Early on, Lehrer introduces his main theme: “Sometimes we need to reason through our options and carefully analyze the possibilities. Subscribe to receive some of our best reviews, "beyond the book" articles, book club info, and giveaways by email. They talk back to each other, they contradict each other, they take turns vetoing each other.
A brain imaging study reveals that from the perspective of the brain, it is literally better to give than to receive. The findings of a recent experiment on patience and self-control, for example, read like neural law; in reality, the results have been sharply contested in the literature. All rights reserved. The author of Orphan Train returns with an ambitious, emotionally resonant historical novel. It’s fascinating to learn about the reward circuitry of the brain, but on some basic level, we know that we seek out rewards and feel depressed when we don’t get them.
In How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer dissects and explains how the brain decides; when it uses reason to arrive at the right decision & it relies on emotion. It is usually presented as a distinct section of a graduate thesis or dissertation. One of the stories is about the crucial decision made by Lieutenant Commander who controlled a British destroyer during the Persian Gulf War.
Indeed, Lehrer displays a prodigious knowledge of the current literature on decision science, and dips adroitly into these recent findings with concision and wit. Lehrer cites the case of Elliot, a bright and successful young man who lost the ability to feel emotions after the removal of a brain tumor from his cortex, which resides near the frontal lobe of the brain.
Also, thinking about what we are thinking is possible by alternating between emotions and rationality. Jonah Lehrer also gives the reader some advices on how to make good decision (acquire the information with a conscious mind and wait for the unconscious to digest it). Publication Information. Author With the beta freeze about to start, this seems like a good time to get folks involved. They shouldn't, however, come away with the sense that the hash of decision-making science is settled.
For a book that plumbs the mysteries of the emotional brain, it has almost nothing to say about the decisions that most of us would conventionally describe as “emotional.” We hear about aviation heroism and poker strategies, and we hear numerous accounts of buying consumer goods. In fact, it is so crucial to learning in primates like us that, as Lehrer puts it, "the process of decision-making begins with fluctuations of dopamine." This is a review of his second book, How We Decide ( Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ), which provides, in 303 pages, a micro-analysis of the way we make decisions and of how we can improve this process, as the human brain is “the most complicated object in the known universe”.
HOW WE DECIDE by Jonah Lehrer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2009 A Gladwellian exploration of the brain’s inner workings during the decision-making process.
We help you decide: What’s appropriate at every age. . Recommended by Vinod Khosla, Vinod Khosla, Seth Godin, and 3 others. At minimum, it would have been gracious to acknowledge Maclean explicitly in the text as the main source of Lehrer's extended, vivid account. We locate services to review. Feb 2009 Lehrer's account of the disastrous 1949 firefighting episode in Montana, for example, with which he began his July 2008 story about insight in the New Yorker, apparently represents no original reporting, but instead is an elaborate four-page retelling of Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire (1992). Article The author presents the importance of the. “How We Decide” tilts more decisively in the thinking-person’s self-help direction, promising not only to explain how we decide, but also to help us do it better. I though "what's something I can write about quickly?" A Rhodes Scholar, Lehrer describes himself as pathologically indecisive. That may be so, but his decision to write How We Decide was certainly a good one. Become a Member and discover books that entertain, engage & enlighten. We all like to think of ourselves as rational beings, fully in charge of the choices we make. Even though Elliots IQ and memory were unaffected, he was no longer able to make even the simplest decisions. After a year of gambling binges, she'd blown through more than $250,000 of retirement savings, lost her husband, and even resorted to stealing small change from her grandchildren. Results report that most of the financial transactions were accompanied by feelings (sweaty palms, spiking blood pressure), and the ones that weren’t, were the worst ones. . So conscious thoughts interfere with good decision-making. See all reviews . A book that promises to improve our decision-making, however, should be judged on more than its narrative devices. One of the stories Jonah Lehrer presents is about how a player made the decision that led his team to victory at 2002 Super Bowl. In truth, these two ostensibly separate neural duchies are so snarled and entangled with interconnected wiring that they look like the back of your home entertainment system. To that end, we put a lot of thought into choosing our homes, our cars, and which movie to see. His pathology suggests that emotions are a crucial part of the decision making process, as “a brain that can’t feel can’t make up its mind”. Click here. He’s insightful and engaging on “negativity bias” and “loss aversion”: the propensity of the human brain to register bad news more strongly than good.
“Paying with plastic fundamentally changes the way we spend money, altering the calculus of our financial decisions,” Lehrer writes. The first book to use the unexpected discoveries of neuroscience to help us make the best decisions. Several caveats: Despite Lehrer's agile handling of a lot of complicated material, I never was quite sure about the line that separated his reporting from other people's work.
When we are cut off from our feelings, Lehrer explains, the most banal decisions become impossible.
One of the stories is about a teacher with Parkinson who became a slot machine addict and lost everything in her life, after taking the treatment for her disease (which stimulated her emotions and inhibited her reason). It is forbidden to copy anything for publication elsewhere without written permission from the copyright holder. © BookBrowse LLC 1997-2020. As in most neuroscience whodunits, her neurons made her do it - specifically, her dopamine-producing neurons. Explaining decision-making on the scale of neurons makes for a challenging task, but Lehrer handles it with confidence and grace.
Jonah Lehrer | 4.06 | 38,999 ratings and reviews.
These neurons unconsciously guide much of our emotional behavior.
Dopamine explains learning, habit, impulse, subconscious information appraisal, intuition, and a number of other decision-making processes based on emotion, all of which How We Decide successfully reprises. But this is also a book largely built out of two kinds of anecdote. It may well be that this is simply the most effective way to convey these kinds of ideas to a lay audience. We all like to think of ourselves as rational beings, fully in charge of the choices we make. Here Lehrer explains how ordinary people are turned into killers, and how psychopaths are able to commit cruel and brutal acts without remorse. On the other hand, Freud imagined the human mind as divided into a series of conflicting parts.
Dan Vlamis. In How We Decide, author Jonah Lehrer explains that our attempts may be fruitless, and besides - too much thought could be the worst way to go about making the really important choices. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. The anecdotes are, without exception, well chosen and artfully told, but there is something in the structure of this kind of nonfiction writing that is starting to feel a little formulaic: startling mini-narrative, followed by an explanation of What the Science Can Teach Us, capped by a return to the original narrative with some crucial mystery unlocked. Search String: Summary | This and other derivative anecdotes are written with such immediacy and visceral detail that it is the kind of prose we normally associate with eyewitness reporting or fastidious, scrupulously sourced reconstruction. Search:
And sometimes we need to listen to our emotions.” Most readers at this point, I suspect, will naturally think of Malcolm Gladwell’s mega-best-seller “Blink,” which explored a similar boundary between reason and intuition. The big message from recent neuroscience, reiterated in the book, is about the decision-making power and acumen of the emotional brain. Sources covered in the review may include scholarly journal articles, books, government reports, Web sites, etc. Learning that this process is modulated by the neurochemical dopamine doesn’t, on the face of it, help us in our pursuit of those rewards. Required fields are marked *, You may use these HTML tags and attributes:
. For most of us, I suspect, these are the decisions that matter the most in our lives, and yet “How We Decide” is strangely silent about them. Full access is for members only. In recasting the timeless battle between the emotional and cognitive voices of the human mind, Lehrer is captive, as we all are, to the original Platonic metaphor for rational thought: reason is the charioteer, struggling to control and steer the horses of emotion, which is wild, impulsive, and has a mind of its own. 14, Next Neuromarketing World Forum: Dubai, April 4-6, 2015. She started hanging out at casinos and dog-racing tracks, compulsively playing the slot machines. Loy Machedo’s Book Review – How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. When we investigated, we learned two things: First, business unit heads demanded simple forecasts because they didn’t understand how to interpret or use complex ones. That line, alas, is often drawn with melodramatic flair - and a very heavy marker. Many of the experiments he recounts involve fMRI scans of brains in the process of making decisions (which, for the record, is a little like making a decision with your head stuck in a spinning clothes dryer). But these are rivaled, and often overshadowed, by a separate class of anecdote that seems, though beautifully rendered, exaggerated and somewhat removed from everyday experience. Usually decision making during shopping sessions involves selfishness. How We Decide . Each of these anecdotes is deftly told (perhaps too deftly; we'll get to that in a moment), but they also strive so hard for drama and attention that they seem to be bulked-up examples of decision making - anecdotes on steroids, if you will.
Time and time again, people who make split-second choices in crisis situations rely on emotional simply because there is no time to analyze the situation logically. For this reader, though, the most provocative sections of “How We Decide” involve sociopolitical issues more than personal ones. A section devoted to The Moral Mind is particularly gripping and even a little disturbing. There is something powerfully human in the act of deliberately choosing a path; other animals have drives, emotions, problem-solving skills, but none rival our capacity for self-consciously weighing all the options, imagining potential outcomes and arriving at a choice. Credit cards, however, make the transaction abstract.” Proust may have been a neuroscientist, but so were the subprime mortgage lenders. But there’s barely a mention of a whole class of choices that are suffused with emotion: whether to break up with a longstanding partner, or to scold a disobedient child, or to let an old friend know that you feel betrayed by something he’s said.
256 pages We literally get a neural kick when we learn something new, and unexpected pleasures are, thanks to dopamine, the most pleasant of all. The central question with one like “How We Decide” is, Do you get something out of it? Subscribe to our free newsletter right now. Get more information on how we review media for educators and legislation that helps kids.
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