On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits by Wray Herbert
I’ve read so much pop science on neurology that I’m always skeptical that a book will surprise and delight me with new information, and I’m delighted to say that this book does. Herbert wins by focusing on heuristics, an important idea that is usually touched on in any books that discuss how people think but rarely to this extent.
Heuristics affect people in every way from dieting to political game theory. You may have heard of this as “priming” and the most commonly repeated study is the one where people are “primed” with words about age and senility, and end up walking slower as a result. Apparently, we’re even more malleable than that. Tired people overestimate the slope of hills, and every person consistently over-estimates how happy or how sad they will be as a result of events in their life.
I recommend this for people who like pop science books on neurology/psychology. It’s also a good book for people who might be interested in psychology and want something that’s easy to understand yet backed up with a generous amount of data.
