Each essay is only 3-5 pages, making this a great book to pick up when you have a few minutes of free time and want a little bit of intellectual stimulation. That said, some essays were great and thought-provoking, but others were painfully dull and a chore to get through.

3.5 stars"This Book Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking" is the collection of essays of various scientists', journalists', professors', and many educators' answering to the editor's question, "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?". The perspectives of the essays are ranging from biology, sociology, astronomy, technology, all the way to psychology. Personally, during the first tens pages of the book, I enjoyed cramming the new in...

The Edge.org question of 2011 was "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?" Many of the world's most famous thinkers responded to it, and their responses are compiled in this book in one-to-four-page essays organized thematically.It's somewhat ironic that although the book is a collection of the ideas of "great minds," many of the essays emphasize the importance of not trusting authority. Debates over climate change and creationism were mentioned often enough to beco...

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman"This Will Make You Smarter" is a thought-provoking book of scientific essays brought to you by The Edge that provides readers with better tools to think about the world. The Edge is an organization that presents original ideas by today's leading thinkers from a wide spectrum of scientific fields. The 2011 Edge question is, "What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit?" This w...

Well, it gave me a rather long list of new things to further read on! :)

Edge is an organisation that promotes the spreading of cultural and scientific knowledge to a general public. Every year they pose a general philosophical question and publish some of the best answers by prominent intellectuals. This book contains the answers to the proposition: "Which new scientific concept should belong to everyone's conceptual toolkit?"In bundling the answers, the editor made one unfortunate mistake. He grouped them thematically. Since many researchers promote the same concep...

The best compilation of essays on scientific concepts and the importance of critical thinking I have read to date.

Brockman is the prince of nurd pimps. He's got all the big brained studs in his stable. He's a rock star of science lit agents (who even knew you could be that). I fuckin hate dinner parties and that kind of stuff. But I would love to attend one of Brockman's wing dings. He's bros with the smartest, most interesting people in the world.Anyway. He's cranking out these little essay books and they're all really good. The way it works is he periodically asks all of his crew to write short (usually o...

This Will Make You Smarter is a challenging book that leaves you with a lot to think about. The essays are short — some shorter than a single page — that cover interesting scientific concepts, new and old ideas to help us think about the world.The founder and publisher of the online science salon, Edge.org, John Brockman, does a great job editing this collection, turning more than 100 essays on a wide range of topics into a coherent manuscript that works its way across the spectrum. You start ou...

not smarter a bit but annoyed

BEST ON SMALL DOSES The occasional, mildly thought provoking contribution has to be weighed against the embarrassing inclusion of self help advice.

I Liked this book. It did contain some useful new notions. Unfortunately it also contains a lot of repetition and also some platitudes. In the end I expected as much. After all, it is more like cookbook. Not every recipe in it needs to be according to my dad tastes.That being said, here are some concepts which I found really interesting:- Deep Time - the Universe has a huge time span. People are aware (those who are not creationists) how long ago it was created, but it will exist for an even lon...

The book is just a printed collection of one page blog entries from edge. com in response to their now famous annual question. Well, wrong medium and rather disappointing uniformity of thought - stick to edge online during your lunch break.A few themes come up over and over again - complexity, unpredictability, evolutionary biology, cognitive biases. While these subjects are certainly intellectually stimulating and while i like other longer works by a handful of the participating authors , readi...

This is a small-plates restaurant for the brain. More than 150 of today’s top thinkers from many different fields answer a simple question: What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit? “Scientific” includes any endeavor that seeks analytical knowledge and understanding. Each dish runs anything from one to four pages. Occasionally I could gobble up ten in a sitting, but often one would be so delicious and filling that I would need to stop reading and ponder its ramificatio...

It didn't.No, in all seriousness, I think this book would have been quite good for me about five years ago - many of the cognitive tools they bring up are indeed very useful. But this book suffers from having too many authors - so for one thing there is quite a lot of redundancy, as multiple people advocate very similar principles, which often overlap with the essays of others, and for another thing everyone was limited to an average of two pages, so there isn't enough room to say anything with

I read this because I wanted to think about how to write accessible, sexy-sounding prose to use in grant proposals. It contains plenty of both good and bad examples of how to make complicated ideas sound exciting to non-experts. The social psychologists and pop-minded economists are the masters of this particular skill. Basically they can just present a couple of examples of goofy human behavior and their job is done. (Though there is also a nice entry on "Anecdotalism", which points out the pro...

The author asked many famous people, "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?"The idea intrigued me; from each successful, "famous" person, what single thing is it important for people to know? It seemed like the book would be full of good advice.However, I didn't enjoy reading it. I suppose all the concepts were scientific ones, which didn't interest me. None of the writers (I only read a few. I didn't read the whole book.) spoke about why or how their particular co...

Ugly name, beautiful content.

This book is not unlike a short-stories book. Short-story books have always been a case of hit-or-miss for me. And so was this book.The overarching theme of the book is this: Which scientific concept can improve everyone's cognitive toolkit? Various prominent scientists, almost all of whom are authors in their specialized fields of expertise, including the likes of Daniel Kahneman, Steven Pinker, Clifford Pickover and Jonathan Haidt, proceed to answer the question what they think is the 'best' c...

It started with good intentions and bought into the title. After one hundred pages in, I had to put it down. Why? The more I read, the dumber I got. Hoping to get a brain implant - saw one on Craigslist denoted as A.B. Normal - so I can finish it and restore any self-esteem I have left. . .. . .the new cranium must have helped because I can discuss collective intelligence, defeasibilty, and Black Swan technologies with some modicum of confidence. The cover's secondary title is "New Scientific Co...