Author: Jonah Lehrer
Ever since the ancient Greeks, we humans have prided ourselves on being capable of purely rational thought. "Over time, our rationality came to define us. It was, simply put, what made us human. There's only one problem with this assumption of human rationality: it's wrong."
With this opening salvo, Jonah Lehrer joins the growing ranks of popular science writers mining cognitive science's ever-expanding evidence underscoring the limits of reason. Since the mid-1990s, when psychologist Daniel Goleman popularized the term "emotional intelligence," it has become fashionable to point out the myriad ways in which unconscious brain mechanisms affect conscious thought. Sadly, many of these books have been long on personal agendas and self-help suggestions but short on real insights - often reducing the marvelous discoveries in the neurosciences to psychobabble.
Fortunately, Lehrer offers real substance by going short on agenda and overreaching simplifications and being long on scholarship; his book presents an excellent synthesis of how many leading mind scientists view decision making. Lehrer is blessed with a rare combination of intelligence. He is a Rhodes scholar who has worked in the lab of Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel; he has an insatiable curiosity as to how the mind works as well as a readily apparent aversion for pat answers. He has won my approval with his closing advice: "Embrace uncertainty. Hard problems rarely have easy solutions."
The book is full of recent basic science and psychology observations that serve as steppingstones for broader understanding of how decisions arise. Take, for example, his section on dopamine neurons - those brain reward system cells that generate the sense of pleasure. Recent studies show that these neurons also act as "prediction neurons." Train a monkey to associate the sound of a bell with getting a drink of juice. Initially, these neurons will fire as soon as the monkey receives the juice. But after a few experimental trials, the neurons will fire when the monkey hears the bell, but before the juice is delivered.
