The Overweight Brain: How our obsession with knowing keeps us from getting smart enough to make a better world

by Lois Holzman

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.

204 pages, Paperback

Published May 30, 2018

About the author

Lois Holzman is a developmental psychologist, director of the East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy, and author of numerous writings on play, learning and development, most recently, Vygotsky at Work and Play.

Reviews

[Philippe · Rating 4 out of 5]

"'I know' only keeps us stupid." -- Lois Holzman.

In this slim volume, Lois Holzman presents a series of important ideas developed over a lifetime in partnership with psychotherapist and activist Fred Newman (+ 2011). Together they have advocated 'the end of knowing'. In our culture, we take it for granted that 'knowing' is good and 'knowing more' is better. Holzman foregrounds the downside of knowing. Too much knowing, or an unreflective reliance on knowledge, is counterproductive. It locks us into a state of 'developmental paralysis'. We stop real learning. As a result, we are unable to extricate ourselves from the mental (and institutional, political) traps we have constructed for ourselves. Instead, we seem like flies in a bottle, unable to find our way out.

The alternative Holzman presents gives primacy to an activity-based, performative approach to 'understanding' human subjectivity. Essentially, we play ourselves forward. We operate in a mode of 'non-knowing growing'. Her ideas are based on the philosophy of Wittgenstein and Marx and the developmental psychology of Lev Vygotsky. Holzman is aware that her attempt to deconstruct the epistemological fly-bottle can only be partially successful because the knowing paradigm is so deeply embedded in our culture, language, individualistic self-understandings and institutions. ""Thinking outside the box" isn't enough. We need to get out of the box altogether. We need to think without a box. But of course we can't. At least not completely. But that's OK. Because developing ourselves and our world doesn't depend on whether we can actually think without a box. It hinges on whether we can imagine that we can." The practice of imagination Holzman advocates is a situated, performative, whole-person imagination that unfolds in concrete relationships with the world around us.

In The Overweight Brain, Holzman has made a strong effort to present her ideas to a general, non-academic audience. The tone is very personal and the narrative is peppered with biographical anecdotes. Nevertheless, and inevitably paradoxically, some appetite for philosophical concepts is required, as Holzman does not shy away from reflecting on notions such as dichotomous thinking, the nature of causality, and the relationship between facts and values. The first four chapters outline the main ideas and acknowledge their debt to Wittgenstein and especially Vygotsky. Chapters 5 to 7 critique the way we run schools, practice and think about psychology and do science. In Chapter 8, Holzman distills from their ideas three guidelines for a growing practice of unknowing: 1/ create the unknown, 2/ accept and build, and 3/ create performance stages everywhere (whereby the stage is a real-life operationalisation of Vygotsky's notion of the 'zone of proximal development').

I have written a more detailed review of Newman and Holzman's book The End of Knowing: A New Developmental Way of Learning elsewhere. This book goes much further in explaining the political implications of these ideas and how they are reflected in an innovative practice of social therapy. Readers who really like The Overweight Brain should definitely go on and try to know more! :-)

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full disclosure, I met Lois Holzman briefly this summer when I attended the Performing the World conference, but before that she and I communicated over email because one of my books was published under the Palgrave Studies in Play, Performance, Learning, and Development Series that she edits. At the conference, however, I entered a world that was both comfortable and foreign to me, as I was surrounded by performance activists, who all seemed to speak a different language from me--the language of Vygotsky, ''non-knowing growing," development, and becoming. I was doing these things, but I hadn't learned about them. So, I decided it was time to learn more. THE OVERWEIGHT BRAIN is a delightful, comprehensible, introduction into important ideas, and a world of creative possibilities. I recommend it to anyone who is trying to find a way to live creatively in a world where creativity has been limited by knowledge.

[Janet Wootten]

Full disclosure is that I know Lois and have studied and evolved a social activism approach with her for many years. AND -- this is the first time that she's taken difficult conceptions about the need for a new approach to life & development ("non-knowing growing"), and made it accessible to a popular audience. Our Overweight Brains are focused on discerning WHAT'S REAL; Lois points a way to creating with WHAT'S POSSIBLE. Rather than relate to ourselves as epistemological machines -- as OBSERVERS, THINKERS, PONDERERS, etc. -- finding the truth, establishing causality, pinpointing discrete identities and (of course!) enamored of our SELVES -- we can perform as the creators of our lives and our communities. She offers a new world (if we build it!) of relationally, performance, creativity, emergence. This is an important book circa 2018. Read it!

[Ross Dickinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trying to get a grasp on the post Covid chaos polarities that seem to be growing in many countries. It seems as though a lot of people's thresholds for the "fight or flight" has lowered, firing with greater intensity. I am getting to know Lois Holzman by participating in some of the events at East Side Institute. I am not someone to read a book again. This wonderful insight provider, will nudge my brain, many times.

I highly recommend this book.