• Strangers to Ourselves

  • Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious
  • By: Timothy D. Wilson
  • Narrated by: Joe Barrett
  • Length: 8 hrs and 31 mins
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (492 ratings)

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Strangers to Ourselves  By  cover art

Strangers to Ourselves

By: Timothy D. Wilson
Narrated by: Joe Barrett
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Publisher's summary

In an eye-opening tour of the unconscious, as contemporary psychological science has redefined it, Timothy D. Wilson introduces us to a hidden mental world of judgments, feelings, and motives that introspection may never show us. This is not your psychoanalyst's unconscious. The adaptive unconscious that empirical psychology has revealed, and that Wilson describes, is much more than a repository of primative drives and conflict-ridden memories. It is a set of pervasive, sophisticated mental processes that size up our worlds, set goals, and initiate action, all while we are consciously thinking about something else. If we don't know ourselves -- our potentials, feelings, or motives -- it is most often, Wilson tells us, because we have developed a plausible story about ourselves that is out of touch with our adaptive unconscious. Citing evidence that too much introspection can actually do damage, Wilson makes the case for better ways of discovering our unconscious selves. If you want to know who you are or what you feel or what you're like, Wilson advises, pay attention to what you actually do and what other people think about you. Showing us an unconscious more powerful that Freud's, and even more pervasive in our daily life, Strangers to Ourselves marks a revolution in how we know ourselves. The book is published by Harvard University Press.

©2002 the President and Fellows of Harvard College (P)2011 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"[Wilson's] book is what popular psychology ought to be (and rarely is): thoughtful, beautifully written, and full of unexpected insights." (Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker)

What listeners say about Strangers to Ourselves

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Interesting, engaging, entertaining, informative

Don’t pick up Timothy Wilson’s Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious thinking it might be a self-help book. It is really a serious consideration of the unconscious mind readily available to the general reader. Similarly, this is a departure from the psychoanalytical approach to the unconscious although Wilson does speak to that point of view. Rather, this book will open the reader’s eyes to current empirical understanding of the unconscious and seeks to answer the question, how might we access the knowledge contained there? The short answer is that we can’t (yet?) tap into the unconscious. However, Wilson provides a number ways that we might access that knowledge indirectly. The book is interesting, engaging, and informative. At least take a few minutes to thumb through a few pages or sign-up for a sample. You just might find it more entertaining and helpful than you envisioned. The reading of Joe Barrett is very good.

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17 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

know thyself!

If you aren't terrified to learn you may have little clue as to why you do much of what you do, you will likely enjoy and glean a lot from this serious, but understandable study of human nature and interactions.

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9 people found this helpful

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eye opening book

listened to book two times back to back because it is very helpful. life application of content is pure gold.

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pretty good

the narration is great, the subject is fascinating, but the overall book is good, but not the best. i do recommend it though.

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Understand Yourself

One of the most profound books on understanding yourself and creating a more meaningful and fulfilling self narrative. It elucidates the interplay between our conscious mind and the adaptive unconscious which must have a cohesive narrative that brings forth peace of mind. This book is packed with insightful anecdotes and impactful stories to bring it all together.

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Excellent listen and will have you thinking a lot

This book pairs well with "Thinkg fast and slow" by Daniel Kahneman if you want to go further down the rabbit hole. Enjoy

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Possibly Preaching to the Choir

I enjoyed listening to this book. It reconfirmed a lot of my own ideals on the way we work. However it has inversely interested me in the critism of opposing theories. I admit I am biased towards works of Pinker and Kahneman and wish to challenge these agreements to further my own interpretations.

That aside, the work was well written, anecdotes were poignant/relevant and not gratuitous and the syntax was easy to follow and provided a cohesive message. I wish Wilson had more publications.

Have a great day everyone.

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must read. blink was inspired by this.

read this because Gladwell apparently read this and wrote Blink. he missed the mark. this is the rest of the story.

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Nice book to read

It was a nice book. Understanding the difference s between concious and subconscious mind very​ well described and the way that they can be identified. after finishing the book it is easy to unleash the traped power of boldness and understand why we are limiting ourselves​.

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    3 out of 5 stars

Informative but scattered and bleak

'Strangers to Ourselves' was published in 2002 but feels much older, as its most-described studies hail from the '60s, and the author himself, Timothy Wilson, is clearly an aging academic whose personal examples have a tendency to read as unusual to a younger audience (what even is "clam dip"?)

On the whole, the book felt badly organized - it is a collection of stories and anecdotes that illustrate insights gleaned from studies that (I hope) are considered representative or authoritative. But these stories rarely fit together thematically, and I wasn't left with much of a sense of either a model for the mind or of a broad overview of how various schools of psychological thought have changed and developed over the last half-century. Instead, it's as if the various pieces were strung together through some more loose sense of association with the result that it's something of a jumble of psych trivia.

The book's overall message and tone may appeal to an ardent devotee of skepticism or scientism, but anyone hoping to reconcile the mythic and meaningful map of the mind presented from psychoanalysis to a contemporary understanding of cognitive science will be sorely disappointed. As the title implies, the book's repeated frame for each of its vignettes is basically "you may think you could know this about yourself, but actually this experiment shows how you can't. But how can you know about yourself? I'll tell you at the end of the book!" Worse than the constant bubble-bursting about self knowledge may be how the mind itself - and by extension humanity - is reduced to a pairing of a clueless consciousness that believes its own confabulations with a "non-conscious" composed of a collection of filters, procedures, and other systems described with mechanical words. Quite apart from the mysterious landscape of the Unconscious peopled by archetypal spirits and demons presented by Jung, Wilson's depiction of the non-conscious is an unknowable black box filled with biological gears and pumps.

The end of the book is perhaps the largest letdown. After teasing the possibilities of methods for accurate self-knowledge throughout the book, Wilson presents us only with a handful of carefully hedged suggestions to observe our own behavior, create and believe a self narrative, and 'fake it til you make it.' Yet his hedging on all of these suggestions save the last is so strenuous that it's unclear that he's really making a recommendation at all.

Overall, the book portrays the conscious mind as gullible and prone to making mistakes and generating illusions and the non-conscious mind as a powerful but soulless machine 'designed' by evolution to ensure reproduction via adaptivity. It denies any but the slimmest possibility for authentic self-knowledge while describing how and why introspection itself is often pathological. It does, at least, summarize several psychological models and influential experiments in ways that are easy for a layperson to grasp.

I'm giving the book 3 stars because it is the only text I have found so far written by a specialist in the field (rather than by a journalist or pop author) that explicitly addresses the broad concept of the Unconscious from a more contemporary academic perspective informed by cognitive science and non-psychoanalytic psychology.

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