How to Understand Everything
Consilience: A New Way to See the World
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Narrated by:
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Philip Battley
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By:
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Tom Beakbane
About this listen
Are you sometimes puzzled by how people behave?
Powerful new technologies enable us to see the details of how our neural systems work. We no longer need to speculate about how genes are expressed or the nature of consciousness. Now, we can understand how the brain functions from the bottom up, how we communicate, form ideas, and behave accordingly.
This book takes you on a mind-altering journey that will help you understand the interconnections between different domains of human life: health, family, business, technology, politics, and spirituality.
Consilience is a new way to understand human beings - and everything else. Join Tom Beakbane, president of Beakbane: Brand Strategies & Communications Inc., who has helped generate over $5 billion in brand value for his clients, and discover a new way to see the world.
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Story
In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas.
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Physically difficult to listen to
- By Claire Hay on 11-08-19
By: Barbara Tversky
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The Ascent of Humanity
- Civilization and the Human Sense of Self
- By: Charles Eisenstein
- Narrated by: Steve Wojtas
- Length: 27 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Charles Eisenstein explores the history and potential future of civilization, tracing the converging crises of our age to the illusion of the separate self. He argues that our disconnection from one another and the natural world has mislaid the foundations of science, religion, money, technology, economics, medicine, and education as we know them. It has fired our near-pathological pursuit of technological Utopias even as we push ourselves and our planet to the brink of collapse.
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I love this author!
- By Tamara Smith on 12-03-17
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The Perfect You
- A Blueprint for Identity
- By: Dr. Caroline Leaf, Avery Jackson, Peter Amua-Quarshi, and others
- Narrated by: Margaret Winston
- Length: 7 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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There are a lot of personality tests out there designed to label you and put you in a particular box. But Dr. Caroline Leaf says there's much more to you than a personality profile can capture. In fact, you cannot be categorized! In this fascinating book, she takes listeners through seven steps to rediscover and unlock their unique "you quotient".
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Hands down, the most helpful book I've listened to
- By Rose O'Connor on 07-31-17
By: Dr. Caroline Leaf, and others
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The Master and His Emissary
- The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
- By: Iain McGilchrist
- Narrated by: Dennis Kleinman
- Length: 27 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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This pioneering account sets out to understand the structure of the human brain - the place where mind meets matter. Until recently, the left hemisphere of our brain has been seen as the "rational" side, the superior partner to the right. But is this distinction true? Drawing on a vast body of experimental research, Iain McGilchrist argues while our left brain makes for a wonderful servant, it is a very poor master.
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The Master and His Emissary
- By Michael on 11-07-20
By: Iain McGilchrist
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The Ravenous Brain
- How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning
- By: Daniel Bor
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 11 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Consciousness is our gateway to experience: it enables us to recognize Van Gogh’s starry skies, be enraptured by Beethoven’s Fifth, and stand in awe of a snowcapped mountain. Yet consciousness is subjective, personal, and famously difficult to examine: philosophers have for centuries declared this mental entity so mysterious as to be impenetrable to science. In The Ravenous Brain, neuroscientist Daniel Bor departs sharply from this historical view, and proposes a new model for how consciousness works.
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Effectively demystifies consciousness
- By Gary on 11-18-12
By: Daniel Bor
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The Bond
- Connecting Through the Space Between Us
- By: Lynne McTaggart
- Narrated by: Karen White
- Length: 10 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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From the best-selling author of The Intention Experiment and The Field comes a groundbreaking new work---a book that uses the interconnectedness of mind and matter to demonstrate that the key to life is in the relationship between things. We are always connected with others, hardwired at our most elemental level---from the quantum level to the cellular, from personal relationships to business and societal structures.
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Horrible narrator
- By Cotran on 09-19-11
By: Lynne McTaggart
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Transcendence
- How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time
- By: Gaia Vince
- Narrated by: Gaia Vince
- Length: 11 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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How four tools enabled humanity to control its destiny What enabled us to go from simple stone tools to smartphones? How did bands of hunter-gatherers evolve into multinational empires? Listeners of Sapiens will say a cognitive revolution - a dramatic evolutionary change that altered our brains, turning primitive humans into modern ones - caused a cultural explosion. In Transcendence, Gaia Vince argues instead that modern humans are the product of a nuanced coevolution of our genes, environment, and culture that goes back into deep time.
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Far too much bias and unsupported conclusions
- By Kurt Leyendecker on 10-01-20
By: Gaia Vince
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Why God Won't Go Away
- Brain Science and the Biology of Belief
- By: Andrew Newberg, Eugene d'Aquili, Vince Rause
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 5 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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In this groundbreaking new book, researchers Andrew Newberg and Eugene d'Aquili offer an explanation that is at once profoundly simple and scientifically precise: The religious impulse is rooted in the biology of the brain. In Why God Won't Go Away, Newberg and d'Aquili document their pioneering explorations in the field of neurotheology, an emerging discipline dedicated to understanding the complex relationship between spirituality and the brain.
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My opinion
- By David Berry on 09-06-18
By: Andrew Newberg, and others
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Know This
- Today's Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments
- By: John Brockman
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman, Dan John Miller
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Scientific developments radically alter our understanding of the world. Whether it's technology, climate change, health research, or the latest revelations of neuroscience, physics, or psychology, science has, as Edge editor John Brockman says, "become a big story, if not the big story". In that spirit this new addition to Edge.org's fascinating series asks a powerful and provocative question: What do you consider the most interesting and important recent scientific news?
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Pete and Repeat and Re-repeat
- By Daniel L on 02-25-18
By: John Brockman
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The Cosmic Serpent
- DNA and the Origins of Knowledge
- By: Jeremy Narby
- Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin
- Length: 4 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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This adventure in science and imagination, which the Medical Tribune said might herald "a Copernican revolution for the life sciences", leads the listener through unexplored jungles and uncharted aspects of mind to the heart of knowledge. In a first-person narrative of scientific discovery that opens new perspectives on biology, anthropology, and the limits of rationalism, The Cosmic Serpent reveals how startlingly different the world around us appears when we open our minds to it.
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Very Good Religious Text
- By Blair K. Hartman on 08-09-17
By: Jeremy Narby
What listeners say about How to Understand Everything
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Christopher Garcia
- 03-18-21
Great listen and very insightful
loved it, couldn't wait to continue listening every day. will re listen soon for sure
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- Denver Rick
- 04-28-21
Props for taking on this challenge in a novel way
The tl;dr summary: If you’re into business, marketing, leadership; and the sciences, particularly biology (or at least not afraid of it); and you’re on the journey of “how to become” rather than “how to do”, then this book could be just what you’re looking for. It is not a self-help nor “rake it in” book; it is a reflection of Tom Beakbane’s openness, curiosity, and relentless wondering, “How could this be what it appears to be?”
I came across the book by chance, and am listening to the audio version for the third time as I write this review. Kudos also go to the narrator, Philip Battley, who, like Tom Beakbane, is British. This adds value, as Mr. Battley reads the book with the intonation, nuance, and irony which appears to be part of Mr. Beakbane’s style as a branding and marketing professional.
My enthusiasm for and interest in the author’s thesis is enhanced by my prior study of the work of neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, particularly in her book “How Emotions Are Made” (a work where the title might better be, “Why We Make Emotions”).
What caused me to ultimately choose this book is the inclusion of “consilience“ in the title. Beakbane takes some pains to define and offer scenarios of “consilience”. In fact, it is essentially the first idea in the text. Quoting the top of the Introduction: “Consilience is a paradigm that opens up liberating new ways to think about everything relating to science and the natural world, including human behavior. It is more challenging to undergo than other paradigm shifts because it concerns the human brain, which we use to understand[… well… ]everything.”
Given his premise, I offer this feedback: The book might be better titled, “How We Understand Everything and Why It Matters”.
In summary, Beakbane assists us to comprehend some of the essential distinctions between interpreting and verifying reality (looking from the top-down, as by reductionism); and exploring and understanding reality (looking from the bottom-up, as by synthesis). With this book, the author inspires me by the way he has, over many decades as an aficionado of the natural sciences (educationally), plus as an observer of people (professionally), developed a seemingly telephoto-to-fisheye-to-macro mental lens regarding biology, evolution, complexity, and sociology, and their inescapable interrelations.
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- ganesh
- 04-02-23
Another layer of perspicacity
I read a lot of works about how we know things, make choices, persuasion, language, etc.
This is a fine addition to the quiver, another layer of reasoning. I’m greatful the author has done a considerable amount of research to offer broad considerations to the geopolitical conversation of humans on the planet, or fearful monkeys, as I like to think of them.
Particularly like the the three tribes silos, and wonder if a new tribe is now in the offing to attract the next level of evolving monkeys.
Also, enjoyed the narrator slipping in the occasional brief vocal impersonations.
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- J. Rozynski
- 05-10-21
Lots of very interesting topics covered
This book touches upon a wide range of topics and ideas, many of which are fascinating and thought provoking. Very good read. Would recommend for anyone that enjoys their world view being challenged - seeing the same thing but in a different light.
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1 person found this helpful