how DO we develop and change, given the multimind view?... It is in the ability to select the reaction, to select the mind that is operating, that is real mental development... Conscious development probably consists of attaining a genuine measure of understanding and control of the wheeling and dealing mental system: being able to choose which of the small minds (if any) operates at any moment... We must be able to learn and train ourselves in how we think, how our minds are structured, and how we can overcome the innate limitations and biases of mind." (Pg. 191)
This is one of Ornstein's most interesting books, and will be of keen interest to all who are interested in "creative" forms of mind research.
Robert Ornstein (born 1942) is a psychologist, researcher and writer, perhaps best known for his work on left brain/right brain studies. He has taught at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute, and been professor at Stanford University. He is also chairman of the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge, and has promoted modern Sufism (e.g., Idries Shah). He has written/edited other books such as 'Symposium on Consciousness,' 'On The Experience Of Time,' etc.
He wrote in the first chapter of this 1986 book, "Together with the reviews of evidence on mind and brain, intelligence and personality, I wish to present a new perspective on the human mind, one that encompasses the philosophical arguments, the challenges from Freud and from the discoveries from evolution, the new evidence from brain sciences and cognition, the problems of intelligence and personality and multiple personality. I hope this viewpoint will allow many who now see only myriad opposing and conflicting small and useless minor theories to understand that many of the conflicts have been caused by looking at the mind as if it had only one aspect, the aspect that is most highly prized in schools." (Pg. 13)
He states, "The idea that we have one rational mind seriously undersells our diverse abilities. It oversells our consistency, and it emphasizes the very small, rational islands in the mind at the expense of the vast archipelago of talents, opportunities, and abilities surrounding them. We often assume that our own mind is a reasonable and stable, somewhat solid device. It is not. It moves, it careens from one idea to another, and it is surprisingly inconsistent and unstable." (Pg. 17)
He means by "multimind": "Instead of a single, intellectual entity that can judge many different kinds of events equably, the mind is diverse and complex. It contains a changeable conglomeration of different kinds of 'small minds'---fixed reactions, talents, flexible thinking---and these different entities are temporarily employed---'wheeled into consciousness'---and then usually discarded, returned to their place, after use." (Pg. 25)
He suggests, "The multimind model leads to a different vision of the mind. In a sense, it assumes that the mind is a kind of bastard hybrid system: a collage comprising many fixed and innate routines, all of which serve the mental operating policies that stretch over millions of years, millions of organisms, and millions of situations." (Pg. 81)
He points out, "The normal strategies of the mental operating system---simplification, exclusion of information---make us continually overreact from the little information we finally do select and allow to enter consciousness... Whatever enters consciousness is greatly overemphasized. It does not matter how the information enters... all that gets in is overemphasized. We ignore more important or more valid evidence that is available to us and focus on what we already know." (Pg. 104)
He admits, "There seems to be an apparent conflict in the minds of many people about how one person could write from apparently divergent viewpoints. I wrote earlier, in The Psychology of Consciousness and The Mind Field, about the unexpected possibilities of the development of consciousness. But later, in The Amazing Brain and in this book, I make the strong claim that the brain is an incoherent, bizarre, and ramshackle device and that we have great difficulty in controlling our minds... It is not, I hope, that I am becoming less coherent and precise in my middle age. It is just that my constant object of inquiry, the human mind, has come more clearly into view." (Pg. 175)
He concludes, "how DO we develop and change, given the multimind view?... It is in the ability to select the reaction, to select the mind that is operating, that is real mental development... Conscious development probably consists of attaining a genuine measure of understanding and control of the wheeling and dealing mental system: being able to choose which of the small minds (if any) operates at any moment... We must be able to learn and train ourselves in how we think, how our minds are structured, and how we can overcome the innate limitations and biases of mind." (Pg. 191)
This is one of Ornstein's most interesting books, and will be of keen interest to all who are interested in "creative" forms of mind research.
Want to read
October 5, 2013seems isolated, possibly traverse, how much is multimind cited and where did multimind spawn new insight?
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews