Jane G. Goldberg, "Wired for Why: How We Think, Feel, and Make Meaning" (2025)

Jane G. Goldberg, "Wired for Why: How We Think, Feel, and Make Meaning" (2025)

WIRED FOR WHY: How We Think, Feel and Make Meaning. (Self-Published 2025) spans eighteen chapters exploring everything from how we manage to stay alive against all odds, to why language separates us from other species, to whether death might be a metaphor. It's a journey through neuroscience, psychoanalysis, history, and philosophy that challenges readers to reconsider their most basic assumptions about human experience. In WIRED FOR WHY, Dr. Jane Goldberg dismantles fundamental assumptions about human consciousness, memory, and experience. Humans have no "now"—we're perpetually living in the past as our brains lag behind reality, processing what has already happened. Memory, Goldberg argues, is an illusion, an unreliable collection of patterns distributed throughout our bodies rather than faithful recordings of our lives. This challenges everything we believe about identity and selfhood. The book explores how beer created civilization, why coffee shaped the Industrial Revolution, why "B" students often outperform "A" students, and why the brain is the only entity on Earth that named itself—a fact that reveals something profound about human self-awareness. Beyond neuroscience, Goldberg tackles pressing cultural questions: why one in six Americans takes psychiatric medication and children Google "how to completely kill all my emotions." She argues we're medicating away normal human experiences at great cost to our emotional intelligence. Against our productivity-obsessed culture, she makes the counterintuitive case that spacing out and daydreaming fuel creativity, that intelligence is fundamentally a team sport requiring connection rather than isolation, and that our minds and bodies continuously eavesdrop on each other in ways we barely understand. The book doesn't offer simple life hacks but instead provides a more honest reckoning with what it means to live inside brains that lie to us, confabulate truth, and imagine reality on a non-stop basis—and suggests we need humility, openness to being wrong, and peace with our beautifully flawed human nature. Christopher Russell is a psychoanalyst working with individuals and groups. He is a member of the faculty at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies; a licensure qualifying institute in New York. CMPS is also the New York campus for the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis; the only accredited, independent graduate school of psychoanalysis in the country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Episoder(399)

Mark Epstein, “The Trauma of Everyday Life” (Penguin Press, 2013)

Mark Epstein, “The Trauma of Everyday Life” (Penguin Press, 2013)

Being human, much of our energy goes into resisting the basic mess of life, but messy it is nonetheless. The trick (as psychoanalysts know) is to embrace it all anyway. “Trauma is an indivisible part ...

13 Okt 201453min

Thomas Kohut, “A German Generation: An Experiential History of the Twentieth Century” (Yale UP, 2012),

Thomas Kohut, “A German Generation: An Experiential History of the Twentieth Century” (Yale UP, 2012),

Germans belonging to the generation born at the turn of the twentieth century endured staggering losses, many of which became difficult to mourn or even acknowledge: their parents in World War I, fina...

6 Okt 20141h 6min

John Fletcher, “Freud and the Scene of Trauma” (Fordham UP, 2013)

John Fletcher, “Freud and the Scene of Trauma” (Fordham UP, 2013)

Putting Freud’s books — not the man but the writings — on the couch, listening closely for the breaks, the retractions, the internal conflicts, the sudden about-faces. John Fletcher, professor of Engl...

29 Sep 20141h 10min

Mari Ruti,  “The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living” (Columbia UP, 2013)

Mari Ruti, “The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living” (Columbia UP, 2013)

Exploring everything from the impact of her own psychoanalysis on her mode and mien to the effect of consumer culture on the psyche, the delightful Mari Ruti keeps the ball rolling.  We pondered with ...

21 Sep 201454min

Elizabeth Lunbeck, “The Americanization of Narcissism” (Harvard UP, 2014)

Elizabeth Lunbeck, “The Americanization of Narcissism” (Harvard UP, 2014)

Elizabeth Lunbeck has made a major contribution to the historical study of psychoanalysis with the publication of The Americanization of Narcissism (Harvard University Press, 2014). Exploring the conc...

21 Aug 201452min

Claudia Luiz, “Where’s My Sanity? Stories That Help” (CreateSpace, 2013)

Claudia Luiz, “Where’s My Sanity? Stories That Help” (CreateSpace, 2013)

Join us for a maximum dopamine experience as Dr. Claudia Luiz discusses the making of her book Where’s My Sanity? Stories That Help, an everyman’s tour de force that’s poised to create a seismic shift...

2 Aug 201451min

Adam Phillips, “Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst” (Yale UP, 2014)

Adam Phillips, “Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst” (Yale UP, 2014)

For those who are savvy about all things psychoanalytic, be they analysts, analysands, or fellow travelers, the existence, presence, work, writing, and imprimatur of Adam Phillips is given long, as op...

28 Jul 201454min

Sharon K. Farber, “Hunger for Ecstasy: Trauma, the Brain, and the Influence of the Sixties” (Aronson, 2013)

Sharon K. Farber, “Hunger for Ecstasy: Trauma, the Brain, and the Influence of the Sixties” (Aronson, 2013)

It may seem silly to ask why we seek ecstasy. We seek it, of course, because it’s ECSTASY. We are evolved to want it. It’s our brain’s way of saying “Do this again and as often as possible.” But there...

20 Mai 20141h

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