Books in Brief: Powers of Mind

Powers of Mind, by “Adam Smith” (Random House, 418 pp., $10).

Take a topic both timelessly fascinating and currently fashionable; mix with a best-selling, highly literate, breezy author—and you should have a better book than this one. Powers of Mind deals with the murkily charted workings of the brain and the myriad studies, movements, and individuals that have attempted to explain psychic phenomena, which are usually attributed either to coincidence or to the supernatural. “Adam Smith” starts from the dichotomy between the conscious and the subconscious—or, rather, the verbal left half of the brain and the spatial, dreamlike right half. It is the prospect of undeveloped potentials of our non-verbal psychic processes that inspires not only “Smith” but the thousands of others now into TM, Esalen, Arica, and a host of other meditation-centered movements, all hoping to propel us into the utopia of a “higher consciousness.” The field is rich, and “Adam Smith” has indeed traversed much of the territory himself; but his narrative is disjointed, bumpy, pasted-together, and sometimes seemingly pointless. It fairly lunges toward a sloppily spontaneous effect, hoping perhaps to demonstrate, by its own spasmodic confusions about the great beyond, the limitations of verbalism and conventional consciousness.

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About the Author

David A. Pietrusza

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Powers of Mind, by “Adam Smith” (Random House, 418 pp., $10).

Take a topic both timelessly fascinating and currently fashionable; mix with a best-selling, highly literate, breezy author—and you should have a better book than this one. Powers of Mind deals with the murkily charted workings of the brain and the myriad studies, movements, and individuals that have attempted to explain psychic phenomena, which are usually attributed either to coincidence or to the supernatural. “Adam Smith” starts from the dichotomy between the conscious and the subconscious—or, rather, the verbal left half of the brain and the spatial, dreamlike right half. It is the prospect of undeveloped potentials of our non-verbal psychic processes that inspires not only “Smith” but the thousands of others now into TM, Esalen, Arica, and a host of other meditation-centered movements, all hoping to propel us into the utopia of a “higher consciousness.” The field is rich, and “Adam Smith” has indeed traversed much of the territory himself; but his narrative is disjointed, bumpy, pasted-together, and sometimes seemingly pointless. It fairly lunges toward a sloppily spontaneous effect, hoping perhaps to demonstrate, by its own spasmodic confusions about the great beyond, the limitations of verbalism and conventional consciousness.