Everyday Survival by Laurence Gonzales
May 5th, 2009Title: Everyday Survival
Author: Laurence Gonzales
Publisher: W.W. Norton (2008)
I am usually pretty interested in this type of sciency book. What? Sciency is not a word? Well, mind your own business, Mr. Merriam-Webster! Anyway…before I was so rudely interrupted…I have read a couple of books from people out of the Santa Fe Institute. The Santa Fe Institute is, according to their website:
devoted to creating a new kind of scientific research community, one emphasizing multi-disciplinary collaboration in pursuit of understanding the common themes that arise in natural, artificial, and social systems.
Basically, anything that I have read from someone associated with SFI is really smart.
Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things by Laurence Gonzales is a really interesting look at what causes people to do dumb things. I am not very smart so following the book all the way through got a little difficult. The book starts with a super cool look at the scripts we all are running constantly. These scripts define things we do often and the more we practice these activities the more ingrained the scripts become. For example, the more we drive a certain route (like to work everyday)…the less we have to think about it. That’s why you sometimes end up somewhere and don’t really know how to get there.
Where people get into trouble is when the scripts in their brain convince them that something is OK when it is really trouble. An example of that is the recent tsunami in Thailand. A lot of the people who died were people on vacation. When you go on vacation your brain runs the “vacation script”…which, for most people, means you relax your normal receptors for warning. These people were not able to recognize signals that they probably would have recognized in other situations.
This book is super smart, and while I enjoyed it…it was not an easy read. If I was smarter I would have been able to understand it more…and therefore would be able to explain everything that he was talking about. I fear I am not really able to do that though. If you are interested in learning new things and changing the way you think about things…this would be a good book to read. I recommend reading it slowly though.
Rating: 4 out of 5
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June 3rd, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Nice review. I have Deep Survival by Gonzales in my TBR right now. I’ll let you know how easy/difficult that one is.