Jane G. Goldberg, "Wired for Why: How We Think, Feel, and Make Meaning" (2025)

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Oct 31, 2025

Dr. Jane Goldberg, a psychoanalyst and author of *Wired for Why*, delves into the intricate relationship between thought, emotion, and identity. She argues that memory is an illusion and discusses how narrative and curiosity shape the brain. Goldberg sheds light on why B students often outperform A students, emphasizing creative paths, and criticizes society's trend of medicating emotional experiences. Moreover, she shares insights on the integration of psychoanalysis in cancer care and the idea that some patients can psychologically reverse their illness.

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INSIGHT

Hardwired For Why And Metaphor

Humans are neurologically wired to ask "why" because curiosity and metaphor enable abstract thought.
Language and metaphor uniquely allow humans to create meaning and pursue cure through curiosity.

INSIGHT

Metaphor Enables Abstract Thought

Metaphor enables abstract thinking by letting one thing stand for another and supporting conceptual leaps.
Children gain this ability around age six when they begin true abstract thought.

ANECDOTE

Flotation Room Sparked Vivid Consciousness

Jane ran a flotation room where people experienced vivid, sometimes cosmic, mental states when external stimulation ceased.
The brain self-stimulates when deprived, producing intense internal experiences rather than turning off.

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WIRED FOR WHY: How We Think, Feel and Make Meaning. (Self-Published 2025) spans eighteen chapters exploring everything from how we manage to stay alive against all odds, to why language separates us from other species, to whether death might be a metaphor. It's a journey through neuroscience, psychoanalysis, history, and philosophy that challenges readers to reconsider their most basic assumptions about human experience.

In WIRED FOR WHY, Dr. Jane Goldberg dismantles fundamental assumptions about human consciousness, memory, and experience. Humans have no "now"—we're perpetually living in the past as our brains lag behind reality, processing what has already happened. Memory, Goldberg argues, is an illusion, an unreliable collection of patterns distributed throughout our bodies rather than faithful recordings of our lives. This challenges everything we believe about identity and selfhood. The book explores how beer created civilization, why coffee shaped the Industrial Revolution, why "B" students often outperform "A" students, and why the brain is the only entity on Earth that named itself—a fact that reveals something profound about human self-awareness.

Beyond neuroscience, Goldberg tackles pressing cultural questions: why one in six Americans takes psychiatric medication and children Google "how to completely kill all my emotions." She argues we're medicating away normal human experiences at great cost to our emotional intelligence. Against our productivity-obsessed culture, she makes the counterintuitive case that spacing out and daydreaming fuel creativity, that intelligence is fundamentally a team sport requiring connection rather than isolation, and that our minds and bodies continuously eavesdrop on each other in ways we barely understand. The book doesn't offer simple life hacks but instead provides a more honest reckoning with what it means to live inside brains that lie to us, confabulate truth, and imagine reality on a non-stop basis—and suggests we need humility, openness to being wrong, and peace with our beautifully flawed human nature.

Christopher Russell is a psychoanalyst working with individuals and groups. He is a member of the faculty at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies; a licensure qualifying institute in New York. CMPS is also the New York campus for the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis; the only accredited, independent graduate school of psychoanalysis in the country.

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