Two Books about Our Bungled Brains
A Review by Doug Brown
Our brains like to think they are flawless, unbiased masters of precision, but the reality is sadly not so. We form conclusions and beliefs with little or no reason and then seek evidence which supports the conclusions we've already reached. Our brains perceive the world in ways that make ourselves look better than others. Most people think they are above average in intelligence (and we think we're all better drivers than everyone else, too) which logically cannot be true. Thomas Kida and Cordelia Fine take on the brain with different approaches. Don't Believe Everything You Think is more about flaws in our ability to reason and recall, whereas A Mind of Its Own leans more toward emotional biases. Thus, the two books complement each other nicely.
Don't Believe Everything You Think is aimed at helping people to be more skeptical. Kida points out that skeptical doesn't mean cynical; it simply means analyzing the evidence before making up one's mind. It sounds simple, but as Kida (and Fine) detail, it runs counter to how our brains want to function. Here are Kida's six basic mistakes our brains make (this isn't giving anything away -- they are on the cover of the book):
- We prefer stories to statistics
- We seek to confirm, not to question our ideas
- We rarely appreciate the role of chance and coincidence in shaping events
- We sometimes misperceive the world around us
- We tend to oversimplify our thinking
- We have faulty memories
Kida cites many studies to support these notions, and provides many examples of how our brains want to take the easy road. Despite the potential for this being a dry pedagogical book, Don't Believe Everything You Think is well-organized and written in an easy, lucid style.
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