Since Plato, philosophers have described the decision-making process as either rational or emotional: we carefully deliberate or we "blink" and go with our gut. But as scientists break open the mind's black box with the latest tools of neuroscience, they're discovering that this is not how the mind works. Our best decisions are a finely tuned blend of both feeling and reason?and the precise mix depends on the situation. When buying a house, for example, it's best to let our unconscious mull over the many variables. But when we're picking a stock, intuition often leads us astray. The trick is to determine when to lean on which part of the brain, and to do this, we need to think harder (and smarter) about how we think.

Jonah Lehrer arms us with the tools we need, drawing on cutting-edge research by Daniel Kahneman, Colin Camerer, and others, as well as the real-world experiences of a wide range of "deciders"?from airplane pilots and hedge fund investors to serial killers and poker players. Lehrer shows how people are taking advantage of the new science to make better television shows, win more football games, and improve military intelligence. His goal is to answer two questions that are of interest to just about anyone, from CEOs to firefighters: How does the human mind make decisions? And how can we make those decisions better?

Expect to enjoy a literary investigation into the many decisions we make day-to-day, using examples from rescue workers, poker players, investment moguls, and health-care professionals. Some of the processes can be related to certain brain areas, while others cannot. The key information lies in how we can influence our choices to have better outcomes. American narrator David Colacci quotes Plato inexplicably with a British accent and recites other quoted material with a growl or faux woman's voice. His attempts to make heavy ideas lighter work to a degree, but his speaking volume takes wide swings from strong to nearly inaudible, causing syllables and whole words to disappear at the nadirs. Colacci's narrative technique of modulating volume to sound more conversational loses information and becomes a distraction. J.A.H. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

 

JONAH LEHRER is editor at large for Seed magazine and the author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist. A graduate of Columbia University and a Rhodes Scholar, Lehrer has worked in the lab of Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel and has written for The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. He edits the "Mind Matters" blog for Scientific American, and writes his own highly regarded blog, "The Frontal Cortex."

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
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