The Overweight Brain

Book excerpt: We live at a time when knowledge of the world is all right there on our smart phones. Yet we persist in going through life trying to get as much knowledge, as many facts and arguments and opinions and predictions, into our heads-and being tested and evaluated and judged by how much we know. Being in the world as a knower keeps us stuck, Holzman says. It constrains creativity and risk taking, keeps us and our dreams small, stops us from learning new things, and stifles our capacity to create new possibilities for ourselves, families, communities and the entire world. For that, she says, we need a new form of life - something she calls "non-knowing growing." That's the invitation of The Overweight Brain - offering a simple but radical departure - an approach to using all we are (and all we know) to make a better world.