You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself

by David McRaney

This book often brings up the consensus of scientists on certain behaviors as a way to prove how deluded you are. It is not a fallacy to trust the consensus of thousands of researchers on how to interpret the evidence provided by decades of studies. Science focuses on the facts, not the people who unearth them, but that doesn’t mean large groups of people can’t agree on something that is totally wrong. Neurologist Walter Freeman won the 1949 Nobel Prize for Medicine in honor of his work—lobotomizing mentally ill people by jabbing a spike behind their eyeballs. Some reports say he performed this technique around 2,500 times, often without anesthesia. He took a practice that had previously required drilling into the skull and turned it into an outpatient procedure. At first, he used an ice pick, but eventually he developed short, thin metal spears he drove through the back of the eye socket with a mallet. The technique made formerly unruly mental patients calmer, as you might imagine severe brain damage would. It became a popular way to treat patients in mental facilities, and Freeman drove a van he called the lobotomobile around the country to teach the technique wherever he could. Somewhere close to twenty thousand people were lobotomized in this way before science corrected itself.