About this item
From the best-selling author of Subliminal and The Drunkard's Walk, a groundbreaking new look at the neuroscience of change--and how elastic thinking can help us thrive in a world changing faster than ever before. With rapid technological innovation leading the charge, today's world is transforming itself at an extraordinary and unprecedented pace. As jobs become more multifaceted, as information streams multiply, and as myriad devices place increasing demands on our attention, we are confronted every day with a plethora of new challenges. Fortunately, as Leonard Mlodinow shows, the human brain is uniquely engineered to adapt. Drawing from cutting-edge research in neuroscience and psychology, Mlodinow takes us on a fascinating and illuminating journey through the mechanics of our own minds as we navigate the rapidly shifting landscapes around us. Out of the exploratory instincts that allowed our ancestors to prosper hundreds of thousands of years ago, humans developed a cognitive style that Mlodinow terms elastic thinking, a collection of traits and abilities that include neophilia (an affinity for novelty) , schizotypy (a tendency toward unusual perception) , imagination and idea generation, pattern recognition, mental fluency, divergent thinking, and integrative thinking. These are the qualities that enabled innovators from Mary Shelley to Miles Davis, from the inventor of jumbo-sized popcorn to the creator of the modern grocery store, and from Nike to Pokemon Go to effect paradigm shifts in our culture and society. And they're the qualities that will enable each of us to succeed, personally and professionally, in the radically changing environments of today. With his keen acumen and rapid-fire wit, Mlodinow gives us the essential tools to harness the power of elastic thinking in an endlessly dynamic world.
About the Author
Leonard Mlodinow is a physicist and author. Mlodinow was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1959, of parents who were both Holocaust survivors. His father, who spent more than a year in the Buchenwald death camp, had been a leader in the Jewish resistance under Nazi rule in his hometown of Cz?stochowa, Poland. As a child, Mlodinow was interested in both mathematics and chemistry, and while in high school was tutored in organic chemistry by a professor from the University of Illinois. As recounted in his book, , his interest turned to physics during a semester he took off from college to spend on a kibbutz in Israel, during which he had little to do at night beside reading , which was one of the few English books he found in the kibbutz library. While a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, and on the faculty at Caltech, he developed (with N. Papanicolaou) a new type of perturbation theory for eigenvalue problems in quantum mechanics. Later, as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysik in Munich, Germany, he did pioneering work (with M. Hillery) on the quantum theory of dielectric media. Apart from his research and books on popular science, he also wrote the screenplay for the film (currently in production) and has been a screenwriter for television series, including and He co-authored (with Matt Costello) a children's chapter book series entitled Between 2008 and 2010, Mlodinow worked on a book with Stephen Hawking, entitled A step beyond Hawking's other titles, The Grand Design is said to explore both the question of the existence of the universe and the issue of why the laws of physics are what they are. Mlodinow currently teaches at Caltech and is in discussions about producing a book with the controversial spiritualist Deepak Chopra.
