Albert Einstein is often quoted as saying "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." Rebecca Costa explains why, proposing that both civilizations and the people that comprise them grind to a cognitive halt in the face of complexity they can't handle. 

She proposes a neurological bases for collapsing cultures over the eons, and a diagnosis of five major thinking flaws (or "supermemes") that bedevil us -- irrational opposition, personalization of blame, counterfeit correlation, silo thinking and extreme economics -- that is spot on and painfully familiar.

Diagnosis is far easier than prescription, of course, just as technology is far easier to change than people's behavior. I encounter this regularly in my own work to help companies design, implement and measure profitable sustainability strategies, and to develop business innovations that are both grounded and game-changing. But Costa is systemic in her approach here as well, arguing fiercely against the trap of "mitigation" (which we tend to confuse with cures) in favor or what she calls "parallel incrementalism... a mitigation strategy whereby the cumulative effect of executing multiple, incrementally useful mitigations in tandem is exponentially more effective that implementing them one at a time." It's a venture capitalist's approach to innovation: try lots of things, and be happy if only 20% of them work. Or as Linus Pauling observed, "The best way to have good ideas is to have lots of ideas." (A far cry from today's "off with their heads" media culture.)

Costa moves fluidly from national policy to individual "brain fitness" training, and posits "insight" -- or "spontaneous thought" -- as the next step in human cognition. Insight -- that sudden leap into a new idea -- is not new, of course; Costa herself offers Archimedes' "eureka" moment in the bath. And insight is a complement, not an antithesis, to "the methodical, analytical thinking we have relied on for centuries." But it has long been considered something that just happens to us, not a capacity that we can -- and must -- cultivate. Costa's great gift in this book is explaining the emerging neuroscience understanding of the nature of insight, and offering a roadmap for nurturing it.

It's this roadmap -- for nurturing insight, practicing parallel incrementalism, and overcoming cognitive gridlock -- that makes the Watchman's Rattle such an important book to help humanity more effectively address the many massive challenges we face today, and one that is worthy of its subtitle, "Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction".