Multimind
A New Way of Looking at Human Behavior
Robert Ornstein
Robert Ornstein
“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.
Such a concentration on verbal talents and rational sequential analysis has led to a spectacular series of triumphs in our society. We can bounce a signal off the moon, make wafers in space the size of a micron, create weapons in one submarine that have the firepower of all of World War II. But our other talents are not educated or developed along with the reasoning ones.”
Robert Ornstein
Multimind
Multimind
A New Way of Looking at Human Behavior
Robert Ornstein
“If there is one book to read on the nature of the human mind, this is it!”
—Paul Ehrlich
“Stuck side by side, inside the skin, inside the skull, are several special purpose, separate, and specific small minds…Our illusion is that each of us is somehow unified, with a single coherent purpose and action. Others present a smooth, seemingly consistent and unified surface as well. But it is an illusion, as we are hidden from ourselves, just as the skin covers a lot of different organs that are only visible once the covering has been lifted.
“Similarly, the brain case screens from our view the diversity of the human brain. It has taken the evidence of the past few decades to discern the different separate mental structures that lie, almost hidden, deep within the homogeneous mass of the brain. It has taken us a long time to break the covering of the different minds within, but as a result our view of our own nature is in for a radical change.”
—Multimind
“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
