The Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head is Really Up To

by Dean Burnett

When you first meet someone, it’s extremely rare for them to tell you their name and nothing else. You’re invariably going to be involved in a conversation about where you’re from, what you do for work, hobbies, what they arrested you for, that sort of thing. Social etiquette insists we exchange pleasantries on first meeting (even if we’re not really interested), but every pleasantry we engage in with a person increases the odds of the person’s name being pushed out of short-term memory before we can encode it.

the average IQ of a population is 100. Without exception. If someone says, ‘The average IQ of [country x] is only 85’, then this is wrong.

A less-drastic example of this is known as the Pygmalion effect. In 1965, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson did a study where teachers in elementary schools were told that certain pupils were advanced or intellectually gifted, and should be taught and monitored accordingly.16 As you’d expect, these pupils showed tests and academic performance in line with being of higher intelligence. The trouble was, they weren’t gifted; they were normal pupils. But being treated as if they were smarter and brighter meant they essentially started performing to meet expectations.

Despite its popularity and appeal, there’s little evidence to suggest that NLP actually works, putting it in the realms of pseudoscience and alternative medicine. This book is filled with examples of how the human brain does its own thing despite everything the modern world can throw at it, so it’s hardly going to fall in line when faced with a

Edmund Burke famously said, ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’

The people demanding that those with depression alter their thinking while refusing to do the same in the face of the evidence are showing just how hard it is.

Every human is technically a meaningless sack of carbon clinging to a rock hurtling through the uncaring void around trillions of tonnes of nuclear fire,