Homo homini homo est
Superhuman: Life at the Extremes of Our Capacity
Dr. Rowan Hooper
Slavisa Pajkic can turn his body into a conductor, an insulator, a heater or an accumulator of electricity, depending on what he wants to be. He has set a Guinness World Record by allowing enough electricity to pass through his body for 1 minute 37 seconds to heat water to boiling point (97 degrees Celsius).
Lewis Pugh swam 20 minutes across the entire North Pole in -1.7 C water wearing nothing but his Speedos. During the swim, the temperature of his muscles dropped to 30 C. Any ordinary human being would die of hypothermia within minutes in such conditions.
When I bought the Superhuman book, I half expected it to be a map of the extremes of human abilities. In a way, that's exactly what it is, but Dr Hooper has set himself a much more human goal and narrowed the scope of the book accordingly. While there are numerous people introduced throughout the book, whose abilities far surpass ordinary human capacity, it never quite feels superhumanly.
Rowan Hooper, clearly, is a positive humanist and the aim of his book seems to be eradication of two false contradictions: human vs superhuman and nature vs nurture. As to the first, focusing much more on the mental rather than the physical abilities (IQ, memory, grit, lucid dreaming), he demonstrates human abilities as positioned on a spectrum. Memory masters and people with IQ-s in the 200s are positioned at the extremes of those spectrums, with the rest of us somewhere along the line. But his powerful human message throughout the book is, that even if we are not all able to attain the extremes, movement along the line is not only possible, but very much within humanly grasp.
As to the other, he examines the genes vs environment dichotomy with regard to every ability described in the book and aims to prove, that it is always nature and nurture working together, not either one or the other determining success. While that line of argumentation runs through every chapter, it is the last chapter of his book that made me choose the title for this reading report. Because for all the “superhuman” examples and the related research (and there's a lot of both in this book), the idea of the book is clearly and powerfully human – that the potential we carry within, both as individuals and as a species, far exceeds our current capabilities and it is the striving to develop to our fullest capacity that is (or should be) the greatest goal of our existence.
I skipped a paragraph (about vocal abilities) and read some other bits diagonally, so it's not a gripping read from cover to cover. Also, I already knew some of the people and cases being dealt with (and the two examples above are not from the book, btw). Having said this, I still think parts of this book should be included in the “Handbook of Being Human”, if ever there were such a thing.