Teasing out the power within us

This is the book version of a magazine article by a Harvard philosophy professor. It is surprisingly superficial for a Harvard professor’s work. It reads like smalltalk at a dinner party. He freely admits he is guessing about facts and quotes. There are no footnotes. He cites no studies. It was 1907, and the world worked differently.

What James has done is collect his thoughts and some anecdotes and put them forward as a theory. The theory is that people can focus their minds to overcome personal adversity. Be it illness, pain, war or other major issues, if you can focus elsewhere, on something more productive, more rewarding, more significant and involved, you might overcome your personal situation. He relates it to the ability of people under stress to get a “second wind” to complete a task when they are seemingly exhausted. He says we have it in us and we just need to realize that and harness it.

It is the start of the “power of positive thinking” movement, and there is now lots of proof of this idea. In April 2014, a study showed that mice would ignore their own pain and discomfort if there were men in the room. Even if it was just men’s worn t-shirts, the mice would suppress their grimaces of pain to focus on the potential threat.

Dr. Johnston said nothing focuses the mind like being told you will be executed in two weeks. So James was hardly the first to play in this sandbox. Most people have at some point experienced the effect of self inflicted pain to draw attention away from some other source of pain, biting a bullet or a lip or clenching a fist for example.

This book gave the theory widespread exposure and led to a lot of investigation and study, so from that perspective it is a significant milestone. But as a monument of theory, research, baseline and thoroughness, it is lacking.

David Wineberg ( )