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Summary
Summary
New York Times Bestseller
Why do we think, feel, and act in ways we wished we did not? For decades, New York Times bestselling author Dr. David A Kessler has studied this question with regard to tobacco, food, and drugs. Over the course of these investigations, he identified one underlying mechanism common to a broad range of human suffering. This phenomenon--capture--is the process by which our attention is hijacked and our brains commandeered by forces outside our control.
In Capture, Dr. Kessler considers some of the most profound questions we face as human beings: What are the origins of mental afflictions, from everyday unhappiness to addiction and depression--and how are they connected? Where does healing and transcendence fit into this realm of emotional experience?
Analyzing an array of insights from psychology, medicine, neuroscience, literature, philosophy, and theology, Dr. Kessler deconstructs centuries of thinking, examining the central role of capture in mental illness and questioning traditional labels that have obscured our understanding of it. With a new basis for understanding the phenomenon of capture, he explores the concept through the emotionally resonant stories of both well-known and un-known people caught in its throes.
The closer we can come to fully comprehending the nature of capture, Dr. Kessler argues, the better the chance to alleviate its deleterious effects and successfully change our thoughts and behavior Ultimately, Capture offers insight into how we form thoughts and emotions, manage trauma, and heal. For the first time, we can begin to understand the underpinnings of not only mental illness, but also our everyday worries and anxieties. Capture is an intimate and critical exploration of the most enduring human mystery of all: the mind.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this fascinating book, Kessler (The End of Overeating), former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, probes the nature of the "hijacked" mind, offering a straightforward and plausible explanation of a neural mechanism by which a range of human behaviors can be understood. Drawing on his two decades of research, Kessler calls this underlying mechanism "capture" and reveals its three basic elements: "narrowing of attention, perceived lack of control, and change in affect, or emotional state." He catalogs the kinds of activities that capture people's attention-including love, trauma, gambling, and art-and demonstrates that in individual cases these phenomena, or sometimes specific events, can lead from positive mental health to mental illness. Kessler devotes considerable attention to David Foster Wallace as an example of capture turning on the self, with the acute self-awareness that seized Wallace's attention developing into the self-hatred that led to his suicide. He also carefully points out that capture can lead to violence as well as exalted spiritual experiences. Kessler ends on a note of hope, presenting a range of ways that people can potentially gain more control of their lives through an understanding of capture. This is a hefty yet accessible tome, and Kessler gives readers much to ponder. Agent: Kathy P. Robbins, Robbins Office. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Why do we do thingsovereat, obsess, fight, commit suicidethat make it seem like our rational minds have been hijacked by something we cannot control? Everyone deals with this "capture," writes Kessler (The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite, 2009, etc.), the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner and dean of the medical schools at Yale and the University of California, San Francisco, in a skillful combination of history, medicine, and scientific (but not pop) psychology. Since Aristotle, explanations of behavior relied almost entirely on philosophy. Psychoanalysis did not improve matters, but "by shifting the study of mind away from morality and rationality and toward the unstable ground of desire," writes the author, "Freud moved science toward a clearer understanding of human thought and behavior." Since Freud, scientists have discovered that every stimulus triggers a particular response from a series of brain neurons. Each repetition of that stimulus strengthens the response: "neurons that fire together, wire together." That's how we learn or remember, but it also influences emotions. The sight of someone we love or a work of art triggers intense feelings, but what happens when feelings about a drug, a stranger's glare, or one's defects become irresistible? After nearly 50 pages of argument, Kessler devotes 150 pages to the dismal impact of capture over the years: autobiographies of individuals driven to lives of torment (Dostoyevsky) that often ended in suicide (Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace), addiction (John Belushi, Tennessee Williams), assassination (John Lennon, Robert Kennedy), or mass murder. In the final 50 pages, the author reveals the concept of capture in a positive light through those who have fended off depression (Winston Churchill, William Styron) or channeled intense feelings into religion, work, or creativity. A reasonable theory of the science behind extreme behavior illustrated by excessive but gripping case histories. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Kessler, former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, discusses the experience of capture, a phenomenon he sees as central to mental illness and drug addiction: our minds cease to be under our own control and we are unable to reign in, or deviate from, whatever thought process has taken over. Though he occasionally references his work on addiction for the FDA, Kessler's main approach is to explore the lives and writings of historical icons who suffered mental illness, including such literary figures as David Foster Wallace, Virginia Woolf, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and religious thinkers, among them Martin Luther, Simon Weil, and Howard Thurman, who he feels represent the potential good of capture namely, transcendence. Kessler also discusses such current instances of mental illness as violent gun crimes, including Sandyhook and Aurora, and those radicalized by ISIS. The precise meaning of the term capture unfortunately remains ambiguous, as he uses it sometimes as a noun, other times as a verb. Kessler's focus on historical analysis makes this less a new theory of the mind and more a well-written and expansive exposé of mental illness through the ages.--Grant, Sarah Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE WRITER David Foster Wallace killed himself at the age of 46, after decades of struggling with depression. For all his extraordinary talent and success, he could not pry himself away from the cast of mind that wound up convincing him that he'd be better off dead. "Jumping out of a burning building," his mother tells David A. Kessler in his new book "Capture." "That's the way I view David's suicide." The case of Wallace, says Kessler, is a tragic instance of "capture": his Big Idea about how to conceptualize the mind and the brain. "'Depression' is a label used to describe a group of symptoms. It is not a cause," Kessler reminds us. And where psychiatry has failed to illuminate, capture offers a new lens through which to understand human behavior. Kessler, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, has spent much of his career researching the ways in which human will can be so inexplicably hijacked, as his book "The End of Overeating" shows. With "Capture," he offers the intriguing idea that one brain-based mechanism underlies a wide range of behaviors from suicide to addiction to artistic obsession. "The theory of capture is composed of three basic elements: narrowing of attention, perceived lack of control and change in affect, or emotional state," he writes. And who among us hasn't experienced this kind of mental vise grip, this total preoccupation that reshapes our lives in its image? This is capture, says Kessler, and it is, according to him, what drove John Belushi to disappear into drug addiction, and Virginia Woolf to walk into the river. But capture can also turn us toward constructive, even exalted, purposes, as it did for Martin Luther, when he set in motion the Protestant Reformation, or Bill Wilson, when he experienced the spiritual awakening that helped him recover from alcoholism and found Alcoholics Anonymous. It might be possible, Kessler says, to learn to harness our own capture circuitry. In our current moment, there is perhaps no more relevant a subject than attention - that most precious of all our possessions. Kessler's contribution is to lay out case after case of people in the throes of single-mindedness. Many of these stories are about famous figures; he also extends the notion of capture to the infamous, like Ted Kaczynski and Eric Harris, one of the Columbine shooters, arguing that they represent the dark side of the capture moon. Kessler writes most of these profiles well, with flesh on the bone, yet there comes a moment when it seems both too much and not enough to fire off three-page mini-biographies, many whittled down to story lines designed to illustrate the centrality of capture. For a book positing a new "biological mechanism" through which to understand a wide swath of human experience, there is a surprising emphasis on the anecdotal, with only a sprinkling of science. Kessler invokes such concepts as Hebb's rule, that staple of Neuroscience 101 classes everywhere, which says that our neurons get into the habit of listening to those neurons they've heard from before, forming patterns of reaction that are reinforced through repetition. This, Kessler suggests, might be the physical basis for capture. He doesn't provide the usual evidence from brain-imaging labs that shows that the brain "lights up" in whatever configuration supports the author's particular point. Instead, Kessler's book reads like an ode to the great romantic scientists of the 19th and 20th centuries, men like Sigmund Freud and A. R. Luria, who offered vivid case studies of single subjects in the absence of empirical data. That approach is problematic in an age of physical proof, of results drawn from large groups of subjects averaged out to one impersonal number. Without this kind of data, you are left feeling that Kessler has not really substantiated his Big Idea. On the other hand, it is refreshing to read about actual people, drawn in full color, in a book about human behavior. In our struggle to understand the brain, both perspectives - the scientific and the personal - are indispensable. Both must be brought to bear. Ultimately, nothing less will do. CASEY SCHWARTZ is the author of "In the Mind Fields: Exploring the New Science of Neuropsychoanalysis."
Library Journal Review
Kessler (former commissioner, U.S. Food and Drug Administration; The End of Overeating) writes about the concept of capture, or forces that strongly influence the mind, overriding reason and will. Such a phenomenon looks at afflictions that seem beyond our control; it can be beneficial but more often is harmful. Widely read, Kessler, an attorney and physician, invokes novelists Henry and William James, Freudian drives, and current neuroscience. Examples include writer Franz Kafka and such behaviors as gambling, hypochondria, creative work, suicide, and addiction. According to -Kessler, capture motivates, clarifies thoughts, and provides insight. Destructive forms include assassination and school shootings, as well as ideologies--Hitler, Stalinism, Khmer Rouge-that "yoke utopia to violence." Socially approved models include religion and spirituality: captured individuals are often charismatic leaders. Poet William Wordsworth exemplifies aesthetic capture, contrasted with religious-Martin Luther, Buddhism-or political types. Positive forms such as Alcoholics Anonymous oppose destructive ones. A major section of notes and full essays on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Carl Jung, and Paul Tillich amplify the text. -VERDICT A challenging and rewarding book for both scholars and lay readers who appreciate well-integrated diversity. [See Prepub Alert, 8/17/15.]-E. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ. Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Part I | |
1 A Human Mystery | p. 3 |
The Terrible Master | p. 3 |
Capture | p. 6 |
The Nature of Mental Distress | p. 9 |
The Search for a Common Mechanism | p. 14 |
2 The Historical and Scientific Context of Capture | p. 18 |
William James and Attention | p. 20 |
Freud and Drive | p. 29 |
The Science Underlying Capture | p. 39 |
3 What Captures? | p. 45 |
A Continuum from the Ordinary to Mental Illness | p. 45 |
Rejection | p. 46 |
A Brutish Father | p. 48 |
Drink | p. 51 |
Physical Pain | p. 53 |
Childhood Trauma | p. 55 |
Blind Love | p. 59 |
Obscene Fascination | p. 65 |
Gambling | p. 67 |
The Body | p. 70 |
A Work of Art | p. 72 |
Death | p. 74 |
A Threat | p. 78 |
Two Addicts | p. 83 |
Control | p. 91 |
Sadness | p. 95 |
Grandeur | p. 99 |
Abandonment | p. 102 |
Going Mad | p. 107 |
Accumulation of Burdens | p. 111 |
A Unified Theory | p. 116 |
4 When Capture Turns on the Self | p. 121 |
Part II | |
5 When Capture Leads to Violence | p. 151 |
Striking Out | p. 152 |
The Assassination of Robert Kennedy | p. 157 |
The Columbine School Shootings | p. 160 |
The Murder of John Lennon | p. 164 |
The Murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School | p. 169 |
A Theory of Human Capital | p. 176 |
6 Capture and Ideology | p. 184 |
The America I Have Seen | p. 186 |
The Obligation of Our Time | p. 191 |
I'm Going Traveling | p. 195 |
@SlaveOfAllah | p. 199 |
Part III | |
7 Capture and Spirituality | p. 205 |
Capture by the Divine | p. 208 |
Paying Attention | p. 211 |
Captured by a Message | p. 214 |
The Revelation of Nature | p. 219 |
8 Capture and Change | p. 223 |
Martin Luther's Anfechtungen | p. 224 |
Meaningful Association | p. 229 |
Moments of Clarity | p. 233 |
A Creative Life | p. 235 |
Compelled to Be Different | p. 240 |
Being in the Right Place | p. 243 |
Distracting the Black Dog | p. 245 |
Belief | p. 248 |
Good-Bye to All That | p. 250 |
Reconciliation and Forgiveness | p. 252 |
A Toolkit Borrowed from Buddhism | p. 257 |
Is There Freedom from Capture? | p. 262 |
A Modest Form of Autonomy | p. 265 |
Notes | p. 269 |
Acknowledgments | p. 389 |
Index | p. 393 |