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Deirdre Barrett
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Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose First Edition

by Deirdre Barrett (Author)
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 121 ratings
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How our once-helpful instincts got hijacked by our garish modern world.

Have you ever wondered why some men choose pornography over actual women? Why so many people watch Friends instead of going out with their own buddies? Why a person would “feed” a plastic Pocket Pet while shirking real duties? Why both sides of every war see the other as the aggressor against whom their “Department of Defense” must respond?

Harvard evolutionary psychologist Deirdre Barrett explains how human instincts―for food, sex, or territorial protection―developed for life on the savannah ten thousand years ago, not for today’s world of densely populated cities, technological innovations, and pollution. Evolution, quite simply, has been unable to keep pace with the rapid changes of modern life. We now have access to a glut of larger-than-life objects―from candy to pornography to atomic bombs―that gratify outmoded but persistent drives with dangerous results.

In the 1930s Dutch Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen found that birds that lay small, pale-blue eggs speckled with gray preferred to sit on giant, bright-blue, plaster dummies with black polka dots. He coined the term “supernormal stimuli” to describe these imitations that appeal to primitive instincts and, oddly, exert a stronger attraction than real things. Obviously these hard-wired preferences pose a danger to a species’ survival. Barrett’s singular insight is to apply this phenomenon for the first time to the alarming disconnect between human instinct and our created environment. Her book adroitly demonstrates how supernormal stimuli are a driving force in many of today’s most pressing problems, including obesity, our addiction to television and video games, and the past century’s extraordinarily violent wars. Man-made imitations, it turns out, have wreaked havoc on how we nurture our children, what food we put into our bodies, how we make love and war, and even how we understand ourselves.

Barrett does more than pull the fire alarm to show how these unfettered instincts fuel dangerous excesses. There is a hopeful message here as well. Once we recognize how supernormal stimuli operate, we can craft new approaches to modern predicaments. Humans have one stupendous advantage over Tinbergen’s birds: a giant brain. The message of this book is that this gives us the unique ability to exercise self-control, override instincts that lead us astray, and save ourselves from civilization’s gaudy traps.

55 illustrations
Previous page
  1. ISBN-10
    039306848X
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0393068481
  3. Edition
    First Edition
  4. Publisher
    W. W. Norton & Company
  5. Publication date
    February 22, 2010
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    6 x 0.8 x 8.6 inches
  8. Print length
    226 pages
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"The concept of a supernormal stimulus is essential to understanding the influence of evolution on organisms in artificial environments―which in the case of humans is almost every aspect of our surroundings. In this clear and thoughtful book, Deirdre Barrett offers the first comprehensive overview of the many ways in which we stimulate ourselves in ways that the forces of evolution never anticipated."
― Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor, Harvard University, and author of How the Mind Works and Enlightenment Now

"Supernormal Stimuli is just super. The reader is shown how by understanding our evolutionary past we can see how our lives are guided today. This book is a great example of the ancient wisdom that to ‘know thyself’ is the key to the good life."
― John Ratey, MD, Associate Clinical Professor, Harvard Medical School, and author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

"Deirdre Barrett’s new book is a super stimulus to our normal imagination. She shows us that biology will be our destiny if we do not recognize our inherited tendency to overvalue supernormal color, size, and taste. She travels effortlessly from the pioneers of ethology―the study of animal behavior―to our current exaggerated preoccupations with sex, food, and war. She lucidly helps us to see the ordinary in an extraordinary new light."
― David Spiegel, MD, Willson Professor and Associate Chair of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine

About the Author

Deirdre Barrett is an evolutionary psychologist at Harvard Medical School’s Behavioral Medicine Program. She is the author of several books, including Waistland, Trauma and Dream, and Supernormal Stimuli. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition (February 22, 2010)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 226 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 039306848X
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393068481
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.1 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.8 x 8.6 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 121 ratings

About the author

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Deirdre Barrett

Deirdre Barrett

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Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D. is a dream researcher at Harvard Medical School. She Past President of both the International Association for the Study of Dreams and the American Psychological Association's Div. 30, The Society for Psychological Hypnosis. Dr. Barrett has written five books: The Committee of Sleep (Random House, 2001), Pandemic Dreams (Oneirio Press, 2020), The Pregnant Man and Other Cases from a Hypnotherapist's Couch (Random House, 1998), Waistland (Norton, 2007) and Supernormal Stimuli (Norton, 2010). She is the editor of four additional books: Trauma and Dreams (Harvard University Press, 1996), The New Science of Dreaming (Praeger/Greenwood, 2007), Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy (Praeger/Greenwood, 2010), and The Encyclopedia of Sleep and Dreams (Greenwood, 2012). Dr. Barrett has published dozens of academic articles and chapters on health, hypnosis, and dreams. She is Editor-in-Chief of DREAMING: The Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams.

Dr. Barrett's commentary on psychological issues has been featured on Good Morning America, The Today Show, CNN, Fox, and The Discovery Channel. She has been interviewed for dream articles in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Life, Time, and Newsweek. Her own articles have appeared in Psychology Today and Invention and Technology. Dr. Barrett has lectured at Esalen, the Smithsonian, and at universities around the world.

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
121 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Aran Joseph Canes
5.0 out of 5 stars The Book that Spawned a Thousand Popular Science Articles
Reviewed in the United States on December 28, 2017
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If you like to read about science in the mainstream media you have probably seen many articles about how the instincts which made human beings evolutionarily adaptive in the African savanna are having negative consequences in the modern West. As far as I can tell, this is the book that spawned the genre.

Besides being written by a scientist rather than a journalist—Dr. Barrett is a psychologist at Harvard Medical School—you might wonder if there is any reason to read the original.

The answer is a resounding yes. First, unlike the many paleo popularizers, Barrett’s account is light on speculation and strong on scientific fact. More significantly, Barrett has a somewhat radical vision of a reformed society which is lacking in most popular science stories.

Noting that the sources of pleasure can be easily rewired in the human brain, Barrett envisions a society where people are nudged from unhealthy pleasure sources like sugar and television to vegetables and real social contact. In other words, less reruns of “Friends” and more real friends. Less Coke and cheeseburgers and more lean meat and cauliflower.

Of course, these insights have moved into the mainstream of public discourse and are not as startling as they were when Barrett first made them. But reading the original source shows that these ideas do not stem from pop psychology but rather have a real scientific grounding. In short, they are not meant for interesting banter at parties frequented by millennial but could lead to real and lasting improvements in human society.
16 people found this helpful
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Mark Twain
4.0 out of 5 stars Nice introduction to evolutionary psychology
Reviewed in the United States on July 10, 2011
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After reading this book I gave it to my fifteen year-old son to read, to try to stimulate an interest in evolutionary psychology.

The author doesn't have enough material on supernormal stimuli to fill a book. Thus she was forced to
1. Keep the book thin.
2. Discuss other topics from evolutionary psychology, plus a couple unrelated topics that she finds interesting.

These two factors make the book great for my kid, or anyone else without much prior exposure to evolutionary physchology. More focused and rigorous books can be long and tedious to read. This book is fun and entertaining.

If you've already read a half-dozen books on evolutionary psychology, the two factors above make this book disappointing. This book will certainly teach you something new and give you a few new insights into topics that were already familiar. But you won't learn much about supernormal stimuli.
One person found this helpful
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Amex
5.0 out of 5 stars Supernormal Stimuli - fascinating book
Reviewed in the United States on May 7, 2010
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I'm an avid popular science pleasure reader, so I ordered this book right after hearing the author on the radio. I'm so glad I did!
It is a fascinating book, very well-written. The concepts are explained in a way that makes them easy to grasp. The animal to human metaphors are truly illuminating. The main point of the book is supernormal stimuli, which are exaggerated versions of natural stimuli to which there are existing instinctual responses. Barrett discusses how our evolved instincts are overwhelmed by technological advances, population density, and other facets of modern society. She explores how pornography, unhealthy diets, and even the quest for nuclear energy as opposed to wind or solar energy can be explained by supernormal stimuli. One reader said he liked the early chapters which are closer to standard evolutionary psychology better than the later more speculative ones. I disagree: I think the ideas in the later chapters are novel and exciting and offer ideas about how to deal with problems of our modern world that I haven't heard anywhere else. Excellent book; I recommend it highly!
14 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
3.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining but concerned about errors
Reviewed in the United States on May 18, 2010
I'm currently reading Supernormal Stimuli ... and it's a fast-moving, readable, chatty little book. (I don't think Barrett's thesis is as revolutionary as she suggests it is. I have a sense that the idea has been banging around the evolutionary psychology literature for a while ...)

Still ... only a third of the way through, I'm concerned about some inaccuracies in the book:

(1) she refers to dominant gorillas as "graybacks" where the standard term is "silverbacks" (p. 48)

(2) she offers a table of "Children Found Living with Animals 1900-2004" (p. 57) and recounts at relative length the story of Amala and Kamala (the Mindnapore "wolf girls"). Barrett is either unaware of or hides the fact that many (if not most) of the cases on her chart are suspect. The Wikipedia entry on the girls summarizes french scholar Serge Aroles's fairly solid argument that the entire Amala and Kamala story is a hoax.

(3) BTW, Barrett's account of Amala and Kamala are based on two sources ... one a chapter from McCrone's 1993 book and the other a 1966 source.

Granted, these problems don't impact her main argumment. And I realize that this book is slightly outside Barrett's specailty area. Okay, fine. But ... things like this suggest to me a book that is a little too fast and loose with scholarly standards of care.

So as I continue to read the book, I'll be a little more cautious. Which is probably ALWAYS a good thing when reading popularizations of biological evolution ....

But anyone reading the book would do well to be similarly careful .....

John Wolfe
Iowa City, Iowa
27 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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M.G.
5.0 out of 5 stars Wer dieses Buch findet, hat ein kleines Juwel entdeckt
Reviewed in Germany on October 2, 2022
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Wer wissen möchte wieviel Tier im Menschen ist und wie man dieses Tier an der Nase herum führen kann bzw. geführt wird, der kann es hier erfahren und in seiner eigene Lebenswelt beobachten und sich auch selbst hinterfragen in seinen/ihren eigenen Begehrlichkeiten.
Designer wie Luigi Colani und co. wussten ganz sicher von diesen Effekten.
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Bruce Russell
5.0 out of 5 stars Used item arrived quickly like Amazon Prime.
Reviewed in Canada on October 22, 2020
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That's it.
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Rahul
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing read
Reviewed in India on February 27, 2015
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What an amazing read! I have a deep interest in Evolutionary Psychology, and this was a great addition to my collection.
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Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen
4.0 out of 5 stars Supernormal Stimuli is a short but rewarding read. It ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 16, 2014
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Supernormal Stimuli is a short but rewarding read. It has a few minor flaws, such as superficial and un-nuanced discussions of political issues that should probably have been either left out or treated in greater depth, but the overarching argument is compelling and, as it were, extremely stimulating. Barrett convingly shows that the modern human experience is fraught with supernormal stimuli that tickle our evolved pressure points in ways that make them almost impossible to resist.
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Azzam K.
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 8, 2015
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Good product - decent price
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