Product Description

Are we noble in reason? Perfect, in God's image? Far from it, says New York University psychologist Gary Marcus. In this lucid and revealing book, Marcus argues that the mind is not an elegantly designed organ but rather a "kluge," a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption. He unveils a fundamentally new way of looking at the human mind -- think duct tape, not supercomputer -- that sheds light on some of the most mysterious aspects of human nature.

Taking us on a tour of the fundamental areas of human experience -- memory, belief, decision-making, language, and happiness -- Marcus reveals the myriad ways our minds fall short. He examines why people often vote against their own interests, why money can't buy happiness, why leaders often stick to bad decisions, and why a sentence like "people people left left" ties us in knots even though it's only four words long.

Marcus also offers surprisingly effective ways to outwit our inner kluge, for the betterment of ourselves and society. Throughout, he shows how only evolution -- haphazard and undirected -- could have produced the minds we humans have, while making a brilliant case for the power and usefulness of imperfection.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7249 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Why are we subject to irrational beliefs, inaccurate memories, even war? We can thank evolution, Marcus says, which can only tinker with structures that already exist, rather than create new ones: Natural selection... tends to favor genes that have immediate advantages rather than long-term value. Marcus (The Birth of the Mind), director of NYU's Infant Language Learning Center, refers to this as kluge, a term engineers use to refer to a clumsily designed solution to a problem. Thus, memory developed in our prehominid ancestry to respond with immediacy, rather than accuracy; one result is erroneous eyewitness testimony in courtrooms. In describing the results of studies of human perception, cognition and beliefs, Marcus encapsulates how the mind is contaminated by emotions, moods, desires, goals, and simple self-interest.... The mind's fragility, he says, is demonstrated by mental illness, which seems to have no adaptive purpose. In a concluding chapter, Marcus offers a baker's dozen of suggestions for getting around the brain's flaws and achieving true wisdom. While some are self-evident, others could be helpful, such as Whenever possible, consider alternate hypotheses and Don't just set goals. Make contingency plans. Using evolutionary psychology, Marcus educates the reader about mental flaws in a succinct, often enjoyable way. (Apr. 16)
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About the Author
Gary Marcus is a professor of psychology at New York University and director of the NYU Infant Language Learning Center. A high school dropout, Marcus received his Ph.D. at age twenty-three from MIT, where he was mentored by Steven Pinker. He was a tenured professor by age thirty. The author of the "'Norton Psychology Reader"', he has been a fellow at the prestigious Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. His writing has appeared in the "'New York Times"', the "'Phladelphia Inquirer"', "'Newsday"', the "'Los Angeles Times"', and other major publications.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Remnants of History

It has been said that man is a rational
animal. All my life I have been searching
for evidence which could support this.


—Bertrand Russell

Are human beings "noble in reason"
and "infinite in faculty" as William
Shakespeare famously wrote?
Perfect, "in God's image," as some
biblical scholars have asserted? Hardly.
If mankind were the product
of some intelligent, compassionate
designer, our thoughts would be rational,
our logic impeccable. Our memory would
be robust, our recollections reliable. Our
sentences would be crisp, our words
precise, our languages systematic and
regular, not besodden with irregular verbs
(sing-sang, ring-rang, yet bring-brought)
and other peculiar inconsistencies. As
the language maven Richard Lederer has
noted, there would be ham in hamburger,
egg in eggplant. English speakers would
park in parkways and drive on driveways,
and not the other way around.
At the same time, we
humans are the only species smart
enough to systematically plan for the
future—yet dumb enough to ditch our
most carefully made plans in favor of
short-term gratification. ("Did I say I was
on a diet? Mmm, but three-layer
chocolate mousse is my favorite . . .
Maybe I'll start my diet tomorrow.") We
happily drive across town to save $25 on
a $100 microwave but refuse to drive the
same distance to save exactly the same
$25 on a $1,000 flat-screen TV. We can
barely tell the difference between a valid
syllogism, such as All men are mortal,
Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is
mortal, and a fallacious counterpart,
such as All living things need water,
roses need water, therefore roses are
living things (which seems fine until you
substitute car batteries for roses). If I tell
you that "Every sailor loves a girl," you
have no idea whether I mean one girl in
particular (say, Betty Sue) or whether
I'm really saying "to each his own." And
don't even get me started on eyewitness
testimony, which is based on the absurd
premise that we humans can accurately
remember the details of a briefly
witnessed accident or crime, years after
the fact, when the average person is
hard pressed to keep a list of a dozen
words straight for half an hour.
I don't mean to suggest that
the "design" of the human mind is a total
train wreck, but if I were a politician, I'm
pretty sure the way I'd put it is "mistakes
were made." The goal of this book is to
explain what mistakes were made—and
why.

Where Shakespeare imagined infinite
reason, I see something else, what
engineers call a "kluge." A kluge is a
clumsy or inelegant—yet surprisingly
effective—solution to a problem.
Consider, for example, what happened in
April 1970 when the CO2 filters on the
already endangered lunar module of
Apollo 13 began to fail. There was no
way to send a replacement filter up to
the crew—the space shuttle hadn't been
invented yet—and no way to bring the
capsule home for several more days.
Without a filter, the crew would be
doomed. The mission control engineer,
Ed Smylie, advised his team of the
situation, and said, in effect, "Here's
what's available on the space capsule;
figure something out." Fortunately, the
ground crew was able to meet the
challenge, quickly cobbling together a
crude filter substitute out of a plastic
bag, a cardboard box, some duct tape,
and a sock. The lives of the three
astronauts were saved. As one of them,
Jim Lovell, later recalled, "The
contraption wasn't very handsome, but it
worked."
Not every kluge saves lives.
Engineers sometimes devise them for
sport, just to show that something—say,
building a computer out of Tinkertoys—
can be done, or simply because they're
too lazy to do something the right way.
Others cobble together kluges out of a
mixture of desperation and
resourcefulness, like the TV character
MacGyver, who, needing to make a
quick getaway, jerry-built a pair of shoes
from duct tape and rubber mats. Other
kluges are created just for laughs, like
Wallace and Gromit's "launch and
activate" alarm
clock/coffeemaker/Murphy bed and Rube
Goldberg's "simplified pencil sharpener"
(a kite attached to a string lifts a door,
which allows moths to escape,
culminating in the lifting of a cage, which
frees a woodpecker to gnaw the wood
that surrounds a pencil's graphite core).
MacGyver's shoes and Rube Goldberg's
pencil sharpeners are nothing, though,
compared to perhaps the most fantastic
kluge of them all—the human mind, a
quirky yet magnificent product of the
entirely blind process of evolution.

The origin, and even the spelling, of the
word kluge is up for grabs. Some spell it
with a d (kludge), which has the virtue of
looking as clumsy as the solutions it
denotes, but the disadvantage of
suggesting the wrong pronunciation.
(Properly pronounced, kluge rhymes with
huge, not sludge. One could argue that
the spelling klooge (rhymes with stooge)
would even better capture the
pronunciation, but I'm not about to foist a
third spelling upon the world.) Some
trace the word to the old Scottish word
cludgie, which means "an outside toilet."
Most believe the origins lie in the
German word Kluge, which
means "clever." The Hacker's Dictionary
of Computer Jargon traces the term back
at least to 1935, to a "Kluge [brand]
paper feeder," described as "an adjunct
to mechanical printing presses."

The Kluge feeder was designed before
small, cheap electric motors and control
electronics; it relied on a fiendishly
complex assortment of cams, belts, and
linkages to both power and synchronize
all its operations from one motive
driveshaft. It was accordingly
temperamental, subject to frequent
breakdowns, and devilishly difficult to
repair—but oh, so clever!

Virtually everybody agrees
that the term was first popularized in
February 1962, in an article titled "How
to Design a Kludge," written, tongue in
cheek, by a computer pioneer named
Jackson Granholm, who defined a kluge
as "an ill-assorted collection of poorly
matching parts, forming a distressing
whole." He went on to note that "the
building of a Kludge . . . is not work for
amateurs. There is a certain, indefinable,
masochistic finesse that must go into
true Kludge building. The professional
can spot it instantly. The amateur may
readily presume that 'that's the way
computers are.'"
The engineering world is filled
with kluges. Consider, for example,
something known as vacuum-powered
windshield wipers, common in most cars
until the early 1960s. Modern windshield
wipers, like most gizmos on cars, are
driven by electricity, but back in the
olden days, cars ran on 6 volts rather
than 12, barely enough power to keep
the spark plugs going and certainly not
enough to power luxuries like windshield
wipers. So some clever engineer rigged
up a kluge that powered windshield-wiper
motors with suction, drawn from the
engine, rather than electricity. The only
problem is that the amount of suction
created by the engine varies, depending
on how hard the engine is working. The
harder it works, the less vacuum it
produces. Which meant that when you
drove your 1958 Buick Riviera up a hill,
or accelerated hard, your wipers slowed
to a crawl, or even stopped working
altogether. On a rainy day in the
mountains, Grandpa was out of luck.
What's really amazing—in
hindsight—is that most people probably
didn't even realize it was possible to do
better. And this, I think, is a great
metaphor for our everyday acceptance of
the idiosyncrasies of the human mind.
The mind is inarguably impressive, a lot
better than any available alternative. But
it's still flawed, often in ways we
scarcely recognize. For the most part,
we simply accept our faults —such as
our emotional outbursts, our mediocre
memories, and our vulnerability to
prejudice—as standard equipment.
Which is exactly why recognizing a
kluge, and how it might be improved
upon, sometimes requires thinking
outside the box. The best science, like
the best engineering, often comes from
understanding not just how things are,
but how else they could have been.

If engineers build kluges mostly to save
money or to save time, why does nature
build them? Evolution is neither clever
nor penny-pinching. There's no money
involved, no foresight, and if it takes a
billion years, who's going to complain?
Yet a careful look at biology reveals
kluge after kluge. The human spine, for
example, is a lousy solution to the
problem of supporting the load in an
upright, two-legged creature. It would
have made a lot more sense to distribute
our weight across four equal cross-
braced columns. Instead, all our weight
is borne by a single column, putting
enormous stress on the spine. We
manage to survive upright (freeing our
hands), but the cost for many people is
agonizing back pain.We are stuck with
this barely adequate solution not
because it is the best possible way to
support the weight of a biped, but
because the spine's structure evolved
from that of four-l...

Customer Reviews

The Mind and You
The entire self help book industry is kind of applied psychology. The author takes an undergraduate degree in pysch, reads up on the current research, applies it to a business context or a life style context and voila- "Applied Psychology for Dummies- or The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, or how to think yourself thin or whatever. It's a formula, and it moves units, as they say in the music biz, so you can forgive NYU professor Gary Marcus if he's trying to get a piece of that sweet, sweet action.

Kluge is, ultimately, a self help book. I have a feeling that on its release it might be a hit- kind along the lines of Malcolm Gladwell's "the tipping point."

A Kluge is clumsy, cobbled together contraption that engineer's will develop in a pinch to solve a certain problem. A good example of a skilled klugian is MacGyver. This book is dedicated to the proposition that the human mind is, in fact, a kluge- and that it's cobbled together nature creates many of the behavioral problems that human beings seek to overcome in our day to day lives. Marcus's thesis is a little more sophisticated then what you typically get in a self help book- he is, in fact, in the minority when he advances the proposition that human reasoning and the human mind is less then the perfect reasoning tool.

To advance his thesis, Marcus draws from experimental psychology, linguistics and, of course, from popular culture. Each chapter deals with a discrete area of the human mind "memory", "belief", "choice", "language" and shows how the cobbled together nature of the mind- created as a result of our evolutionary history- has created behaviors that our problematic for large numbers of people in their day to day lives. In the second to last chapter, Marcus argues that mental illness- depression and schizophrenia are the result of "klugie" behaviors in separate areas reinforcing one another in negative fashion. In the last chapter, Marcus actually provides a list of 13 strategies to help overcome common mistakes that we all make in our day-to-day decision making. Amazingly enough, he does this all in 175 pages and in a breezy anecdotal fashion that- again- makes me think that Kluge has real potential for best seller status.

Kluge is being published in mid April- so keep your eyes peeled- espech if you dig the applied psychology/self help section of your local Borders/Barnes & Noble.

I enjoyed the Unabridged CD version
Ideally, I'd have given this a 4.5 star rating, as a number of the studies sited in Kluge I'd heard of before [but in fairness, I read or listen to lots of psyche-science books]. Still, very worthwhile, for giving a convincing portrayal of how our... [appropriately, I can't think of the right word] often defective/unsatisfying brains are simply the way things are. It's not just me/us! It's well, the way evolution worked out.
Definitely recommended.

Missing some relevant factors
It was with great interest that I received a review copy of "Kluge", because I myself am halfway through writing an Environmental Psychology book about modern human society.

I was dismayed to find that the author gives 13 pieces of advice at the end of book, of how human beings can avoid our instinctual reactions and be more rational, and then doesn't follow them. He doesn't "consider alternate hypotheses" (as I will elaborate) and he doesn't "distance himself".

Many EP authors, such as Rubin, describe how our instinctual propensity to belong to groups, leads in modern society to our predilection to pick ideological groups to support. We choose between Democrats, Republicans, Conservatives, Liberals, as well as Jocks, Goths, Cheerleaders, Stoners, and more in High School, and later Evangelicals, Atheists, Newagers and on and on.

Unfortunately, almost all academicians and scientists do the same. They accept the media conventional wisdom that "evolution" and "intelligent design" are opposing sports teams. Like Marcus, they immediately fall prey to the emotional responses (that ironically, he describes in detail in this book) that "science" and "evolution" are "us" - our tribe - and must be defended. It's interesting that only a philosopher like John Paul II has ventured that evolution and intelligent design are not intrinsically incompatible.

Mr. Marcus disproves his own overall premise - that the human mind is haphazard and thus not designed - partway through the book. In Chapter Six, he mentions video games, and how they have to be balanced somewhere between too easy and too difficult. But he fails to notice how this can be applied to his premise - because he doesn't follow his own advice to "consider alternate hypotheses" and "distance himself". Somehow, he is postulating a "designer" of the human mind who is stupider than a video game designer. This is what he is clearly saying with his premise that any imperfections in the human mind indicate that it is not designed. In reality, if all human minds were perfect, then human life would be like a video game that was so easy, it became boring. That would be "Stupid Design", not intelligent design.

I'm not trying to start yet another discussion of ID (there are already too many hundred thousand page discussions on that subject), but from the cover, subtitle and conclusion of the book, it seems to be the premise of the book to "debunk" it, and it clearly fails to do so.

Furthermore, as other reviewers have mentioned, the author's grasp of Evolutionary Psychology that is evidenced in this book, is somewhat lacking. I will echo that the author seems to largely ignore the effects of Sexual Selection, and I will second the recommendation of "Red Queen" as an excellent text on that subject.

Marcus strangely also largely ignores the effect of the fact that modern civilization has only existed for 10,000 years - far too recent for any genetic adaptations - and thus we are adapted for a situation far different from modern human society. Bizarrely, he does mention this factor in a footnote in Chapter Seven where he quotes Kurt Vonnegut, and dismisses it with the odd statement "mental disorders have been around as long as humans have". Uh, how can he possibly know that ? No writings exist from before civilization, so there is no way to know either way. From an EP viewpoint, the human mind is adapted to a tribal lifestyle, and it is certainly a reasonable, even probable premise that all of the problems that Marcus describes in his book are simply a result of human society changing far more quickly than humans can genetically adapt.

Having said all that, I do give Marcus points for his interest in this important subject matter, and in his relatively readable presentation of the ideas. Our media encourage the viewpoint that some people ("experts") are highly rational and competent. To the extent that this book helps to disabuse people of this unrealistic notion, it can be of value.