Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind

Guy Claxton makes the case for slowing down. His book looks at the kinds of knowing that need time, abilities that most of us have let go of or learned to overlook, even though they are essential to a fully developed mind.

Given time, he argues, the brain will do some surprising and valuable things. It can pick up patterns so subtle that a busy, goal-driven mind cannot even notice them. It can make sense of vague, poorly defined situations that leave ordinary reasoning stuck. It can get to the root of personal and emotional problems more successfully than the probing intellect can. It can sense meaning that resists explanation, as in a poem, and it can sometimes produce answers to tangled dilemmas that are wise rather than merely clever.

Claxton draws on cognitive science and other research as evidence for each of these capacities. He then explains how we could use these slower ways of knowing more often and to better effect.