 Best Sellers | | Home Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind | |
|  | |  | | | Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind | | | | | | | |
List Price:
| $25.00 | |
Our Price:
| $4.49 | |
You Save:
| $20.51 (82%)
| | *Shipping: | $4.49 | |
*Shipping:
| |
| | | SKU:
9781416569695FMT | | In Stock | | Availability:
Usually ships in 1-2 business days | | Only 2 left in stock, order soon! | | |
|
| | Description | Owner of "the most remarkable mind on the planet," (according to Entertainment Weekly) Daniel Tammet captivated readers and won worldwide critical acclaim with the 2007 New York Times bestselling memoir, Born On A Blue Day, and its vivid depiction of a life with autistic savant syndrome. In his fascinating new book, he writes with characteristic clarity and personal awareness as he sheds light on the mysteries of savants' incredible mental abilities, and our own. Tammet explains that the differences between savant and non-savant minds have been exaggerated; his astonishing capacities in memory, math and language are neither due to a cerebral supercomputer nor any genetic quirk, but are rather the results of a highly rich and complex associative form of thinking and imagination. Autistic thought, he argues, is an extreme variation of a kind that we all do, from daydreaming to the use of puns and metaphors. Embracing the Wide Sky combines meticulous scientific research with Tammet's detailed descriptions of how his mind works to demonstrate the immense potential within us all. He explains how our natural intuitions can help us to learn a foreign language, why his memories are like symphonies, and what numbers and giraffes have in common. We also discover why there is more to intelligence than IQ, how optical illusions fool our brains, and why too much information can make you dumb. Many readers will be particularly intrigued by Tammet's original ideas concerning the genesis of genius and exceptional creativity. He illustrates his arguments with examples as diverse as the private languages of twins, the compositions of poets with autism, and the breakthroughs, and breakdowns, of some of history's greatest minds. Embracing the Wide Sky is a unique and brilliantly imaginative portrait of how we think, learn, remember and create, brimming with personal insights and anecdotes, and explanations of the most up-to-date, mind-bending discoveries from fields ranging from neuroscience to psychology and linguistics. This is a profound and provocative book that will transform our understanding and respect for every kind of mind. | |
| | Product Details | | Author: | Daniel Tammet | | Hardcover: | 304 pages | | Publisher: | Free Press | | Publication Date: | January 06, 2009 | | Language: | English | | ISBN: | 1416569693 | | Product Length: | 0.0 inches | | Product Width: | 0.01 inches | | Product Height: | 0.01 inches | | Product Weight: | 0.01 pounds | | Package Length: | 8.58 inches | | Package Width: | 5.75 inches | | Package Height: | 1.26 inches | | Package Weight: | 0.88 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 54 reviews |
| |
| | Customer Reviews | Average Customer Review: ( 54 customer reviews )
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
34 of 34 found the following review helpful:
 "the treasures deep within us" Jan 18, 2009
By Robert C. Ross
Daniel Tammet's first book, Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant, provides a fascinating insight into a mind that understood numbers much better than it understood people. His second book provides amazing insights into our own minds.
Tammet's book is based on wonderfully detailed and lucid descriptions of research on how people think. He then applies his learning to every day experiences to show how less gifted people like me can apply that research in a practical way.
For example, in one chapter he analyzes the issue of information overload and attempts to cope with it, including recent studies showing that multi-tasking is not really very effective. He is eloquent on the "beauties" of the Dewey Decimal System, and concludes:
"Dewey's system is a marvel of organization, but I have given detailed examples here in order to make an important philosophical as well as practical point. Information is meaningless unless it can be made sense of, and to do that it requires an internal system of thought and ideas that can provide context and relate it to other information we have already learned.
"Many people lack a coherent worldview with which they can evaluate and assimilate new information. The problem of information overload, therefore, may not be the quantity of it but our inability to know what to do with it. One possible explanation for this is the common confusion between information and ideas. In his book, The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking, history professor Theodore Roszak makes the point that the mind thinks with ideas, not information. Ideas are of primary importance because they define, make sense of, and create information. Roszak goes further still by arguing that the greatest ideas, such as the Founding Fathers' "all men are created equal," do not contain any information at all. Rather, such ideas are the result of an innate human sensibility that reaches beyond strings of data to recognize and synthesize transcendent patterns of thought. A personal worldview then helps put information back into perspective, giving it an intuitive place in our minds like the books in a library."
Tammet maintains a wonderfully informative website called Optimnem where he explores his (and our) minds. This book is the best self help book for the brain I've ever read; I've enjoyed every minute I've spent reading his writing.
Robert C. Ross 2009
21 of 21 found the following review helpful:
Why you think the way you do Jan 23, 2009
By PT Cruiser
"PT Cruiser"
I didn't read Daniel Tammet's first book, Born on a Blue Day (yet) but this book was one of the most fascinating and informative books about the way the human mind works that I've ever read. Daniel Temmet is an autistic savant and talks in this book about how similar autistic and non-autistic minds function. It gave me a whole new perspective on how we learn, remember and process thoughts.
It was particularly helpful to me in understanding how we learn language since I've been learning French for the past 10 years and more recently Italian. It's much more involved than I previously thought but I also came away with the idea that it's possible to learn several languages and be able to function in each of them. According to research it's believed that when a person learns more than one language as a baby and small child, both languages occupy the same small section of the brain, but when learning a second or third language, they are kept in a separate section of the brain. This makes sense since little kids can often go back and forth between languages whereas when I try to switch I can almost feel my brain opening another "compartment".
He discusses IQ tests and IQ and disputes where they can actually measure intelligence. There is a whole section on how the human brain processes information and how we remember things. We often hear that our brains are like computers, just processing information but he shows how they are so much more intricate than even the most advanced computers. There are studies showing that babies can count and he discusses arguments that a "number module" exists within the human brain.
There is so much fascinating information packed into this book and Tammet's writing style makes it all so interesting and not at all a dry subject. I had a hard time putting it down and read the book in two days. The only thing I wish, is that there was a little more about the way his brain processes subjects and information discussed in this book. But from what I understand, his first book, Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant goes more deeply into this. It's a book that I definitely want to read after reading this one.
20 of 22 found the following review helpful:
The miracle and mystery of the human mind Jan 16, 2009
By Julie Neal
Autistic savant author Daniel Tammet clearly has a beautiful mind, but the real focus of this important book is the boundless ability of EVERY human brain, "the treasures buried deep within us all." Tammet argues convincingly that the differences between a savant and an average person are not really so great. He debunks myths about savants, many due to the movie Rain Man, that seem to rob the humanity from these rare people. After several chapters explaining how his own mind works, he gives tips on how everyday brains can improve their functioning.
Tammet shows how IQ testing does not show the true intelligence of a person, and is inherently flawed. He agrees with Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, and shows that when schools espouse this view, student's grades improve.
I found it fascinating to learn that Tammet has trouble remember faces, but numbers are alive for him. "In my head, numbers assume complex shapes that interact to form solutions to sums," he explains. "I do not know where my number shapes come from. I do not know why I think of 6 as tiny and 9 as very large or why threes are round and fours pointy."
Peeking in on such a mind is an interesting experience; I highly recommend it!
Here's the chapter list:
1. Wider Than the Sky
2. Measuring Minds: Intelligence and Talent
3. Seeing What is Not There
4. A World of Words
5. The Number Instinct
6. The Biology of Creativity
7. Light to Sight
8. Food for Thought
9. Thinking by Numbers
10. The Future of the Mind
12 of 13 found the following review helpful:
 40% Insightful May 23, 2009
By Robert Carlberg
Tammet is a fine writer and his first book, the autobiography "Born on a Blue Day" was illuminating. This second book is a bit less so, because he allows himself to wander from the subjects he knows best and gets into the weeds.
Chapters 1 (about savantism), 3 (about memory), 4 (about words) and 5 (about numbers) are all interesting takes, with unique insights from the mind of a prodigious savant. These four chapters make the book worth reading, IMO.
On the other hand chapters 2 (IQ measurement), 6 (creativity), 7 (vision), 8 (organization of knowledge), 9 (innumeracy) & 10 (brain enhancement) are all plebeian treatments, with tired examples and a rather tedious style ("X says in his book Y that..."). Daniel tries to tie all these disciplines together into a sort of unified theory of mind, but the trouble is he really only knows his own inner workings well. When he recommends that poor people invest money toward a brighter future, or that over-population can't be a problem because Holland has high population density, he is really only showing his lack of worldliness.
Hopefully his next book will be a chip shot back onto the green.
6 of 6 found the following review helpful:
This book provided encouragement and some AHAs Feb 03, 2009
By Diane Kistner
Rather than talk about what this book is about, I'd like to share how I reacted to it. First, I think mild autistic spectrum disorders probably run in my family, overlapping with ADHD. I'm pretty sure after reading this book that at least one of my family members has Asperger's syndrome, and realizing this helps me understand their social distancing. I'm encouraged to find out more.
I was especially encouraged by the "World of Words" chapter, which deals with language acquisition in general, plus common misconceptions about learning languages beyond one's own initially acquired language. I've always approached learning a second language as if there was something mysterious and hard-wired about the brain that negated my ability as an adult to learn it. After getting all eight questions right in the intuitive sense for word meanings test, I realized that learning new languages does not depend on memorizing strings of words. The techniques for learning a new language Tammet suggests made complete sense to me, and I realized I've failed in the past because I've tried to just memorize words without forming a linguistic gestalt.
Throughout other chapters, what soon became clear to me is that many people are taught to just memorize without an understanding of the underlying conceptual, logical, and systematic relationships. Tammet's explanation of the Dewey decimal system used by libraries was a great AHA! for me. The system is not at all arbitrary, as I had always assumed; new categories are not just tacked on willy nilly. The system not only makes elegant sense to me now, the way the books are organized in a library--with books of a similar nature being located near each other--seems analogous to the way information is stored most efficiently in the brain.
Tammet encourages people who are trying to learn a new language to learn clusters of words that make the words more memorable; he gives the example in English of the words "pen," "paper," "pencil," and "paint": all the words begin with similar sounds and refer to similar objects or those normally used together. As I read about phonesthesia "(where certain sounds become associated with certain meanings)" I realized that this is a major key in helping me not only learn new words but to reach for them directly in thought without having to first find an English word before translating it into the new language--always an impediment for me in trying to get past the basics of a language.
I was most drawn to the linguistic discussions in the book, but Tammet also covers visual, numerical, and other forms of apprehension and thought. Clear examples of what he is discussing are included so the reader can really visualize what he is talking about, and he gives examples to test comprehension as he goes along. He also dispels magical notions of what "genius" is and simultaneously gives us a means of drawing on our own creative intelligence--which, he is quick to tell us, is far more profound and powerful than that of the computers our brains are misguidedly compared to.
I laughed out loud when Tammet confirmed for me what I've suspected for quite some time: Drinking too much information too often through the firehose of the Internet can make you stupid! After reading this book, I can see why that is true! Time to restrict surfing like I restrict watching TV.
See all 54 customer reviews on Amazon.com
| |
* Estimated shipping rate for US 48 states. Final rate calculated at checkout. | |
| |  | |  |
|
Recently Viewed | You may also like ... |
