An Invitation To Consider This Story. If You Dare Unlearn The Patterns.

Burton guides the reader to unlearn, rediscover, and return to wholeness. 

It is a journey out of Plato’s cave…

The International Review of Books

"Sharpen your mind, reframe your perspectives, and unleash your full human potential

RD Laing presented madness as a voyage of discovery that could open out onto a free state of higher consciousness, or hypersanity. But if there is such a thing as hypersanity, then mere sanity is not all it’s cracked up to be, a state of dormancy and dullness with less vital potential even than madness. We could all go mad, in a way we already are, minus the promise. But what if there was another route to hypersanity, one which, compared to madness, was less fearsome, less dangerous, and less damaging? What if, as well as a backdoor way, there was also a royal road strewn with petals and sprayed with perfume?


This is a book about thinking, which, astonishingly, is barely taught in formal education. Our culture mostly equates thinking with logical reasoning, and the first few chapters examine logic, reason, their forms, and their flaws, starting with the basics of argumentation. But thinking is also about much more than logical reasoning, and so the book broadens out to examine concepts such as intelligence, knowledge, and truth, and alternative forms of cognition that our culture tends to overlook and underplay, including intuition, emotion, and imagination.


If Hypersanity fails to live up to its tall promise, it should at least make you into a better thinker. And so you can approach the book as an opportunity to hone your thinking skills, which, in the end, are going to be far more important to your impact and well being than any facts that you could ever learn. As BF Skinner once put it, ‘Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.’

Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking digs deeper into our thinking patterns and processing. 

Neel Burton challenges our reasoning and how we come to conclusions. He includes examples that allows you to test the theories he presents and explains how faulty the general public as they come up with conclusions that are off the wall and not even relevant.

Neel Burton begins with simple explanations and builds to deeper thoughts and methods. Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking is for those who desire a more profound concept of life. 

His ideas are not what you would hear from an average author, his work is definitely above average. I did not understand everything he discussed in his book, though he presented his theories with a precise explanation. My favorite chapter was on fallacies. I will look deeper into how I read the news and the agenda they are pushing though they don’t line up with the facts
Burton guides the reader to unlearn, rediscover, and return to wholeness. It is a journey out of Plato’s cave…

—The International Review of Books

Kirkus Review ~ A guide focuses on the factors that influence human thought patterns.

"Neel Burton (For Better or Worse, 2017, etc.), a British psychiatrist, borrows the manual’s title from a 1967 R.D. Laing book; the term referred to a breakthrough to higher consciousness. To live up to their “full human potential,” Burton insists that people must avoid common pitfalls in reasoning and recognize where prejudice or false beliefs might be holding them back. He starts by exploring the types of fallacies often found in arguments, illustrating them with quotations from high-profile politicians such as President Donald Trump. A set of 10 questions designed to be comparable to the Thinking Skills Assessment (administered to would-be students of philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford University) is particularly illuminating. Though these seem like straightforward logic problems, even sharp thinkers may struggle to score above 50%. The book’s other topics include intelligence, types of memory, rhetorical techniques, truth versus “fake news,” intuition, wisdom, and more. Cognitive bias and hallucinations are cited as instances of people’s brains tricking them into making poor judgements. 

The author’s frame of reference is wide, ranging from the ancient Greeks to current events, and he gives plenty of examples. He makes intriguing, if slightly off-topic, observations about what a language’s grammar indicates about it: for instance, French tends to repeat personal pronouns, which Burton suggests might be a sign of egocentrism. “Our language reflects and at the same time shapes our thoughts and, ultimately, our culture,” he asserts. Certain sections seem to have less obvious relevance, such as a discussion of snobbery and a chapter on music, and the overall structure is fairly arbitrary. It feels as if pieces of various, vaguely familiar books—by the likes of Daniel Kahneman and Oliver Sacks—have been recombined. By contrast, the most useful parts offer practical advice: 10 ways to improve the memory (for example, by involving the senses or making mnemonic devices) and seven tips for being open to inspiration (including waking up without an alarm clock and breaking free of routines).

A well-researched and helpful, if slightly jumbled, tour through the brain’s workings."