Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.

Start by marking “How We Decide” as Want to Read:

Other editions

Enlarge cover

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Open Preview

How We Decide

Jonah Lehrer (Goodreads Author)

3.82 · Rating details · 35,520 ratings · 1,470 reviews

The first book to use the unexpected discoveries of neuroscience to help us make the best decisions.

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 ...more

Get A Copy

Or buy for

Hardcover, 259 pages

Published February 9th 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company

More Details... edit details

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Reader Q&A

To ask other readers questions about How We Decide, please sign up.

Lists with This Book

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Behaviour change and social psychology: how people make decisions

175 books — 482 voters

Greatest Psychology Books

539 books — 1,067 voters

More lists with this book...

Community Reviews

Showing 1-30

Rating details

Sort: Default

Filter

Feb 14, 2009 Heather rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nonfiction

As I am not a scientist like some other reviewers, I found this book to be quite enlightening. It was well-written and entertaining, as well.

Things I learned:

People need to use both rational thought and emotion to make the best decisions.

We need to make our own mistakes because that is how our brains get rewired not to do it again. Emotions turn mistakes into educational events and then use those lessons unconsciously.

We get cranky when we're hungry and tired because the prefrontal cortex is the ...more

flag 91 likes · Like · see review

Aug 13, 2009 Trevor rated it it was amazing

Shelves: behavioural-economics, psychology

For the first half of this book I was rather annoyed. The problem was that I had heard most of the stories before and I was thinking that what I should do is write a ‘how to write a popular book on decision making’ style review. As with anyone who has found themselves on Good Reads for a while, I now can’t read a book without thinking, at the same time, how I’m going to review it.

You know, in this type of book it seems there has to be an American Football story, a plane crash or two or maybe ev ...more

flag 66 likes · Like · see review

Jul 14, 2013 Carly marked it as no-thanks

Recommends it for: No one, sorry; I don't approve of plagiarism.

Recommended to Carly by: Goodreads (collaborative filtering, maybe?)

False attributions
and self-plagiarism
and plain old plagiarism...
oh, my!
I'm not a journalist; honestly, I have trouble understanding the ethical dilemmas of "self-plagiarism." Yes, I understand that one should cite oneself, but I can also understand why this would fail to occur to an author.

But seriously?
Plagiarising Gladwell?
Making up quotes from Bob Dylan?
Taking quotes from Wikipedia and pretending that they were interviews?
What makes one decide to do that?
Do explain.

flag 36 likes · Like · see review

Apr 20, 2012 Steve Van Slyke rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Everyone

Recommended to Steve by: Jim, Science & Inquiry Group

Shelves: kindle, science

I probably would not have read this book had it not been recommended by someone whose opinions I respect and the fact that the Kindle version was selling for only $2.99 at the time.

I'm really glad now that I didn't miss it. Most of the science books I choose to read are interesting but very few are also what I would call “entertaining”. This book was. As other reviewers have mentioned I too am leery when I start to read a book that immediately launches into a case study, because this can sometim ...more

flag 27 likes · Like · see review

Mar 28, 2015 carol. rated it did not like it

Recommends it for: no one

Shelves: not-on-blog, non-fiction, yuck, no-negative-reviews

03/28/14 Update.
I don't know where this review went, but I'm putting it back.

11/09/13 Update.

This is why Goodreads needs to separate itself from Amazon, and why Amazon sucks: http://www.amazon.com/How-We-Decide-J...

An average of four stars, the "most helpful negative review" is three stars, and the main page and 'negative review' doesn't mentions Lehrer's little plagiarism problem or the fact that the publisher recalled the book--they actually offered refunds. This is why I don't bother with Ama ...more

flag 24 likes · Like · see review

Jun 16, 2012 David rated it it was amazing

Shelves: psychology

This is one of the most entertaining "pop-psychology" books that I've read. It is filled with anecdotes and stories that illustrate the main point of the book: the emotional side of our brains makes our decisions for us, and the rational side of our brains helps justify our decisions. Sometimes, depending on our rational thoughts can get in the way of making good decisions, and can actually be a detriment. A good example is the physicist who got interested in playing poker professionally. He und ...more

flag 21 likes · Like · see review

Aug 27, 2013 seak rated it it was amazing

Shelves: ebooks-to-read, audio, 2013

To this day, this is the book I recommend the most. Partly because I pretty much only read fantasy books and that only works for certain (awesome) people, but mostly because this book does such a good job explaining how the brain works that I still remember much of the book today.

Think Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, but with much better explanations and less exciting writing.

Actually these two books use quite a number of the same studies to make their points, but where Gladwell tends toward obfuscati ...more

flag 11 likes · Like · see review

Apr 08, 2009 Lisa rated it liked it

Recommends it for: brainiacs

Recommended to Lisa by: NPR

How We Decide opens with a killer first sentence: "I was flying a Boeing 737 into Tokyo Narita International Airport when the left engine caught on fire." Right away, I am hooked. As the paragraph progresses, in heart thumping detail, my eyes flick back to the first sentence, to confirm that the author is indeed the pilot on this flight, and not a passenger.
Something strikes me as odd. Before reaching the end of the two paragraph opening page, I find myself flipping to the author photo on the b How We Decide opens with a killer first sentence: "I was flying a Boeing 737 into Tokyo Narita International Airport when the left engine caught on fire." Right away, I am hooked. As the paragraph progresses, in heart thumping detail, my eyes flick back to the first sentence, to confirm that the author is indeed the pilot on this flight, and not a passenger.
Something strikes me as odd. Before reaching the end of the two paragraph opening page, I find myself flipping to the author photo on the back flap of the book. The author looks like a young kid. If I were a bartender, I'd card him. No, in honor of the subject of the book, let me rephrase that; if I were a bartender, I'd decide to card him. As a reader, I decided to scan his credentials; editor at large for Seed magazine. Author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist. Graduate of Columbia University. Rhodes Scholar. Lab worker. Editor. Blogger. How did this kid find the time to also get a pilot's license? I read on.
The author is faced with a highly technical life or death decision; should he increase the throttle, or steepen the descent? He decides to gain velocity by faking a nose dive. He writes, "Immediately, I started to go faster. The problem was that I was headed straight for a suburb in Tokyo."
The next page, the gig is up. Turns out, our author is faking more than the nose dive; the anecdote is a sham. Paragraph seven reveals that our industrious author is recalling his experience in a flight simulator. Which leaves me to wonder, should I trust our narrator, or not? He is picking and choosing which details to share, as every author must, and doing it more skillfully than most. How am I to trust which details reveal a truth about decision making, and which details merely support a virtuoso performance? Esthetically, I am charmed. Intellectually, I am wary.
I venture with caution into the first chapter, which questions the Platonic notion that reason must triumph over emotion by declaring that, "without emotion, reason wouldn't exist at all," and supports this assertion with an entertaining, crowd pleasing play by play examples of gut decisions made by NFL quarterbacks. I'm not a football fan, so I still see the puppeteer's strings, but these promptly disappear as I am presented with an anecdote about Antonio Damasio, who is the neurologist version of Brett Favre. Is it geeky to be more taken by neurologists than quarterbacks? Not when you have MS.
I digress.
Demasio encountered a patient who had undergone brain surgery to remove a tumor in his frontal cortex; while this man's considerable intellect had survived intact, his life had subsequently disintegrated. He was fired from his corporate management position; his businesses failed, his marriage failed, he'd been taken in by a scam, he'd gone bankrupt. What struck Damasio, though, was that the fellow was able to describe his ruination without a trace of emotion. His neutral affect intrigued Damasio, who hooked the guy up to a machine which measures the activity of sweat glands in the palms to quantify emotional response. The man was presented with reliably provocative images; violence, porn, you get the picture. No sweat. The guy was impervious to any emotional provocation. While any of us armchair diagnosticians can easily imagine the man's emotional vacancy was the cause of the disintegration of his marriage, Damasio wondered the damage went further than that; perhaps this man's lack of emotions also led to his failures in the other, supposedly more rational aspects of his life. For there was one intriguing deficit the man complained of; since his surgery, he'd been chronically incapable of making even the smallest decision. We think of decision making as being a rational process, yet it was not this man's intellect that was stripped away, but his emotions; without reference to them, he was unable to choose a restaurant, much less a menu item, and this deficit was proving to be utterly debilitating. Damasio wondered if the emotions play a greater part in decision making than we generally give them credit for.
Our author does not leave us with a one note argument for trusting one's emotions in decision making. Instead, he illustrates cases for using one's rational mind as elegantly as he argues the cases for using one's emotional intuition. The key, of course, is to learn how to think about our thinking; to learn to recognize which decisions are best informed by reason, and which by emotion. Many of the experiments presented here were not new to me, but this core thesis promoting metacognition presented a fine uniting principal, and justified the retelling of these stories.
By the way, for those of you who would like to hear a surprisingly different take on the crash of United Airlines 232, it's worth viewing disc 3 of Errol Morris' First Person 2000 series. It tells the story of the same incident, from another point of view, designating a different hero and a different decision making process. This is not to say that Morris' perspective detracts from the perspective offered here; it simply serves as a delicious reminder that the facts can serve different masters. I will close by observing that the author, Jonah Lehrer, is a fellow goodreads member. One of his quotes, interestingly enough, is from Jane Austen:
"Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken." — I imagine, then, that he would encourage you to seek other versions of these stories, as well.
...more

flag 9 likes · Like · see review

Sep 14, 2011 Riku Sayuj rated it really liked it

Shelves: brain-bheja-fry, pop-journ-type, pop-science, r-r-rs

A great improvement over Imagine: How Creativity Works and am I thankful for that. This is probably my first back-to-back for a non-fiction author and was dreading it every page.

flag 10 likes · Like · see review

Mar 02, 2010 Chris Herdt rated it it was ok

I was at the bookstore today and happened to see this book. I picked it up and read part of a couple chapters.

First of all, why would the author, who can put any picture of himself in the entire world (or no picture at all) on the back of his book choose a picture where he is wearing an unzipped hooded sweatshirt? How am I supposed to take this guy seriously? Speaking of decisions, am I right?

Second, this book seems to be formulaic pop psychology at its worst. Each chapter opens with an overly d ...more

flag 7 likes · Like · see review

Jan 26, 2009 Dina rated it it was amazing

This is a great review of neurobiology, filled with real-life examples. If you ever wondered what informs hunches, why certain things give you the heebie-jeebies "for no reason," or what neurotransmitters are involved in your "6th sense," this is the book for you.

flag 7 likes · Like · see review

Feb 16, 2009 Jeffrey rated it it was amazing

Shelves: reviewed

The brain is our defining organ, giving us not only self-awareness, but also the ability to wonder about ourselves, our world, and our own mortality. It is, nevertheless, a mystery why brains work better than others---why some of us make consistently good decisions, and others never seem to learn from their mistakes.

In How We Decide, author Jonah Lehrer explores our current understanding of the human mind. In well-crafted and engaging prose, he draws on examples from professional football player

...more

flag 6 likes · Like · see review

Feb 06, 2009 Ben Babcock rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, science, 2011-read, own

N.B. September 2013: So apparently this book is a pile of plagiarism (hat tip to Ceridwen for the info). I’m not exactly going to re-read the book so I can rewrite my review in that light. But just be aware of this fact as you read the review below.

In my recent review of The Grand Design I went on about my love of science, particularly of physics. I’ll be honest: although biology is really, really cool, I also find it kind of gross. It’s full of squishy stuff, and it was my least favourite of th ...more

flag 5 likes · Like · see review

Sep 10, 2009 John Wiswell rated it it was ok

I was excited for How We Decide. Lehrer supposedly took my position, that human beings are both rational and irrational, both are important to good decision making, and they are highly interrelated. Who doesn’t like having their deeply held beliefs about the human condition validated by science? But, though Lehrer did plumb some of the rational/emotional divide, his book became more of a series of scientific anecdotes and sweeping generalizations than a proper synthesis of neuroscience. The anec I was excited for How We Decide. Lehrer supposedly took my position, that human beings are both rational and irrational, both are important to good decision making, and they are highly interrelated. Who doesn’t like having their deeply held beliefs about the human condition validated by science? But, though Lehrer did plumb some of the rational/emotional divide, his book became more of a series of scientific anecdotes and sweeping generalizations than a proper synthesis of neuroscience. The anecdotes are sharp, crossing popular topics like sports and the stock market, and in proper media man fashion, Lehrer takes us into the personal details of people who were present. That’s one thing that makes his New Yorker writing so compulsively readable. Unfortunately here, with several hundred pages in which to illuminate the mind, he seems to have missed the scope.

In his opening, Lehrer relays the story of Tom Brady, the rookie quarterback who led his team to a Superbowl upset victory. Lehrer uses Brady as an example of how going on feeling leads to sports success. But a few chapters later, Lehrer uses the 76ers basketball team as an example of how feelings distort how well we’re doing. The 76ers help illustrate contemporary scientific theories on dopamine, but it’s not as though Brady wasn’t affected by the chemical. A few chapters in you realize that like a lot of neuroscience books, this one is just going to represent the same things we already know (sometimes feeling is good, sometimes bad; sometimes logic takes over) in some novel scientific terms. By way of sweeping generalization and chapters contradicting each other, it fails to synthesize neuroscience by avoiding context as to why things sometimes succeed, fail or come into conflict. In that sense, it’s a longer and not quite as exact explanation of the brain as Stephen Johnson’s Mind Wide Open.

The worst sweeping generalization is Lehrer’s conflation of intuition, gut reaction and emotion. You can argue that intuition and gut feelings are emotions – but they are not all of the emotions. Love, hate and fear are not the same as unconscious intuition. So when he discusses the popular game show, Deal or No Deal, and bounces between chastising players for relying too much on emotion, he’s only partially right. Watch the show and you see people caving in to fear about low prize amounts, pleas from family to do one thing or another, and emotional assurances from the host. But when Lehrer implies they lose money on the show for relying on intuition, he’s ignoring what actually happens. Your emotions relating directly to an event, emotions reflecting possible outcomes in the future, and reflective emotions about how things will feel in the future, are not the same.

Lehrer covers so much ground, from game shows to sports to politics, that you’re bound to know one example well enough to catch him oversimplifying. It’s the ironic problem of writing for such a broad audience. Take his analysis of the chaotic stock market. Lehrer claims that if investors see the market climbing and have successful returns, they’ll believe they’ve “solved the market.” Doubtless some people do delude themselves into thinking they’ve got the whole system figured out. But in reality many investors seek out corroboration - if you see precious metal commodities rising and find corroborating stimuli like positive feedback from your broker or a news story of strife where the metals are mined, you have probably figured out one blip in the market. Attempted interpretations like that can still be faulty, but the market responses aren’t purely random, and the individuals that chase them to do not necessarily believe they’ve figured out the entire trading cycle. Lehrer cites a study in which investors partook in a mock-market that was secretly based on the world’s worst crashes – but the study made it impossible for mock-investors to find data, causes or even gossip for why these models were shifting. It does tell us something about how people will interpret unexplained series of numbers, but also tells us something about how some scientists will oversimplify human behavior.

How We Decide has dozens of entertaining anecdotes. It’s no surprise that Lehrer has been on The New Yorker’s staff before; he’s got the knack for germane-sounding tidbits. But like fellow New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, he seems equally prone to overgeneralizing his subjects in the throes of enthusiasm. He makes the pop science entertaining, but I can’t recommend it as a resource.
...more

flag 5 likes · Like · see review

Jul 24, 2011 Judyta Szaciłło rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: natural-sciences, humanities-social-sciences

As per Goodreads community reviews, this book ("The Decisive Moment: How The Brain Makes Up Its Mind") is an act of self-plagiarism (from "How We Decide"? or is it the same book?), and it also contains plenty of misquoted data. In this light, I probably should have started my adventure with neuroscience with Kahneman instead. Nevertheless, I have learnt some new things about the workings of the brain, even though it did not feel like a very engaging introduction to me. I found it hard to relate ...more

flag 5 likes · Like · see review

Dec 15, 2014 Sara Shakouri rated it it was ok

Shelves: non-fiction

About 30% of each chapter includes a 'dramatic' story, where the ability of making the right decisions in a matter of seconds (or less) would be a matter of life and death.
Then section develops to explaining what parameters are having the most effect on our decisions. The rest of the book is a collage, which among other sources is mostly taken from Daniel Kahnemann and Antonio Damasio's works, and as they were used out of their original contexts, sometimes imply misleading conclusions.
Thinking: ...more

flag 5 likes · Like · see review

Jul 25, 2014 Olivier Goetgeluck rated it liked it

The process of thinking requires feeling, for feelings are what let us understand all the information that we can't directly comprehend. Reason without emotion is impotent.

Every time you make a mistake or encounter something new, your brain cells are busy changing themselves. Our emotions are deeply empirical.

When Schultz studied those juice-craving monkeys, he discovered that it took only a few experimental trials before the monkey's neurons knew exactly when to expect their rewards. The neuron ...more

flag 4 likes · Like · see review

Jun 28, 2013 Ensiform rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, brain

A look at the existing literature on behavioral science and the conclusions it makes about how we make decisions; specifically, the book argues that we do not simply decide rationally. Rather, we use a blend of emotion, gut feeling, or instinct, as well as a rational weighing of pros and cons, when we decide. Or at least, we should. (The experimental literature is especially fascinating here, as for example in the man who has a brain injury that leaves him affectless and unmoved by emotion, and A look at the existing literature on behavioral science and the conclusions it makes about how we make decisions; specifically, the book argues that we do not simply decide rationally. Rather, we use a blend of emotion, gut feeling, or instinct, as well as a rational weighing of pros and cons, when we decide. Or at least, we should. (The experimental literature is especially fascinating here, as for example in the man who has a brain injury that leaves him affectless and unmoved by emotion, and thus unable to make even the simplest decision, as he gets caught up in an endless loop of weighing the advantages and disadvantages of each possibility.) Snap decisions based on observation and instinct, Lehrer shows in countless examples, are often better (as in successfully crash-landing a plane or escaping a forest fire) than simply listening to one’s desires (as those trapped in credit card debt know too well). On the other hand, as Lehrer shows from examples in the fields of sports and art, over-thinking a mistake or a challenge can lead to perpetual self-doubt and undoing. The crucial point is that deciders must analyze their own decisions and watch carefully how much emotion is biasing their choices; we “know more than we think we know,” and if we apply reason to that knowledge, we can make efficient decisions.

This isn’t a particularly weighty or earth-shaking conclusion, and much of the material here can be found in other popular books on neuroscience. I recognized the hot hands study, the story of the firefighter who built a burnt patch to save himself, and several others. Instead of providing further insight on or alternative interpretations of these studies, Lehrer repeats their key points in such a way that they relate to his larger claims about decision making. I also learned, just before finishing this book, that Lehrer is the disgraced journalist who manufactured Bob Dylan quotes for a subsequent book. So, caveat lector, I suppose. Those problematic aspects aside, I very much enjoyed this book, with its wealth of fascinating anecdotes from brain studies and its practical, sensible applications of the studies to advice on how to decide. Lehrer’s style is breezy and accessible, and he has a gift for finding the empathy, suspense, and drama in every human story. ...more

flag 4 likes · Like · see review

Aug 12, 2014 Riley rated it really liked it

I'm in eighth grade this year and I read it last year. My teacher had it on a shelf and I thought it was a YA book not realizing it was actually on psychology. Anyway I thoroughly enjoyed the book and it made it easier to understand the concepts they were explaining by going back and showing examples. It took me about 2 weeks to finish but then again I'm only a middle school student.

flag 4 likes · Like · see review

Mar 05, 2010 Kyle rated it did not like it

Shelves: adult, non-fiction

I'm going to start this review by saying I did not read the entire book. I read about 2 chapters and had to turn the book off (I was listening on my commute.)

Approaching the book with sincere optimism at reading a solid non-fictional psychology based book about choices, I felt I was baited and switched.

While this book proclaimed scientific non-fiction, and painted itself as objective, I simply could not get over the fact that the author was very clearly pushing a big-bang, darwin-inspired, god ...more

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

Apr 15, 2009 Bookmarks Magazine rated it liked it

Shelves: may-june-2009

With Blink, The Tipping Point, and Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell has cornered the market on popular studies of human behavior. But Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide holds its own with Gladwell, Stephen Pinker, Daniel Dennett, and the host of science writers increasingly focused on the complexities of the human brain. "There isn't any spectacular revelation, unique viewpoint or knockout final summation," noted the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Washington Post felt that Lehrer "does little to integrate

...more

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

Jul 09, 2011 Taylor rated it liked it

I think I have to stop reading (listening to) these kinds of books (i.e. books in which an author uses psychological/neurological/behavioral economics research to explain how humans do something -- decide, pay attention, seek happiness, etc.). This one follows a similar pattern as the rest of them, discussing a lot of the same classic and newer experiments, then trying to relate the results to how we make decisions.

While that part has gotten repetitive for me, the author does come to some feasi ...more

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

Aug 11, 2009 charlie rated it really liked it

I have read three books that circle around the science of decision-making, especially under pressure. The most famous is BLINK; but I also grabbed on a whim a book called THE UNTHINKABLE about how people have survived extreme circumstances (such as plane crashes and acts of terrorism)... finally, on a recommendation, I read HOW WE DECIDE. They all are informed in one way or another by the new discoveries of neuroscience about how the brain work, and use the same case study techniques of FREAKONO ...more

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

Aug 29, 2011 Milan rated it really liked it

Shelves: psychology, non-fiction

It’s my first look inside the brain and I liked what I saw. 'How we Decide' looks at the new science of decision-making and how it can help us in making better choices in our daily lives. Jonah Lehrer shows us the inner workings of the brain. We learn about the different parts of the brain which are involved in the decision-making process, chiefly among them the prefrontal cortex. He explains beautifully about loss aversion, creativity and working memory. I really liked the description of new id ...more

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

Apr 07, 2012 Dy-an rated it really liked it

What I liked: The reassurance that air travel is very safe. Big decisions should be emotional decisions. The author is wearing a hoodie in his picture (he better like drinking beer).
What I didn't like: The use of monkeys in experiments. Super sad!
Who I'd suggest it to: Anyone who likes pretending they are a psychologist. This will add more ammunition to the psychological gun.

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

Jan 05, 2013 Dana rated it it was amazing

Review Unavailable :p
It's simply because, I cannot think of an appropriate review for this book; no matter how much I wrote, it deserves much Much MUCH more <3
Jonah Lehrer, YOU ROCK!!!

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

Oct 11, 2011 yulia rated it really liked it

Suprisingly it was a very easy and enjoyable read. The book is good and the Russian translation is amazing!!

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

Jun 20, 2013 Cheryl rated it really liked it

“Plato, for example, couldn’t help but imagine a utopia in which reason determined everything. Such a mythical society- a republic of pure reason- has been dreamed of by philosophers ever since. But this classical theory is founded upon a crucial mistake. For too long, people have disparaged the emotional brain, blaming our feelings for all of our mistakes. The truth is far more interesting. What we discover when we look at the brain is that the horses and the charioteer depend upon each other. “Plato, for example, couldn’t help but imagine a utopia in which reason determined everything. Such a mythical society- a republic of pure reason- has been dreamed of by philosophers ever since. But this classical theory is founded upon a crucial mistake. For too long, people have disparaged the emotional brain, blaming our feelings for all of our mistakes. The truth is far more interesting. What we discover when we look at the brain is that the horses and the charioteer depend upon each other. If it weren’t for our emotions, reason wouldn’t exist at all.”

Lehrer goes on to detail the intricate way we make decisions, and it is fascinating, a wonderful, elegant, surprising read. It is a hot button topic, and when brought up with friends, everyone has their own examples of making a decision, with which tools they used, emotion or reason, and the consequences, and they believed passionately in the outcome as proof as to whether it was a good or bad decision. I tend to subscribe to the more Zen like view that no decision is inherently good or bad, but what had to happen in the way it did, so that even bad decisions lead you where you are supposed to be. As Mason Jennings sings, “…where would I be right now if all my dreams had come true… I would have never seen your face, this world would be a different place.” Not to spoil the gist of it all, but Lehrer ends with a wonderful conclusion; that thinking about how you make decisions is more important whether you go with reason or with emotion. “If you’re going to take only one idea away from this book, take this one: Whenever you make a decision, be aware of the kind of decision you are making and the kind of thought process it requires. It doesn’t matter if you’re choosing between wide receivers or political candidates. You might be playing poker or assessing the results of a television focus group. The best way to make sure you are using your brain properly is to study your brain at work, to listen to the argument inside your head.”

Lehrer seriously leaves no stone unturned in his vast perusal of the literature of neurology and cognitive psychology, and he makes learning so deliciously fun, I wish he was a teacher, but am not sure if I want him to have been my high school or college teacher. Didja know, “a typical major league pitch takes about .35 seconds to travel from the hand of the pitcher to home base. (This is the average interval between human heartbeats.)Unfortunately for the batter, it takes about .25 seconds for his muscles to initiate a swing, leaving his brain a paltry one-tenth of a second to make up its mind on whether or not to do so. But even this estimate is too generous. It takes a few milliseconds for the visual information to travel from the retina to the visual cortex, so the batter really has fewer than five milliseconds to decide if he should swing. But people can’t think this quickly, even under perfect conditions, it takes the brain about twenty milliseconds to respond to a sensory stimulus.”

So I have never been at the receiving end of a major league fastball, so I imagine I had more time to decide when I played softball, or when I hit a tennis ball, but I get that it is all happening in seconds, and it is not the rational part of my brain working, it is instinct, and it is feeling that guides me. Lehrer spends a bit of time on Tom Brady’s decision making in the pocket, with high pressure and again milliseconds to decide where to throw, when and to whom. “There is no robot that can hit a baseball or throw a football or ride a bicycle…This is why when evolution was building a brain, it didn’t bother to replace all of those emotional processes with new operations under explicit, conscious control. The result is that the uniquely human areas of the mind depend on the primitive mind underneath. The process of thinking requires feeling, for feelings are what let us understand all the information that we can’t directly comprehend. Reason without emotion is impotent.” There is an interesting example of a British submarine commander who was watching radar and something was just slightly off, slightly different than a normal blip on radar that he had been watching and he had a minute or less to decide whether he should give the command to fire on the blip or not. When his decision, which was the right one, was studied by other military personnel, they could discern no disruption of the pattern, and chalked it all up to luck. The commander himself could not describe what felt different or wrong to him either, but when a psychologist took a broader view, he was able to find a 3 second discrepancy, enough to give the commander chills, enough to make him decide to shoot it down, and save an entire American battleship and not kill 2 American pilots. That kind of instinct is elegant and beautiful, and accurate over and over.

Oh, if we could have learned this in school: “The brain is designed to amplify the shock of mistaken predictions. Whenever it experiences something unexpected- like a radar blip that doesn’t fit the usual pattern- the cortex immediately takes notice. Nothing focuses the mind like surprise. This fast cellular process begins in a tiny area in the center of the brain that is dense with dopamine neurons. Neuroscientists have known for several years that his region, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is involved in the detection of errors. The signal emanates from the ACC, so many neuroscientists refer to this area as the “oh, shit!” circuit.”

When there is a genetic mutation present that causes decreased dopamine receptors in the ACC, researchers have found fascinating correlations with drug and alcohol dependency, for example. The signals that alert the brain that something bad has happened, a negative reinforce, can’t allow the brain to learn from it, or alter its self destructive path. The signals travel along ‘spindle neurons’ that carry emotions through the whole brain. Only humans and great apes have spindle neurons. Lehrer writes, “we can now begin to understand the surprising wisdom of our emotions. The activity of dopamine neurons demonstrates that feelings are simply reflections of hard wired animal instincts. Human emotions are rooted in the predictions of highly flexible brain cells, which are constantly adjusting thief connections to reflect reality. Every time you make a mistake or encounter something new, your brain cells are busy changing themselves. Our emotions are deeply empirical…Every time you experience a feeling of joy or disappoint men, fear or happiness, your neurons are busy rewiring themselves, constructing a theory of what sensory cues preceded the emotions. The lesson is then committed to memory, so the next time you make a decision, your brain cells are ready. ”

I recently discovered a brain training memory game based on the Stroop task, which is a psychological experience of flashing colored words of different colors, and the task is to ignore the word and focus on the color and pick the color over the word. So the word blue in green needs to be read as green, and it is hard to tell your brain that. It instinctively wants to pick blue since that is the word you are looking at. When looked at through MRI, the prefrontal cortex, home of reason, is the most active during this exercise. I am good at this exercise, which is interesting since I think I rely on my emotional brain more than my rational brain when it comes to decisions. So exercising my prefrontal cortex will come in handy. It’s fun too! Another fascinating example involved an airplane flight with a completely unprecedented and never before though of system failure that required the pilot to invent, invent!, a new way of flying midflight. The prefrontal cortex is also capable of coming up with unique and creative solutions or flashes of insight, which feel more instinctual or emotion based, but is an elegant synthesis of the two.

And perhaps my favorite idea in the whole book: “moral emotions existed long before Moses. They are writ in the primate brain. Religion simply allows us to codify these intuitions, to translate the ethics of evolution into a straightforward legal system.” Research and imaging of the brain as they confront ethical dilemmas such as a train speeding down the track reveals intricate reasoning and feeling; the easy choice is to flick a switch to save five men versus one, but the brain struggles if the choice is to push an overweight man onto the track to save the same five men. Our psychological evolution, separate from the bleak Darwinian view of ‘amorality and selfish genes,’ is richer and more integral to the wiring of our brain that we ever knew. Beautiful.
...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Feb 13, 2016 Hana Bilqisthi rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: psikologi

https://hanabilqisthi.wordpress.com/2...

Kalau kamu bertanya padaku buku apa yang sebaiknya dibaca ketika ingin kabur dari kenyataan? Aku merekomendasikanmu untuk membaca buku ini.

Aku berusaha kabur sejenak dari tugas yang menumpuk dengan pergi ke bagian perpustakan majalah SWA dan tanpa disengaja aku melihat buku ini. Aku sudah menginginkan membaca buku ini sejak lama dan tidak menyangka menemukan versi terjemahannya di perpustakan majalah SWA.
Alhamdulillah!

Kesenanganku bertambah ketika mendapat ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Sep 16, 2012 Loy Machedo rated it it was amazing

Loy Machedo’s Book Review – How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer.

My journey into the world of the Grey Matter started with Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink and then moved into Freewill by Sam Harris, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, Predictably Irrational by Dan Airely, Quiet by Susan Cain, Incognito by David Eagleman and Emotional Intelligence by Travis Bradberry. And when I thought I knew a little bit, in comes 27 year old Author - Jonah Lehrer with his Mind-Boggling Contribution to the world of Neuros ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

« previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 … next »

new topic
Discuss This Book

topics	posts	views	last activity
Why did HMH pull it?	3	50	Feb 12, 2014 02:48PM
Decision making	6	83	Nov 07, 2012 09:14PM
Science and Inquiry: How We Decide	20	120	Aug 23, 2012 05:14AM

Readers Also Enjoyed

Genres

Nonfiction

796 users

Psychology

712 users

Science

327 users

Business

108 users

Biology > Neuroscience

79 users

Self Help

64 users

See top shelves…

About Jonah Lehrer

Jonah Lehrer

595 followers

Books by Jonah Lehrer

More…

Trivia About How We Decide

3 trivia questions

More quizzes & trivia...

Quotes from How We Decide

“...new ideas are merely several old thoughts that occur at the exact same time.” — 29 likes

“How do we regulate our emotions? The answer is surprisingly simple: by thinking about them. The prefrontal cortex allows each of us to contemplate his or her own mind, a talent psychologists call metacognition. We know when we are angry; every emotional state comes with self-awareness attached, so that an individual can try to figure out why he's feeling what he's feeling. If the particular feeling makes no sense—if the amygdala is simply responding to a loss frame, for example—then it can be discounted. The prefrontal cortex can deliberately choose to ignore the emotional brain.” — 27 likes

More quotes…