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A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives
"Provocative enough to make you start questioning your each and every action."� Entertainment Weekly The brain's power is confirmed and touted every day in new studies and research. And yet we tend to take our brains for granted, without suspecting that those masses of hard-working neurons might not always be working for us. Cordelia Fine introduces us to a brain we might not want to meet, a brain with a mind of its own. She illustrates the brain's tendency toward self-delusion as she explores how the mind defends and glorifies the ego by twisting and warping our perceptions. Our brains employ a slew of inborn mind-bugs and prejudices, from hindsight bias to unrealistic optimism, from moral excuse-making to wishful thinking―all designed to prevent us from seeing the truth about the world and the people around us, and about ourselves.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 12, 2005
161 people are currently reading
8,449 people want to read
About the author
Cordelia Fine
7books453followersCordelia Fine is a prize winning author and academic. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Scientific American, and Times Literary supplement. Cordelia won the Royal Society Science Book Prize in 2017, and was awarded the 2018 Edinburgh Medal, which honors men and women of science who have made a significant contribution to the understanding and well-being of humanity. In 2023 she was named a 'living legend' by The Australian newspaper.
Cordelia has a PhD in Psychology from University College London and is Professor in the History & Philosophy of Science program at the University of Melbourne.
Photo credit: Peter Casamento
Cordelia has a PhD in Psychology from University College London and is Professor in the History & Philosophy of Science program at the University of Melbourne.
Photo credit: Peter Casamento
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 146 reviews
February 13, 2015
If I’d read this about five years ago this would have been quite a different review. Don’t get me wrong, after reading her Delusions of Gender there is nothing, NOTHING Ms Fine could do that I wouldn’t think was potentially god-like. Delusions is an amazing book and you ought to read it first, before this one, in fact, before just about any other book. It is a necessary book in ways this one isn’t. I mean that kindly � but there are lots of other books on this topic, many at least as good, but there are no other books I’ve read on how gender is constructed in our societies from a scientific perspective that hold a candle to Delusions of Gender. Like I said, it is a must read.
Now, a couple of weeks ago I found out that the Milgram experiments were involved in, well, what some people might call ‘data manipulation� and to such an extent that it really calls into question the entire import of these experiments to social science. This is a worthwhile link to have a wee look at:
It seems we are not quite as likely to be Nazi prison guards as was originally assumed, and I, for one, am rather pleased this is the case. We humans are capable of the most god-awful abuses and nastinesses � and worse � but I am much happier knowing that such unthinking ‘follow the leader� behaviours aren’t nearly as all-pervasive as Milgram seemed to show. We may not have cause for much hope about humanity, but utter despair may yet prove to be somewhat of an over-reaction too.
The part of this book, then, that must be read with the above article in mind is the part that deals with Milgram.
One of the things that is repeatedly said in this book is that we are pretty hopeless at knowing our own true motivations. We get fooled far too often and often by ourselves. Part of the reason for this is that we have limited ways in which our bodies can respond to inputs. She talks about her sweaty palms while being nervous, for example � but also racing hearts and shortage of breath, that sort of thing. The problem arises, not so much in ‘real� life, but rather in psychological tests where your emotions can be manipulated in certain ways without your conscious knowledge and then, when you are asked to explain why you might be feeling a certain way, the shrink can smugly smile knowing they are right and you are wrong. My favourite example isn’t in this book, but the couple of examples given here are interesting too. My favourite is about people who are hypnotised and told that when they wake up they won’t remember anything about what has been said to them, but when someone says “chicken� they will fall to the ground. They are then woken up (or whatever one does when one brings hypnotised people back from being hypnotised) and the conversation starts. It is going along nicely until someone says that they had a chicken sandwich for lunch and the stooge � I mean, psychology assessment victim/subject/object of derision � finds themselves on the ground. So far, the script has gone pretty much as the writer intended. But now comes the interesting bit. They ask said stooge/victim why they are on the floor. Not a completely unreasonable question in normal circumstances. What very rarely happens is that said stooge says, “Frig, no idea � I must be completely nuts�. Rather, they generally come up with a ‘reason� for what, we can only assume, must seem even to them like completely inexplicable behaviour. They’ll say something like, ‘I’ve been thinking of getting some new carpet and …� or “Oh, sorry, I felt a little faint for a second there� or “Jesus, where did you get those shoes?�. The point is, as with all such stories, there is a clear cause and there is a clear effect and only the expert can tell you which is which.
And there is my problem with this stuff. One of the questions she asks a few times during the book is basically, how can you know you are in a relationship that you ought to be in when all of us are so crap at understanding our true motivations for doing anything?
In another recent review I talked about something a writer said about the difference between modernism and post-modernism. Modernism is based on the idea of radical doubt � it is the Sherlock Holmes perspective. Bad shit has gone down, there’s even a body to prove it, and someone is responsible for the dead body � there is a knife in its back, someone put it there. But they aren’t letting on that they did it and so it is up to Holmes, trusting no one, doubting everything, to try to figure out what happened and why. There is one truth, he is standing outside this particular world and looking in, and he will find that one true truth using all of his powers of pure deduction.
Post-modernism is more like Phillip Marlow, the Phillip Marlow in the Singing Detective that is. The story is far too complicated, the teller is drugged and incoherent, they are involved up to their eyeballs in the story so that there is no ‘outside� from which to look in, there isn’t one truth, the truth is relational and depends on who you are in the story and who you have spoken to and what you already know and what you have guessed, and the secrets you are keeping and the secrets no one is tell you, and the stuff you aren’t sure of, and also and mostly who you like and who you can’t stand. The truth isn’t one thing, it is very much situated and depends on endless very personal accidents. It isn’t that the truth isn’t ‘objective�, it is just that it is ‘relative�.
So, while I do see that there is a causal relationship between the guy being hypnotised and someone saying chicken and him ending up on the ground, I’m not nearly so sure this means the ‘truth� of this situation is the god-like perspective of the shrink. Yep, when you get to set up the rules of the game you get to see ‘causality� � but in life you don’t get this perspective or to set up the rules in quite that same way. So, how are we going to use this particular piece of evidence of human frailty? If it is just to tell us that we are all stuffed in the head, well, you know, that isn’t really news to most of us. The problem with such experiments is that they reinforce the idea that there is a single ‘truth� and that somehow we must go looking for that. But that is exactly the wrong lesson here. A much better lesson is that we are self-interested pricks and spend far too much time finding ways to protect our rather delicate egos. That, actually, can mostly be a good thing, but sometimes it is a really, really bad thing. Like when we ‘don’t try� to do something well so we can have an excuse for failure (well, I didn’t really try). But there are very few things about us that are unequivocally good or bad. The problem is that everything is situated, it only makes sense from within the situation, and as such it is really hard to offer general advice when we live in the particular.
That said, the bits of this that I really liked were the bits I’ve been obsessing over for nearly a decade now. Firstly, stereotype threat. Short version � people live down to the expectations of the social stigmas they are confined within. Stereotypes matter because they do damage to people by stuffing them in boxes they struggle to get back out of. This book provides as good a summary of stereotype threat as anything else I’ve read � although, really, read Claude Steele’s book. He’s the guy who did much of the original research into this and his book is at least as easy a read as this one.
This book is a bit more jokey than Delusions of Gender � I really don’t mind that, I quite like people being amusing and there were a couple of times when she even made me laugh. But, I suspect some people might find this a bit off-putting. The stereotype is that serious books need to be serious � more’s the pity, I think, but you’ve been warned, this book might amuse you.
Now, I can hear you already � McCandless, you’ve whinged about the book the whole way through your review and yet you’ve given it five stars � what is going on? Well, I still think this is a really interesting book and despite my reservations about what these sorts of books can really tell us or the help they can really provide us, these are still interesting experiments and they, surely, tell us something about what it is to be human. And if reading a book like this gets you to not be a racist shit � even once � that’s got to be a good thing. Even if it only makes you pause before being racist, even that is a good thing.
Like I said, if you haven’t read a book like this before, this is a pretty good place to start. Other books you might find interesting are on my ‘Behavioural Economics� shelf.
Now, a couple of weeks ago I found out that the Milgram experiments were involved in, well, what some people might call ‘data manipulation� and to such an extent that it really calls into question the entire import of these experiments to social science. This is a worthwhile link to have a wee look at:
It seems we are not quite as likely to be Nazi prison guards as was originally assumed, and I, for one, am rather pleased this is the case. We humans are capable of the most god-awful abuses and nastinesses � and worse � but I am much happier knowing that such unthinking ‘follow the leader� behaviours aren’t nearly as all-pervasive as Milgram seemed to show. We may not have cause for much hope about humanity, but utter despair may yet prove to be somewhat of an over-reaction too.
The part of this book, then, that must be read with the above article in mind is the part that deals with Milgram.
One of the things that is repeatedly said in this book is that we are pretty hopeless at knowing our own true motivations. We get fooled far too often and often by ourselves. Part of the reason for this is that we have limited ways in which our bodies can respond to inputs. She talks about her sweaty palms while being nervous, for example � but also racing hearts and shortage of breath, that sort of thing. The problem arises, not so much in ‘real� life, but rather in psychological tests where your emotions can be manipulated in certain ways without your conscious knowledge and then, when you are asked to explain why you might be feeling a certain way, the shrink can smugly smile knowing they are right and you are wrong. My favourite example isn’t in this book, but the couple of examples given here are interesting too. My favourite is about people who are hypnotised and told that when they wake up they won’t remember anything about what has been said to them, but when someone says “chicken� they will fall to the ground. They are then woken up (or whatever one does when one brings hypnotised people back from being hypnotised) and the conversation starts. It is going along nicely until someone says that they had a chicken sandwich for lunch and the stooge � I mean, psychology assessment victim/subject/object of derision � finds themselves on the ground. So far, the script has gone pretty much as the writer intended. But now comes the interesting bit. They ask said stooge/victim why they are on the floor. Not a completely unreasonable question in normal circumstances. What very rarely happens is that said stooge says, “Frig, no idea � I must be completely nuts�. Rather, they generally come up with a ‘reason� for what, we can only assume, must seem even to them like completely inexplicable behaviour. They’ll say something like, ‘I’ve been thinking of getting some new carpet and …� or “Oh, sorry, I felt a little faint for a second there� or “Jesus, where did you get those shoes?�. The point is, as with all such stories, there is a clear cause and there is a clear effect and only the expert can tell you which is which.
And there is my problem with this stuff. One of the questions she asks a few times during the book is basically, how can you know you are in a relationship that you ought to be in when all of us are so crap at understanding our true motivations for doing anything?
In another recent review I talked about something a writer said about the difference between modernism and post-modernism. Modernism is based on the idea of radical doubt � it is the Sherlock Holmes perspective. Bad shit has gone down, there’s even a body to prove it, and someone is responsible for the dead body � there is a knife in its back, someone put it there. But they aren’t letting on that they did it and so it is up to Holmes, trusting no one, doubting everything, to try to figure out what happened and why. There is one truth, he is standing outside this particular world and looking in, and he will find that one true truth using all of his powers of pure deduction.
Post-modernism is more like Phillip Marlow, the Phillip Marlow in the Singing Detective that is. The story is far too complicated, the teller is drugged and incoherent, they are involved up to their eyeballs in the story so that there is no ‘outside� from which to look in, there isn’t one truth, the truth is relational and depends on who you are in the story and who you have spoken to and what you already know and what you have guessed, and the secrets you are keeping and the secrets no one is tell you, and the stuff you aren’t sure of, and also and mostly who you like and who you can’t stand. The truth isn’t one thing, it is very much situated and depends on endless very personal accidents. It isn’t that the truth isn’t ‘objective�, it is just that it is ‘relative�.
So, while I do see that there is a causal relationship between the guy being hypnotised and someone saying chicken and him ending up on the ground, I’m not nearly so sure this means the ‘truth� of this situation is the god-like perspective of the shrink. Yep, when you get to set up the rules of the game you get to see ‘causality� � but in life you don’t get this perspective or to set up the rules in quite that same way. So, how are we going to use this particular piece of evidence of human frailty? If it is just to tell us that we are all stuffed in the head, well, you know, that isn’t really news to most of us. The problem with such experiments is that they reinforce the idea that there is a single ‘truth� and that somehow we must go looking for that. But that is exactly the wrong lesson here. A much better lesson is that we are self-interested pricks and spend far too much time finding ways to protect our rather delicate egos. That, actually, can mostly be a good thing, but sometimes it is a really, really bad thing. Like when we ‘don’t try� to do something well so we can have an excuse for failure (well, I didn’t really try). But there are very few things about us that are unequivocally good or bad. The problem is that everything is situated, it only makes sense from within the situation, and as such it is really hard to offer general advice when we live in the particular.
That said, the bits of this that I really liked were the bits I’ve been obsessing over for nearly a decade now. Firstly, stereotype threat. Short version � people live down to the expectations of the social stigmas they are confined within. Stereotypes matter because they do damage to people by stuffing them in boxes they struggle to get back out of. This book provides as good a summary of stereotype threat as anything else I’ve read � although, really, read Claude Steele’s book. He’s the guy who did much of the original research into this and his book is at least as easy a read as this one.
This book is a bit more jokey than Delusions of Gender � I really don’t mind that, I quite like people being amusing and there were a couple of times when she even made me laugh. But, I suspect some people might find this a bit off-putting. The stereotype is that serious books need to be serious � more’s the pity, I think, but you’ve been warned, this book might amuse you.
Now, I can hear you already � McCandless, you’ve whinged about the book the whole way through your review and yet you’ve given it five stars � what is going on? Well, I still think this is a really interesting book and despite my reservations about what these sorts of books can really tell us or the help they can really provide us, these are still interesting experiments and they, surely, tell us something about what it is to be human. And if reading a book like this gets you to not be a racist shit � even once � that’s got to be a good thing. Even if it only makes you pause before being racist, even that is a good thing.
Like I said, if you haven’t read a book like this before, this is a pretty good place to start. Other books you might find interesting are on my ‘Behavioural Economics� shelf.
December 10, 2007
I’ve come to see this book as a handy little owner’s manual for anyone with a brain. In an entertaining and highly readable style, Cordelia Fine has synthesized a host of cognitive research to show that our minds often give us a much more distorted picture of reality than any of us would imagine. Our brains, it seems, are masters of self-deception, engaging in a whole host of hidden activities designed to protect both our fragile egos and our pre-existing beliefs.
While there are benefits to be gained from these distortions, Fine also spells out in detail the price that we pay when we allow our brain to keep us comfortably insulated from information that might otherwise change our minds. In one particularly compelling example, Fine discusses how a doctor discovered that the standard pre-natal practice of giving x-rays to pregnant women doubled the risk that the fetus would go on to develop childhood cancer. Her findings, however, were completely dismissed for decades and millions of children were unnecessarily exposed to x-rays while advocates of the procedure vigorously denied her claims. The techniques these doctors used to defend x-rays in the face of mounting evidence against them shows just how dangerous these self-deceptions can be, not just to us personally, but also to humanity as a whole.
While generally light in tone, Fine’s book is very comprehensive in that each chapter outlines a specific technique of distortion used in the brain, discusses the research used to discover that process, and talks about the impact of that technique in everyday life. In “The Deluded Brain,� Fine reveals research that shows how we will rewrite personal history in order to fit with our expectations. This chapter has major implications for anyone who has ever spent a lot of money on self-help. In “The Immoral Brain,� Fine reveals the part of us that is programmed to blame others for their misfortunes so that we might feel less fear that those same misfortunes could befall us. This chapter goes a long way towards explaining how die-hard believers in “The Secret� could adopt the morally reprehensible position that the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks “attracted� their misfortune through their own negative thinking.
While it can be disturbing to realize just how far removed from reality we often are, Fine also provides information on how we can use our brains� natural tendencies to overcome some of its more damaging handicaps. Her examination of how disciplined dieters transcend temptation and how those who work with the disadvantaged combat the brain’s natural inclination towards bigoted stereotypes show that we do not, in fact, have to be at the mercy of our unconscious processes. At a time when the national debate on controversial issues often seems to be more about who can shout the loudest than genuinely trying to come to an understanding of opposing positions, I think pretty much everyone could benefit from reading this book.
While there are benefits to be gained from these distortions, Fine also spells out in detail the price that we pay when we allow our brain to keep us comfortably insulated from information that might otherwise change our minds. In one particularly compelling example, Fine discusses how a doctor discovered that the standard pre-natal practice of giving x-rays to pregnant women doubled the risk that the fetus would go on to develop childhood cancer. Her findings, however, were completely dismissed for decades and millions of children were unnecessarily exposed to x-rays while advocates of the procedure vigorously denied her claims. The techniques these doctors used to defend x-rays in the face of mounting evidence against them shows just how dangerous these self-deceptions can be, not just to us personally, but also to humanity as a whole.
While generally light in tone, Fine’s book is very comprehensive in that each chapter outlines a specific technique of distortion used in the brain, discusses the research used to discover that process, and talks about the impact of that technique in everyday life. In “The Deluded Brain,� Fine reveals research that shows how we will rewrite personal history in order to fit with our expectations. This chapter has major implications for anyone who has ever spent a lot of money on self-help. In “The Immoral Brain,� Fine reveals the part of us that is programmed to blame others for their misfortunes so that we might feel less fear that those same misfortunes could befall us. This chapter goes a long way towards explaining how die-hard believers in “The Secret� could adopt the morally reprehensible position that the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks “attracted� their misfortune through their own negative thinking.
While it can be disturbing to realize just how far removed from reality we often are, Fine also provides information on how we can use our brains� natural tendencies to overcome some of its more damaging handicaps. Her examination of how disciplined dieters transcend temptation and how those who work with the disadvantaged combat the brain’s natural inclination towards bigoted stereotypes show that we do not, in fact, have to be at the mercy of our unconscious processes. At a time when the national debate on controversial issues often seems to be more about who can shout the loudest than genuinely trying to come to an understanding of opposing positions, I think pretty much everyone could benefit from reading this book.
March 19, 2017
As my friend Lena writes in of this book:
Those who have already read extensively on this topic might not find much new here, though. On the other hand, the book will be easy to breeze through compared to those tomes that investigate the neurochemical or philosophical aspects of how these crazy brains of ours work. Fine provides plenty of resources via her endnotes, but focuses on the "what's strange about this picture?" and leaves the "why does it work like that?" for other authors.
She splits her book into eight chapters:
» The Vain Brain: For a softer, kinder reality
» The Emotional Brain: Sweaty fingers in all the pies
» The Immoral Brain: The terrible toddler within
» The Deluded Brain: A slapdash approach to the truth
» The Pigheaded Brain: Loyalty a step too far
» The Secretive Brain: Exposing the guile of the mental butler
» The Weak-willed Brain: The prima donna within
» The Bigoted Brain: "Thug... tart... slob... nerd... airhead"
And so she covers the various ways thebrain
mind
brain
refuses to do what a rationalist might expect it to be doing. There were a few surprises—my personal favorite cognitive bias, the
, was never covered, which is a tragedy: it is such a fun and important phenomena. A few other cognitive biases were mentioned haphazardly in the "deluded" section; this makes sense, since they are way we innocently misapprehend what our senses tell us. But pathological psychiatric delusions were also covered in that chapter. That highlights their similarities, but does disservice to the kind of simply-plain-wrong thinking the brain is wired for. That our unreasoning behavior upon exposure to the word "free" (see ) has roots akin to the is important, but popular culture and mass media entertainment mean that the former has ramifications that deserve a lot more attention. I guess this just isn't the book for it, but it would have been nice to see more attention paid to how a lack of rationality deals very poorly with a consumer culture.
A few highlights:
OK, one more issue. Fine mentions this only briefly at 144ff, but I've got a bee in my bonnet.
In the past few decades neurologists have discovered the puzzling fact that they can detect the beginnings of decisions in the brain before the person themselves has made the decision.
In the archetypal example: the subject is told to tap one of their fingers on the table at any time in the next minute or so, and to carefully note the position of a clock hand when they've decided what to do.
We would expect: brain activity starts peaking somewhere in the "consciousness" portions of the brain a tiny but significant amount of time before the person thinks "now!", followed by some kind of trickling of brain activity towards the movement portions of the brain (motor cortex), which then tells the finger to move.
But the researchers can see the decision being made in the brain up to one-third of a second before the person claims they even made it!
So what we get: a kind of brain activity now called the "readiness potential" is seen which indicates what decision has been made, then a bit later the conscious mind says "Now!", and then the motor cortex starts to get involved.
So is this a big deal? Well, it has been for some folks. Some psychologist/philosophers have decided that we have no free will, because the conscious mind isn't doing the choosing (see and ). From Wikipedia: "Libet's experiments suggest that unconscious processes in the brain are the true initiator of volitional acts, and free will therefore plays no part in their initiation." Apparently the late Libet and his buddies think there is something else in our brains besides "us" making our decisions. I don't know about you, but I consider "me" to include the whole triad—id, ego and superego. The fact that my consciousness is more of a back-seat narrator than the actual driver comes as something of a surprise, but the driver is still somewhere up there in my gray matter. Libet simply got confused because he has faith in the reality of "consciousness" as an ontological primitive. Geez, its stuff like this that makes one think that scientists have no common sense.
Excellent book. Read it.
"I’ve come to see this book as a handy little owner’s manual for anyone with a brain. In an entertaining and highly readable style, Cordelia Fine has synthesized a host of cognitive research to show that our minds often give us a much more distorted picture of reality than any of us would imagine."I'd agree. Furthermore, it is a nice introductory text to anyone curious about this exploding field of "Popular Cognition" (is there a magazine yet?). The author, despite her PhD in Psychology, writes in a casual and breezy manner. While I think the dust-cover blurb describing this as "rip-roaringly funny" is a bit hyperbolic, the prose is definitely amusing—in a way. She seemed a bit like a more restrained version of ; some of that same silliness, and plentiful use of her husband as a long suffering foil for her wit, but not descending to Roach's often juvenile depths.
Those who have already read extensively on this topic might not find much new here, though. On the other hand, the book will be easy to breeze through compared to those tomes that investigate the neurochemical or philosophical aspects of how these crazy brains of ours work. Fine provides plenty of resources via her endnotes, but focuses on the "what's strange about this picture?" and leaves the "why does it work like that?" for other authors.
She splits her book into eight chapters:
» The Vain Brain: For a softer, kinder reality
» The Emotional Brain: Sweaty fingers in all the pies
» The Immoral Brain: The terrible toddler within
» The Deluded Brain: A slapdash approach to the truth
» The Pigheaded Brain: Loyalty a step too far
» The Secretive Brain: Exposing the guile of the mental butler
» The Weak-willed Brain: The prima donna within
» The Bigoted Brain: "Thug... tart... slob... nerd... airhead"
And so she covers the various ways the
A few highlights:
You probably already knew this, but: first, you give a group of school children a fake test, then arbitrarily choose a few of those students as showing more "intellectual potential". Tell the teacher which ones did well, and those students will magically start doing better. You don't need to tell the students themselves: the teacher will start treating them differently, and that in combination with the student's response will be sufficient (p. 113).
More on schoolkids: a group of students were provided with training on how to solve a difficult math problem. Half of 'em got a clear and helpful video presentation, the other half got one that was deliberately confusing which left them floundering. No surprise that the second half did less well; also, probably not much of a surprise that they blamed themselves. They concluded they were simply inept with numbers. Bigger surprise: the lack of confidence persisted even after the researchers showed them the difference between the two videos and explained the trick. Even three weeks later, their lack of confidence left them less interested than their counterparts in signing up for similar math classes (p. 117).
Or: "a woman’s expectations for how her relationship will turn out, for example, may ‘create her own reality�": if she feels anxious about her partner's commitment and is preoccupied with the possibility of rejection, she will often behaving more cantankerously when minor conflicts do arise. According to one study, the relationships of these "rejection-sensitive women" were nearly three times more likely to fail, even in comparison to women who were of equal health and happiness (p. 114. Sound sexist? Sorry—that seems to be the way the studies Fine cited were set up).
If someone were to tell you "Congressman Smith has never been accused of pedophilia", would that make you more likely to believe the opposite? Sure: if your mental capacity is being taxed, leaving you too distracted to consider the impact of the "never", your brain will happily lump together the congressman and the accusation without regard to the actual truth-value of the statement. So pre-trial publicity is often harmful to the reputation of the accused regardless of the facts (p. 122).
If you want to manipulate your fellow players in a game Trivial Pursuit, trigger their "schemas" beforehand. This is the network of concepts that relate to one another in a kind of web. Say "rice" and the concept of "Asian" will be closer to consciousness; say "elderly" even if people don't think "forgetful", the idea will be more likely to be put into play by the subconscious. When a schema is about a group of people, we call it a stereotype, but from the brain's point of view it is just a way of saving time and energy. So talk to your own teammates before the game starts and off-handedly mention words like "professor"; chat separately with the other team and talk about the "Dumb and Dumber" movies, or Jim Varney, or even Alzheimer's. Don't let any of them know what you're doing: folks that know their schemas are being activated will discount them (p. 137).
OK, one more issue. Fine mentions this only briefly at 144ff, but I've got a bee in my bonnet.
In the past few decades neurologists have discovered the puzzling fact that they can detect the beginnings of decisions in the brain before the person themselves has made the decision.
In the archetypal example: the subject is told to tap one of their fingers on the table at any time in the next minute or so, and to carefully note the position of a clock hand when they've decided what to do.
We would expect: brain activity starts peaking somewhere in the "consciousness" portions of the brain a tiny but significant amount of time before the person thinks "now!", followed by some kind of trickling of brain activity towards the movement portions of the brain (motor cortex), which then tells the finger to move.
But the researchers can see the decision being made in the brain up to one-third of a second before the person claims they even made it!
So what we get: a kind of brain activity now called the "readiness potential" is seen which indicates what decision has been made, then a bit later the conscious mind says "Now!", and then the motor cortex starts to get involved.
So is this a big deal? Well, it has been for some folks. Some psychologist/philosophers have decided that we have no free will, because the conscious mind isn't doing the choosing (see and ). From Wikipedia: "Libet's experiments suggest that unconscious processes in the brain are the true initiator of volitional acts, and free will therefore plays no part in their initiation." Apparently the late Libet and his buddies think there is something else in our brains besides "us" making our decisions. I don't know about you, but I consider "me" to include the whole triad—id, ego and superego. The fact that my consciousness is more of a back-seat narrator than the actual driver comes as something of a surprise, but the driver is still somewhere up there in my gray matter. Libet simply got confused because he has faith in the reality of "consciousness" as an ontological primitive. Geez, its stuff like this that makes one think that scientists have no common sense.
Excellent book. Read it.
May 24, 2014
If you've read much on the subject, this doesn't really bring anything new to the table, but it's presented in a readable, well-organised format, meticulously footnoted, and adopts a pretty light tone. If you're anything like me, you'll smile in recognition of some of the things she says -- in the middle of describing the brain's unreliability, Fine points out that precisely in line with what she's saying, your brain is probably insisting you're different. It doesn't apply to you. You'd ignore the researcher in the obedience to authority experiments, you can see through your brain's attempts to make you believe you're better than you are.
(And if you're honest, you'll admit at this point that you do want to think you're different. My favourite bit was putting some of this together. For example, when it talked about experiments where people were told that extroverts do better at something, they went through their memories and pulled out only ones that corresponded with an extroverted image of themselves. On the other hand, I ruefully thought about all the ways I am a hopeless introvert -- thereby illustrating one of the brain's ways of protecting itself from failure, by providing myself with an excuse, i.e. 'if I'm less successful, it's because I'm not extroverted'.)
Not revelatory, but pretty fun.
(And if you're honest, you'll admit at this point that you do want to think you're different. My favourite bit was putting some of this together. For example, when it talked about experiments where people were told that extroverts do better at something, they went through their memories and pulled out only ones that corresponded with an extroverted image of themselves. On the other hand, I ruefully thought about all the ways I am a hopeless introvert -- thereby illustrating one of the brain's ways of protecting itself from failure, by providing myself with an excuse, i.e. 'if I'm less successful, it's because I'm not extroverted'.)
Not revelatory, but pretty fun.
January 11, 2014
A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives is a book about how the human mind is error-riddled, slapdash, and barely adequate to its task. Unable to deal with the reality that terrible things happen for no reason and with no way to anticipate them, we assume that anyone suffering from misfortunate must have done something to deserve it. Before an unlikely disaster we are willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, but afterwards we believe that of course they should have prepared for the miniscule chance that the bridge would collapse and that they're negligent in the extreme for not doing so. Our lives are mostly influenced by chance and the actions of other people, but when asked, we confidently assert that our successes are the result of our own hard work and good sense. What's more, when things go wrong for us we believe that it's the result of external circumstances impeding our actions, but when they go wrong for other people we breezily assume that it's due to their personality flaws.
Emotions poison all our attempts to think rationally or critically about anything. Indeed, people who have suffered specific damage to the emotional centers of their brains are incapable of making decisions, and will spend hours agonizing over what tie to wear in the morning or whether to eat their spaghetti with only a fork or with a fork and a spoon. We give more consideration to the decisions and opinions of people we like and less to those of people we dislike, regardless of the content of those opinions. We frequently transfer our feelings from one subject to something completely unrelated. Indeed, the physical symptoms of arousal are the same regardless of the cause, and its up to the brain to interpret it based on our emotional state, which is laughably prone to errors.
Our opinions change on a dime, and we're liable to like something when it's called by one name and then turn around and dislike it when it's called another. Statements are easily believable no matter their content, and even a blatant denial of something will stick in our memory and may end up leaving us more likely to believe the inverse of the denial. We resort to stereotypes at the drop of a hat, and even seeing words related to the stereotype in a totally unrelated context can make us racist or sexist toward our fellows in subsequent interactions.
Finally, you who are reading this are at least . And despite everything previously mentioned, we think that we're more reasonable, less gullible, more capable, and less culpable than others.
I could go on.
Also, I'm naturally a pessimist, so of course the message I took from the book is one of a fundamental human incompetence and depravity. It's close enough to what I believed anyway that my brain took the easy way out of just confirming my existing prejudices instead of bothering to actually update the schema I use to look at the world.
Okay, that whole section was a bit flippant, but it is a pretty good summary of the book. The thing is, though, I basically felt the whole time I was reading A Mind of Its Own that it was just a more colloquial and less unified version of . has a much breezier writing style with a lot more anecdotes, but it's less referential. Sure, there are plenty of footnotes, but one thing that annoyed me the whole time I was reading was that she never used the actual name for most of the psychological concepts she talks about. She mentions how people assume their own flaws are due to external causes but others' are due to internal ones without ever saying the words , for example. The closest she comes is mentioning the belief in a just world without ever adding hypothesis to the end of it.
Thinking, Fast and Slow also does a better job of explaining why all this occurs in the first place, whereas A Mind of Its Own reads more like a eulogy for the concept of the rational thinker, which I think is another reason I preferred it. The former has a hypothesis about the workings of the brain that binds the whole book together and which keeps returning to as he writes, but the latter is mostly just a list of everything that's wrong with you that you might not even have known about. They cover a lot of the same ground, but Thinking, Fast and Slow provides a structure for it all and A Mind of Its Own is just a bullet-pointed list.
A Mind of Its Own isn't a bad book, but if you have to read one book about the cognitive distortions our brain throws up every day, read Thinking, Fast and Slow instead.
Emotions poison all our attempts to think rationally or critically about anything. Indeed, people who have suffered specific damage to the emotional centers of their brains are incapable of making decisions, and will spend hours agonizing over what tie to wear in the morning or whether to eat their spaghetti with only a fork or with a fork and a spoon. We give more consideration to the decisions and opinions of people we like and less to those of people we dislike, regardless of the content of those opinions. We frequently transfer our feelings from one subject to something completely unrelated. Indeed, the physical symptoms of arousal are the same regardless of the cause, and its up to the brain to interpret it based on our emotional state, which is laughably prone to errors.
Our opinions change on a dime, and we're liable to like something when it's called by one name and then turn around and dislike it when it's called another. Statements are easily believable no matter their content, and even a blatant denial of something will stick in our memory and may end up leaving us more likely to believe the inverse of the denial. We resort to stereotypes at the drop of a hat, and even seeing words related to the stereotype in a totally unrelated context can make us racist or sexist toward our fellows in subsequent interactions.
Finally, you who are reading this are at least . And despite everything previously mentioned, we think that we're more reasonable, less gullible, more capable, and less culpable than others.
I could go on.
Also, I'm naturally a pessimist, so of course the message I took from the book is one of a fundamental human incompetence and depravity. It's close enough to what I believed anyway that my brain took the easy way out of just confirming my existing prejudices instead of bothering to actually update the schema I use to look at the world.
Okay, that whole section was a bit flippant, but it is a pretty good summary of the book. The thing is, though, I basically felt the whole time I was reading A Mind of Its Own that it was just a more colloquial and less unified version of . has a much breezier writing style with a lot more anecdotes, but it's less referential. Sure, there are plenty of footnotes, but one thing that annoyed me the whole time I was reading was that she never used the actual name for most of the psychological concepts she talks about. She mentions how people assume their own flaws are due to external causes but others' are due to internal ones without ever saying the words , for example. The closest she comes is mentioning the belief in a just world without ever adding hypothesis to the end of it.
Thinking, Fast and Slow also does a better job of explaining why all this occurs in the first place, whereas A Mind of Its Own reads more like a eulogy for the concept of the rational thinker, which I think is another reason I preferred it. The former has a hypothesis about the workings of the brain that binds the whole book together and which keeps returning to as he writes, but the latter is mostly just a list of everything that's wrong with you that you might not even have known about. They cover a lot of the same ground, but Thinking, Fast and Slow provides a structure for it all and A Mind of Its Own is just a bullet-pointed list.
A Mind of Its Own isn't a bad book, but if you have to read one book about the cognitive distortions our brain throws up every day, read Thinking, Fast and Slow instead.
October 15, 2018
عقل يعمل بذاته : كيف يمارس عقلك التشويه والخداع
كورديليا فاين
...................
تعتقد أنك طالما تتبع قواعد المنطق في التفكير أن تفكيرك صحيح بعيد عن الخطأ، لكن للأسف اعتقادك غير صحيح، فالعقل لا يعمل تابعا لصاحبة، العقل ليس حياديا بصورة مطلقة، بل له ما يشبه الذاتية المستقلة عن صاحبه، وقد يخدعه ويوهمه بأنه يعمل في طريق الصواب لكنه في حقيقة الأمر يمشي في الطريق الخطأ.
تنبع المشكلة من أن عقلنا يتصرف كمحام ذكي يبحث عن الأدلة لكي يدعم قضية موكله، بدلا من أن يتصرف كهيئة محلفين تبحث عن الحقيقة. عقلك يتبع هواك غالبا ولا يتبع الحيادية المطلقة، الحيادية المطلقة غير موجودة في الدنيا أصلا.
في الحقيقة إنه لا توجد حيادية حتي في التفكير بينك وبين نفسك فمخك القاسي لا يستحق ثقتك إطلاقا؛ حيث أن له بعض العادات المريبة التي تشوه الحقائق. حتي ذاكرتك لا تستحق ثقتك المطلقة فغالبا ما تعد الذاكرة السكرتيرة شديدة الحماسة التي تساعد في هذه العملية عن طريق إخفاء أو إتلاف الملفات التي تحوي معلومات غير مرغوبة. نحن لا نجرؤ علي أن نلقي نظرة إلا عندما نمزق ما يكفي من الأمور. أنت تريد وعقلك يفعل ما تري��، ويوجه الدنيا حولك ليريك ما تريد، لا ليريك الحقيقة.
في الحقيقة قد تعتقد أن عقلك لا يستحق ثقتك لأنه يخدعك، وقد تظن أن العقل دوره في الحياة سلبي لا يستحق الثقة، وقد ترتبك لأن دور العقل في الحياة عظيم جدا خاصة في عصر العلم، لكن في الحقيقة أيضا أن هذا الخداع له فائدته في حياتك اليومية، مخك المغرور قد يخفي عنك بعض الحقائق ويوهمك بأنك صح والدنيا كلها خطأ، لا تغضب كثيرا من مخك المغرور لأنه يحميك من الحقيقة حينما تكون الحقيقة مؤذية. فهناك في الواقع فئة من الناس يقتربون من حقيقة أنفسهم والعالم بشكل غير معتاد؛ وتكون مفاهيمهم الذاتية أكثر توازنا، ويوكلون مسئوليات النجاح والفشل بمزيد من الإنصاف، وتكون توقعاتهم للمستقبل أكثر واقعية. وهؤلاء شهادة حية علي مخاطر معرفة الذات، فهم مصابون بالاكتئاب. ثمة سبب رائع آخر لأن تشكر مخك علي أكاذيبه البيضاء البسيطة؛ وهو كونها تجعلنا نحت��ل الحياة ذاتها.
جرب مرة واختبر عقلك، فكر في يوم رغبت فيه في فوز حزب في انتخابات، فأنت كلما رغبت بحماسة في أن يفوز حزبك، ارتفع تقديرك لاحتمالية نجاحه، من أين ينبع هذا الأمل الدائم إذن؟ قد يلعب المحامي الفاسد دورا في هذا، بأن يخبئ المعلومات غير المرغوبة ويحرفها.
مخك مغرور، عاطفي، لا أخلاقي، متوهم، عنيد، كتوم، ضعيف الإرادة، متعصب. كل هذه صفات لعقل لا تعتقد أنه سيعطيك رؤية صحيحة لما يحدث فعلا في العالم، إنه يعطيك رؤيته الخاصة، إنك تري ما تراه بعدما صبغه المخ بشخصيته ومعرفته.
..............
كورديليا فاين
...................
تعتقد أنك طالما تتبع قواعد المنطق في التفكير أن تفكيرك صحيح بعيد عن الخطأ، لكن للأسف اعتقادك غير صحيح، فالعقل لا يعمل تابعا لصاحبة، العقل ليس حياديا بصورة مطلقة، بل له ما يشبه الذاتية المستقلة عن صاحبه، وقد يخدعه ويوهمه بأنه يعمل في طريق الصواب لكنه في حقيقة الأمر يمشي في الطريق الخطأ.
تنبع المشكلة من أن عقلنا يتصرف كمحام ذكي يبحث عن الأدلة لكي يدعم قضية موكله، بدلا من أن يتصرف كهيئة محلفين تبحث عن الحقيقة. عقلك يتبع هواك غالبا ولا يتبع الحيادية المطلقة، الحيادية المطلقة غير موجودة في الدنيا أصلا.
في الحقيقة إنه لا توجد حيادية حتي في التفكير بينك وبين نفسك فمخك القاسي لا يستحق ثقتك إطلاقا؛ حيث أن له بعض العادات المريبة التي تشوه الحقائق. حتي ذاكرتك لا تستحق ثقتك المطلقة فغالبا ما تعد الذاكرة السكرتيرة شديدة الحماسة التي تساعد في هذه العملية عن طريق إخفاء أو إتلاف الملفات التي تحوي معلومات غير مرغوبة. نحن لا نجرؤ علي أن نلقي نظرة إلا عندما نمزق ما يكفي من الأمور. أنت تريد وعقلك يفعل ما تري��، ويوجه الدنيا حولك ليريك ما تريد، لا ليريك الحقيقة.
في الحقيقة قد تعتقد أن عقلك لا يستحق ثقتك لأنه يخدعك، وقد تظن أن العقل دوره في الحياة سلبي لا يستحق الثقة، وقد ترتبك لأن دور العقل في الحياة عظيم جدا خاصة في عصر العلم، لكن في الحقيقة أيضا أن هذا الخداع له فائدته في حياتك اليومية، مخك المغرور قد يخفي عنك بعض الحقائق ويوهمك بأنك صح والدنيا كلها خطأ، لا تغضب كثيرا من مخك المغرور لأنه يحميك من الحقيقة حينما تكون الحقيقة مؤذية. فهناك في الواقع فئة من الناس يقتربون من حقيقة أنفسهم والعالم بشكل غير معتاد؛ وتكون مفاهيمهم الذاتية أكثر توازنا، ويوكلون مسئوليات النجاح والفشل بمزيد من الإنصاف، وتكون توقعاتهم للمستقبل أكثر واقعية. وهؤلاء شهادة حية علي مخاطر معرفة الذات، فهم مصابون بالاكتئاب. ثمة سبب رائع آخر لأن تشكر مخك علي أكاذيبه البيضاء البسيطة؛ وهو كونها تجعلنا نحت��ل الحياة ذاتها.
جرب مرة واختبر عقلك، فكر في يوم رغبت فيه في فوز حزب في انتخابات، فأنت كلما رغبت بحماسة في أن يفوز حزبك، ارتفع تقديرك لاحتمالية نجاحه، من أين ينبع هذا الأمل الدائم إذن؟ قد يلعب المحامي الفاسد دورا في هذا، بأن يخبئ المعلومات غير المرغوبة ويحرفها.
مخك مغرور، عاطفي، لا أخلاقي، متوهم، عنيد، كتوم، ضعيف الإرادة، متعصب. كل هذه صفات لعقل لا تعتقد أنه سيعطيك رؤية صحيحة لما يحدث فعلا في العالم، إنه يعطيك رؤيته الخاصة، إنك تري ما تراه بعدما صبغه المخ بشخصيته ومعرفته.
..............
January 31, 2010
This is a fantastic little book. It's split into six chapters, each of which covers an aspect of how the brain deceives your conscious mind about how it works. It's astonishing just how subtle and well-engineered the deception is. One set of ideas I'd never seen before was about brain "schemas", or closely related concepts that get "filed away" together. The ways these can be triggered, and the effect they have on our decision making, may have a profound impact on how our lives play out.
Beyond the psychology content, this book is a great read because it's incredibly funny from start to finish. The author never fails to point out the irony or absurdity of the situations research has uncovered. But as she hints, you have to let the brain's attempts to deceive you continue, or you might well go insane. As such, a dose of humour is more than welcome.
Beyond the psychology content, this book is a great read because it's incredibly funny from start to finish. The author never fails to point out the irony or absurdity of the situations research has uncovered. But as she hints, you have to let the brain's attempts to deceive you continue, or you might well go insane. As such, a dose of humour is more than welcome.
August 3, 2020
A fascinating account of how we think we think. At times, what the author reveals about our unconscious brain activity is disconcerting to say the least. However, she does not fall into a "disresponsabilisation" attitude. Rather, she shows that through realising how our unconscious brain works, we can strive to counter our psychological sins and biases.
December 10, 2023
A re -read for me; I read this several years ago and it stuck with me, so I wanted to read it again. A lot to consider here--what I find particularly compelling are the passages that talk about what you can do to help shape how your brain does all the sort-of-subversive things it does. I do know, however, that there has been in the last few years some discussion of data manipulation and inability to replicate some sociology/psychology experiments, including one of the ones referenced in the book, which makes me curious which others may be no longer considered definitive.
April 18, 2019
[3.5]
I found this an easy enough read although there was not a great deal in here that I hadn't read somewhere else, at some point, before. Which is not necessarily a criticism of the book as such � after all, the vast majority of non-fiction books are not about subjects that nobody else has ever written about before, and the theme of what we don't realise or recognise about our own brains worked well enough (on the subject of which, I rather liked her throwaway remark late on in the book about the difference between people who 'treat their body as a temple' and those who regard it as 'primarily a hotel for their brain'.)
Nagging away in the background, though, I kept thinking 'what about the replicability crisis in psychology though?' How many of the experiments that she refers to in her book would stand up if someone tried to repeat them? And the trouble is, I don't really have the time or the energy to start trying to find out the answer to that question myself. I have a dim memory of having at some point read that some of the work around 'implicit bias' and prejudice didn't stand up to scrutiny but maybe I'm not remembering that correctly. Or maybe the studies I read about are not the ones that Fine is citing in her chapter on 'the Bigoted Brain'. And perhaps that points to a more fundamental issue which is that many of the kinds of experiments described in the book are enormously open to interpretation. Often, such social psychology experiments involve a kind of toy-town simplification of the real world, and knowing exactly what to make of the results us difficult. Even assuming that they are not enormously sensitive to context (an underlying problem with a lot of this research is that so many of the study subjects are WEIRD - Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic � and that the studies do not necessarily replicate when other subjects are used.
But perhaps I'm being too negative about a book which I actually found rather interesting and which provides plenty food for thought even if it may be that not everything in it would necessarily stand up to close scrutiny. The idea that the human mind has biases of perception and what, in the software world, would be called 'bugs' seems perfectly plausible. And an optimism bias and a tendency to see the world in a self-serving way are almost certainly ones where the evidence stacks up. The old saw that most people think they are better than average drivers is doubtless true, and few people see themselves as the villains of their own stories...
I found this an easy enough read although there was not a great deal in here that I hadn't read somewhere else, at some point, before. Which is not necessarily a criticism of the book as such � after all, the vast majority of non-fiction books are not about subjects that nobody else has ever written about before, and the theme of what we don't realise or recognise about our own brains worked well enough (on the subject of which, I rather liked her throwaway remark late on in the book about the difference between people who 'treat their body as a temple' and those who regard it as 'primarily a hotel for their brain'.)
Nagging away in the background, though, I kept thinking 'what about the replicability crisis in psychology though?' How many of the experiments that she refers to in her book would stand up if someone tried to repeat them? And the trouble is, I don't really have the time or the energy to start trying to find out the answer to that question myself. I have a dim memory of having at some point read that some of the work around 'implicit bias' and prejudice didn't stand up to scrutiny but maybe I'm not remembering that correctly. Or maybe the studies I read about are not the ones that Fine is citing in her chapter on 'the Bigoted Brain'. And perhaps that points to a more fundamental issue which is that many of the kinds of experiments described in the book are enormously open to interpretation. Often, such social psychology experiments involve a kind of toy-town simplification of the real world, and knowing exactly what to make of the results us difficult. Even assuming that they are not enormously sensitive to context (an underlying problem with a lot of this research is that so many of the study subjects are WEIRD - Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic � and that the studies do not necessarily replicate when other subjects are used.
But perhaps I'm being too negative about a book which I actually found rather interesting and which provides plenty food for thought even if it may be that not everything in it would necessarily stand up to close scrutiny. The idea that the human mind has biases of perception and what, in the software world, would be called 'bugs' seems perfectly plausible. And an optimism bias and a tendency to see the world in a self-serving way are almost certainly ones where the evidence stacks up. The old saw that most people think they are better than average drivers is doubtless true, and few people see themselves as the villains of their own stories...
July 24, 2007
You may have a much more humble opinion about your free will and ability to control your thoughts, emotions and direction in life after you read this book, which shares some of the same concepts as "Blink" in its examination of how many of our cognitive and emotional processes are hidden from us or ones that we deceive ourselves about. Dr. Fine is a first-time author with a good knack for describing the many psychological experiments she cites and a good sense of humor that emerges in family stories she inserts.
March 12, 2018
Really enjoyed this book! Such a fantastic look at some of the ways that the brain has of surviving, and how that's not actually a true portalrayal of reality. Particularly chilling was the "bigoted brain" chapter that talked about how much our brains love a stereotype and the impact this has on even the most liberal of people. Like. No-one is safe. However it does offer hope in how we can over come it, although it takes a lot of brain training. And with the other traits of our brains (we assume we are better at things than the average person for example) it's quite humbling and eye opening. Only reason I didn't give 5/5 was because I found some of the chapters quite similar.
December 7, 2024
We never consider ourselves in the bottom half even though that is statistically impossible.
If a trait or skill you're being asked about is ambiguous, you interpret the question to suit your strengths. If you're hopeless in that area of life, you diminish the importance of the skill.
Retroactive pessimism: Tell yourself in retrospect the odds were against you & failure was inevitable.
Self-handicapping: Have a nonthreatening excuse for failure: Your poor performance on an int test was from lack of effort. Win-win for ego: also enhances success.
Drug use, medical symptoms, anxiety can be used to shield ego from failure.
A student is the youngest child of a Catholic family whose mother stayed home rearing her and her ten older siblings, and she longs to be a doctor. Then she reads about a successful doctor who is Catholic, the oldest child, and whose mother went out to work. The student will then decide that a Catholic upbringing brings success but that the other two factors are relatively unimportant. But if they are told that the same person was unsuccessful then their Catholicism would seem less relevant (‘what could religion possibly have to do with being a doctor?�), but factors she differs on - birth order and mother's employment - would suddenly become crucial.
Motivated skepticism - people read an article setting out the medical dangers for women (but not men) of drinking too much coffee. Men and women who drank little or no coffee found it convincing. Men who drank a lot of coffee found it convincing. Guess who found it unconvincing?
Everyone thinks their own teams will triumph & when asked why will deny that wishing for their own team’s success affected their prediction. Yet what could be biasing our judgment other than the hope of being on the winning side? Hope springs eternally from hope, it seems.
Schoolchildren doing badly in reading or math: encouraged to blame their difficulties on lack of effort rather than ability: showed remarkable gains in persistence and accomplishment.
First-year undergraduates worried about their poor grades: primed by researchers into thinking that grades improve after the first semester: In a self-fulfilling prophecy, the students went on to get better grades (a week and even a year later) & were less likely to drop out compared w similar concerned students not primed to be optimistic.
Volunteers select cards over & over from any of four decks in front of them. Told some decks worked out better than others, & when they turned over a card won or lost points. Two decks yielded high point gains but every so often very severe point losses. These packs were best avoided in the long run; the other 2 offered less dazzling wins but less devastating point losses.
While they played, researchers monitored their emotional responses: measured skin conductance response - sweating.
The win/loss pattern was too complicated for the volunteers to calculate which decks were best. Yet by the end of the experiment nearly all were choosing from the winning packs. They developed hunches. & the volunteers sweaty fingers worked out which decks to avoid before they themselves did: pre-hunch stage, still choosing cards haphazardly, their skin conductance response shot up just before they chose a card from a losing deck. Only after they started showing these warning emotional jolts did they develop gut feeling what decks to avoid.
Give this gambling game to patient EVR, who has damage to his prefrontal cortex. Former businessman and husband and father - lost the ability to make decisions.
Yet intellect was apparently unaffected by the injury: Could come up with plenty of sensible solutions - but would cheerfully admit he wouldn't have a clue what to decide if he was in the situation himself.
The patients w prefron damage made poor decisions in the gambling game.
Why couldn't they solve the gambling task?
Maybe somatic markers - emotional tags - guide our decision making. W/o these, no amount of knowledge can help “You/I� pick a bottle of shampoo. We are disabled w/o emotional input available for weighing options. Yet using emotions as information brings the peril of mistaking the cause of those emotions. Our judgments & decisions are often based on misattributions & mistaken origins.
The problem is that our body seems to produce a one-size-fits-all emotional response. For a long time psychologists had trouble accepting the idea that our hearts thump in pretty much the same way regardless of whether we're taking an exam, have just won the lottery, or are running to catch a bus.
It is the thoughts that go alongside your emotional arousal that enable you to distinguish between one emotion and another�
Emotion = Arousal + Emotional Thoughts
Because the arousal is the same whatever the emotion (it only varies in intensity), your brain has the job of matching the arousal with the right thoughts�
...emotions enjoy the dangerous ability to affect *what* we experience, not just how we interpret it�
[Experiment with volunteers watching two movies of the face of an actor]…The world may not really be smiling with you when you smile; it might just look that way thanks to the distortions of the emotional brain. Our visual experiences are so compelling, so real, and seemingly objective that it is hard to acknowledge the furtive role played by the brain in creating what we see. Could it really be that the unpleasant look that you saw, plain as day, pass over your spouse's face has more to do with your own frazzled mood than that fleeting arrangement of his facial features?
Fading affect bias: the brain tampers with our memory of events we have experienced. History is rewritten such that the distressing emotions we experienced when things went wrong are looked back on as having been less and less intense, as time goes by. In contrast, the brain's biographer does its best to lovingly nurture and sustain the vigor of memories of our past joys. This differential treatment of the past leaves us susceptible to believing that our past was happier than it truly was.
Our emotional brain seems to generate our sense of self, existence, being.
In nerve-wracking experiences you feel detached & emotionless. Your brain deprives itself of the self in order to better execute information your mental workshop already possesses. Depersonalization seems to be the emotional brain's emergency response to stress and anxiety.
Depersonalized patients should be unemotional about everything. When showed nasty pictures, they don't show the normal skin conductance response /were not emotionally aroused by the pics the way people usually are.
Not a good state to be in for extended periods. Self-injury & -mutilation are common.
”Music usually moves me, but now it might as well be someone mincing potatoes. . . I seem to be walking about in a world I recognize but don't feel. . It's the terrible isolation from the rest of the world that frightens me. It's having no contact with people or my husband. I talk to them and see them, but I don't feel they are really here.�
“I would rather be dead than continue living like this. It is like the living dead.�
“It is as if the real me is taken out and put on a shelf or stored somewhere inside of me. Whatever makes me me is not there. I feel as though I'm not alive - as though my body is an empty, lifeless shell.�
Depersonalization - feel as if dead. Cotard delusion - believe is dead.
Too much emotion you may wind up bawling over nothing, in a mental hospital, or paralyzed with terror. Yet if you remove the ability to use emotions as information, the simplest decision becomes irredeemably perplexing. Dampen down emotions too much and you lose sense of self.
When our ego gets the balance right, the result is still mild delusions about past, present & future.
We are more able to overcome the distortions of emotional states when we know we know ahead of time we will be held accountable to explain our behavior. Normally we don't bother keeping mood out of moral equations.
Moral judgment is also polluted by many people's deep-rooted belief in karma, virtue/rewad, afterlife.
We use blame as a coping strategy to deny that life is merciless, think bad things happen to bad people.
...Remarkably - and horribly - the less monetary compensation the observers think that the victim will receive for her suffering (in other words, the less just the experiment), the more they dislike her. Disparaged even more is the woman whom people think will go on to suffer more with a further bout of electric shocks. And what of the martyr, who selflessly sacrificed herself to benefit others? She, I'm afraid to say, is the most despised of all.
We call upon personalities to explain slip-ups but make excuses for our own behavior when it falls below par. Our appraisal of others also doesn't take the same generous account of good intentions we allow ourselves.
Volunteers hold arm on bucket of icy water for charity. 50c for every min submerged. Ask to rate their own altruism. Measured virtue was based less on how much they actually earned than on how much they would've liked to help; judged themselves by what they wanted to do rather than what they did.
Ask another group of volunteers to watch the first group suffer, they aren't interested in motives: they judged purely by results.
I am holier than thou.
Milgram obedience studies repeated results: two-thirds of ordinary men and women will obediently electrocute a fellow human (up to a highly dangerous 450 volts) because a scientist in a lab coat tells them to. 90% administered at least one more shock after hearing the stooge pound on the wall.
If they were to learn anything from [Milgram’s] work, it was that it is not so much the kind of person you are as the pressures of the situation in which you find yourself that will determine how you behave.
…people's moral stamina is but a lead blown hither and thither by the winds of circumstance.
When we ignore the power of circumstance to overwhelm personality, we wind up misguidedly looking at a person's character to explain their failure to uphold an ideally high standard of conduct. [correspondence bias]
People asked if they're happy rather than unhappy about [social life] believe themselves more blessed on the front.
Never ask someone you want to stay with Don't you love me anymore?
Crucial decisions may become consequences of something as trivial as the way a question is phrased.
“Which parent should have custody of the child?� or “Which parent should be denied custody of the child?� Leads to very different results if participants choose parent A or B.
3 week study skill program experiment - Despite the course being ineffective, the students managed to persuade themselves by exaggerating how poor their study skills were before the program: they remembered giving themselves worse ratings than they actually had. In other words, by memory's sleight of hand they gave themselves a little extra room for improvement.
Jars of beads experiment - People generally ask for between 3 & 4 beads before they feel confident to say the beads are drawn from jar B.
Statistically this is pathetic: the probability of the bead being from B after the first black bead is 85%; after the second black bead 97%.
People suffering from delusions only request about 2 beads before making their decision.
They are better “scientists� than we are.
Reasoning study - ”Repetition, asseveration, self-contradiction, outright denial of the fact, and ritualistic behavior…� “Pathology of Reasoning�
Delusional patients do just as well (rather, just as badly) on reasoning tests
”The seeds of madness can be planted in anyone's backyard.� (Zimbardo)
Schizophrenia - often delusions of control. Believe their thought and actions are being controlled by external force like an alien.
Problem may lie in patient's inability to keep tabs on intentions, meaning no longer able to tell difference between actions he has willed and actions done to him. No longer able to match an action to intention, it feels externally caused. Struggling to explain the experience? external agent is in command.
“Alien hand� experiment - creates discrepancy between motor command & perceptual experience.
Mental health professionals are not much concerned by the devout Christian who has been fortunate enough to experience the presence of Jesus. But if the identity of that presence happens to be Elvis rather than the son of God then eyebrows begin to be raised. And while Catholics can safely divulge to psychiatrists their belief that God lends them the strength to pursue the Catholic way of life, Mormons should think twice before revealing their conviction that they will be transformed into a god after they die. It is fine to be assisted by a supernatural entity, but not to aspire to BE one.
People hold beliefs even more strongly when confronted with counter evidence. We twist information & self-censor arguments to keep us self-assured.
Good clinical trials of drugs are now run double-blind.
Flattery dulls intellectual opponents far more effectively than logical arguments.
Social sensitivity test - tell ppl pperformance was inferior or superior. Explained the feedback was fabricated. Volunteers continued believing in their superior or inferior social sensitivity even after learning it was fake.
Math test - helpful video vs confusing video: lack of confidence persisted even after showing them the helpful video & explaining they got bad instructions. Even 3 weeks later students shown the baffling video showed less interest in math.
We find it easy to believe but difficult to doubt.
We believe things to be true as a matter of course. You can't not believe everything you read. Only with mental effort can we decide what is untrue. Our default position and natural urge is to believe.
In general people speak the truth more often than not, so it's more efficient to assume things are true unless we have reason to think otherwise. But this causes problems. If your brain is distracted or under pressure you are more likely to believe statements you would normally find dubious.
Susceptible to innuendo: “Is Bob Talbert Associated with Fraudulent Charity?� is just as damaging as “Bob Talbert Associated with Fraudulent Charity.� Negative campaigning works.
Publicity is very bad for defendants. Media reports of crime encourage pro-prosecution stance in jurors.
With hindsight, what has happened seems inevitable and foreseeable, so you convince yourself you saw it coming.
We don't consider counterevidence because we are convinced we are already doing so.
The unconscious automatically makes you go the extra mile when schema are primed.
Schemas make up the filing system of the mind. Example: schema for dogs, schema for Asian, schema for mother, etc. Think about dogs having four legs, other aspects of dogs filed in the schema are primed, like dogs bark. Priming a schema means shaking the whole bed.
It's not that we're necessarily unaware of the stimulus itself. However, we are oblivious to the effect that it is having on us.
Lacking enlightenment, we have to perform the cumbersome task of placing ourselves on the psychiatrist’s couch whenever we want to know why we did what we've done. And, as we would with anyone else whose inner tickings we wished to probe, we infer motives from anything around us.
School children experiment - Bring pens, tell some children if they busied themselves drawing they'd be rewarded w a gold star & ribbon. Other children were given the selection of pens to play with but no incentive. Few days later: this time pens lying around for them to play with as they pleased. The unrewarded children play w the pens more.
Reasoning (self-perception theory): “How do I like drawing with the pens?� Unrewarded children: “I spent all that time drawing the pens last week, so I must enjoy it.� Rewarded group: “Not pens again, I played with them last week just to get the star and ribbon.�
When we reflect on major issues in our lives - why we prefer this car or that house, why we are in this particular career, or with that particular person - the answers that we come up with are just best guesses. They may have little to do with the truth.
Benjamin Libet experiment - Half a second before someone's finger moves there's a little flurry of brain activity called the readiness potential. Didn't have anything to do with implementing the actual finger movement: wasn't the instructions to get the finger up - this comes later, right before movement, in the motor control area of the brain.
This was the readiness potential - the command “Move finger� itself. Volunteers didn't consciously experience the will to move finger until more than a third of a sec after the readiness potential.
The brain can prepare for intentions you haven't had yet.
Are our lives nothing more than the “dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago.�? (William James)
Never forget that your unconscious is smarter than you, faster than you, and more powerful than you. It may even control you. You will never know all of its secrets.
Making decisions, getting things going, developing plans, fixing your attention on the task at hand - in short, anything that requires concentrated thought - all deplete the same pool of mental resources.
We can exert self-control when we are feeling bad, we just usually choose not to because it's more important for us to feel good than to be good.
Being told you are unlikeable makes you not want to direct attention inward, fear of deficiencies and flaws. But ignoring the inner self leaves you unable to make usual comparisons between What I am doing & What I SHOULD be doing, which is essential for keeping self in line.
Psychology hack: MIRROR. Mirrors can reverse the effect of social exclusion. They literally make people self-reflect.
Stress & distraction both have very untoward effects on the conscious mind's ability to stay focused and in control of itself. It is strange but true that, the harder we try to relax and forget our anxieties, the more determined we are to cheer up and forget our troubles, or the more urgently we try to wind down & sleep, the more persistently thoughts of stress, sadness, or sleeplessness can drum at consciousness.
When your unconscious searches mental baggage for unwanted thoughts it primes the very thoughts.
Use moral muscles sparingly, ensuring precious brainpower isn't wasted on less important matters.
Resolution: Give up smoking, Exercise regime, Soup for breakfast, lunch, dinner
You’ll fail. Not enough willpower. Pick the most important thing and focus.
We do this naturally when reminded of our mortality
How to diet: put a skull in the fridge
If you are disciplined about resisting a particular temptation when it appears your unconscious will eventually take over.
Sad and unloved: Remember the problem isn't that we can't control ourselves but that we are less inclined to: Low-spirited people are just as likely to resist temptation if told it won't improve their mood.
Don't avoid potentially bruising self-reflection. Whip out a mirror.
Keeping life simple, calm, and sensibly paced may be a necessity rather than an indulgence if we are to keep thoughts under control.
When our lives are far from tranquility, it's better to give up & allow thoughts to flow free. Better a trickle than torrent.
Insomniacs ordered to stop themselves from falling asleep get to sleep quicker. The sleep-starved person calls off the inevitably unsuccessful attempts to keep wakeful thoughts suppressed.
Habits: plan out exactly how and when. People who strengthen resolve w simple but determined plan are far more likely to develop self-control.
Also makes you more likely to use restraint in other areas.
If a trait or skill you're being asked about is ambiguous, you interpret the question to suit your strengths. If you're hopeless in that area of life, you diminish the importance of the skill.
Retroactive pessimism: Tell yourself in retrospect the odds were against you & failure was inevitable.
Self-handicapping: Have a nonthreatening excuse for failure: Your poor performance on an int test was from lack of effort. Win-win for ego: also enhances success.
Drug use, medical symptoms, anxiety can be used to shield ego from failure.
A student is the youngest child of a Catholic family whose mother stayed home rearing her and her ten older siblings, and she longs to be a doctor. Then she reads about a successful doctor who is Catholic, the oldest child, and whose mother went out to work. The student will then decide that a Catholic upbringing brings success but that the other two factors are relatively unimportant. But if they are told that the same person was unsuccessful then their Catholicism would seem less relevant (‘what could religion possibly have to do with being a doctor?�), but factors she differs on - birth order and mother's employment - would suddenly become crucial.
Motivated skepticism - people read an article setting out the medical dangers for women (but not men) of drinking too much coffee. Men and women who drank little or no coffee found it convincing. Men who drank a lot of coffee found it convincing. Guess who found it unconvincing?
Everyone thinks their own teams will triumph & when asked why will deny that wishing for their own team’s success affected their prediction. Yet what could be biasing our judgment other than the hope of being on the winning side? Hope springs eternally from hope, it seems.
Schoolchildren doing badly in reading or math: encouraged to blame their difficulties on lack of effort rather than ability: showed remarkable gains in persistence and accomplishment.
First-year undergraduates worried about their poor grades: primed by researchers into thinking that grades improve after the first semester: In a self-fulfilling prophecy, the students went on to get better grades (a week and even a year later) & were less likely to drop out compared w similar concerned students not primed to be optimistic.
Volunteers select cards over & over from any of four decks in front of them. Told some decks worked out better than others, & when they turned over a card won or lost points. Two decks yielded high point gains but every so often very severe point losses. These packs were best avoided in the long run; the other 2 offered less dazzling wins but less devastating point losses.
While they played, researchers monitored their emotional responses: measured skin conductance response - sweating.
The win/loss pattern was too complicated for the volunteers to calculate which decks were best. Yet by the end of the experiment nearly all were choosing from the winning packs. They developed hunches. & the volunteers sweaty fingers worked out which decks to avoid before they themselves did: pre-hunch stage, still choosing cards haphazardly, their skin conductance response shot up just before they chose a card from a losing deck. Only after they started showing these warning emotional jolts did they develop gut feeling what decks to avoid.
Give this gambling game to patient EVR, who has damage to his prefrontal cortex. Former businessman and husband and father - lost the ability to make decisions.
Yet intellect was apparently unaffected by the injury: Could come up with plenty of sensible solutions - but would cheerfully admit he wouldn't have a clue what to decide if he was in the situation himself.
The patients w prefron damage made poor decisions in the gambling game.
Why couldn't they solve the gambling task?
Maybe somatic markers - emotional tags - guide our decision making. W/o these, no amount of knowledge can help “You/I� pick a bottle of shampoo. We are disabled w/o emotional input available for weighing options. Yet using emotions as information brings the peril of mistaking the cause of those emotions. Our judgments & decisions are often based on misattributions & mistaken origins.
The problem is that our body seems to produce a one-size-fits-all emotional response. For a long time psychologists had trouble accepting the idea that our hearts thump in pretty much the same way regardless of whether we're taking an exam, have just won the lottery, or are running to catch a bus.
It is the thoughts that go alongside your emotional arousal that enable you to distinguish between one emotion and another�
Emotion = Arousal + Emotional Thoughts
Because the arousal is the same whatever the emotion (it only varies in intensity), your brain has the job of matching the arousal with the right thoughts�
...emotions enjoy the dangerous ability to affect *what* we experience, not just how we interpret it�
[Experiment with volunteers watching two movies of the face of an actor]…The world may not really be smiling with you when you smile; it might just look that way thanks to the distortions of the emotional brain. Our visual experiences are so compelling, so real, and seemingly objective that it is hard to acknowledge the furtive role played by the brain in creating what we see. Could it really be that the unpleasant look that you saw, plain as day, pass over your spouse's face has more to do with your own frazzled mood than that fleeting arrangement of his facial features?
Fading affect bias: the brain tampers with our memory of events we have experienced. History is rewritten such that the distressing emotions we experienced when things went wrong are looked back on as having been less and less intense, as time goes by. In contrast, the brain's biographer does its best to lovingly nurture and sustain the vigor of memories of our past joys. This differential treatment of the past leaves us susceptible to believing that our past was happier than it truly was.
Our emotional brain seems to generate our sense of self, existence, being.
In nerve-wracking experiences you feel detached & emotionless. Your brain deprives itself of the self in order to better execute information your mental workshop already possesses. Depersonalization seems to be the emotional brain's emergency response to stress and anxiety.
Depersonalized patients should be unemotional about everything. When showed nasty pictures, they don't show the normal skin conductance response /were not emotionally aroused by the pics the way people usually are.
Not a good state to be in for extended periods. Self-injury & -mutilation are common.
”Music usually moves me, but now it might as well be someone mincing potatoes. . . I seem to be walking about in a world I recognize but don't feel. . It's the terrible isolation from the rest of the world that frightens me. It's having no contact with people or my husband. I talk to them and see them, but I don't feel they are really here.�
“I would rather be dead than continue living like this. It is like the living dead.�
“It is as if the real me is taken out and put on a shelf or stored somewhere inside of me. Whatever makes me me is not there. I feel as though I'm not alive - as though my body is an empty, lifeless shell.�
Depersonalization - feel as if dead. Cotard delusion - believe is dead.
Too much emotion you may wind up bawling over nothing, in a mental hospital, or paralyzed with terror. Yet if you remove the ability to use emotions as information, the simplest decision becomes irredeemably perplexing. Dampen down emotions too much and you lose sense of self.
When our ego gets the balance right, the result is still mild delusions about past, present & future.
We are more able to overcome the distortions of emotional states when we know we know ahead of time we will be held accountable to explain our behavior. Normally we don't bother keeping mood out of moral equations.
Moral judgment is also polluted by many people's deep-rooted belief in karma, virtue/rewad, afterlife.
We use blame as a coping strategy to deny that life is merciless, think bad things happen to bad people.
...Remarkably - and horribly - the less monetary compensation the observers think that the victim will receive for her suffering (in other words, the less just the experiment), the more they dislike her. Disparaged even more is the woman whom people think will go on to suffer more with a further bout of electric shocks. And what of the martyr, who selflessly sacrificed herself to benefit others? She, I'm afraid to say, is the most despised of all.
We call upon personalities to explain slip-ups but make excuses for our own behavior when it falls below par. Our appraisal of others also doesn't take the same generous account of good intentions we allow ourselves.
Volunteers hold arm on bucket of icy water for charity. 50c for every min submerged. Ask to rate their own altruism. Measured virtue was based less on how much they actually earned than on how much they would've liked to help; judged themselves by what they wanted to do rather than what they did.
Ask another group of volunteers to watch the first group suffer, they aren't interested in motives: they judged purely by results.
I am holier than thou.
Milgram obedience studies repeated results: two-thirds of ordinary men and women will obediently electrocute a fellow human (up to a highly dangerous 450 volts) because a scientist in a lab coat tells them to. 90% administered at least one more shock after hearing the stooge pound on the wall.
If they were to learn anything from [Milgram’s] work, it was that it is not so much the kind of person you are as the pressures of the situation in which you find yourself that will determine how you behave.
…people's moral stamina is but a lead blown hither and thither by the winds of circumstance.
When we ignore the power of circumstance to overwhelm personality, we wind up misguidedly looking at a person's character to explain their failure to uphold an ideally high standard of conduct. [correspondence bias]
People asked if they're happy rather than unhappy about [social life] believe themselves more blessed on the front.
Never ask someone you want to stay with Don't you love me anymore?
Crucial decisions may become consequences of something as trivial as the way a question is phrased.
“Which parent should have custody of the child?� or “Which parent should be denied custody of the child?� Leads to very different results if participants choose parent A or B.
3 week study skill program experiment - Despite the course being ineffective, the students managed to persuade themselves by exaggerating how poor their study skills were before the program: they remembered giving themselves worse ratings than they actually had. In other words, by memory's sleight of hand they gave themselves a little extra room for improvement.
Jars of beads experiment - People generally ask for between 3 & 4 beads before they feel confident to say the beads are drawn from jar B.
Statistically this is pathetic: the probability of the bead being from B after the first black bead is 85%; after the second black bead 97%.
People suffering from delusions only request about 2 beads before making their decision.
They are better “scientists� than we are.
Reasoning study - ”Repetition, asseveration, self-contradiction, outright denial of the fact, and ritualistic behavior…� “Pathology of Reasoning�
Delusional patients do just as well (rather, just as badly) on reasoning tests
”The seeds of madness can be planted in anyone's backyard.� (Zimbardo)
Schizophrenia - often delusions of control. Believe their thought and actions are being controlled by external force like an alien.
Problem may lie in patient's inability to keep tabs on intentions, meaning no longer able to tell difference between actions he has willed and actions done to him. No longer able to match an action to intention, it feels externally caused. Struggling to explain the experience? external agent is in command.
“Alien hand� experiment - creates discrepancy between motor command & perceptual experience.
Mental health professionals are not much concerned by the devout Christian who has been fortunate enough to experience the presence of Jesus. But if the identity of that presence happens to be Elvis rather than the son of God then eyebrows begin to be raised. And while Catholics can safely divulge to psychiatrists their belief that God lends them the strength to pursue the Catholic way of life, Mormons should think twice before revealing their conviction that they will be transformed into a god after they die. It is fine to be assisted by a supernatural entity, but not to aspire to BE one.
People hold beliefs even more strongly when confronted with counter evidence. We twist information & self-censor arguments to keep us self-assured.
Good clinical trials of drugs are now run double-blind.
Flattery dulls intellectual opponents far more effectively than logical arguments.
Social sensitivity test - tell ppl pperformance was inferior or superior. Explained the feedback was fabricated. Volunteers continued believing in their superior or inferior social sensitivity even after learning it was fake.
Math test - helpful video vs confusing video: lack of confidence persisted even after showing them the helpful video & explaining they got bad instructions. Even 3 weeks later students shown the baffling video showed less interest in math.
We find it easy to believe but difficult to doubt.
We believe things to be true as a matter of course. You can't not believe everything you read. Only with mental effort can we decide what is untrue. Our default position and natural urge is to believe.
In general people speak the truth more often than not, so it's more efficient to assume things are true unless we have reason to think otherwise. But this causes problems. If your brain is distracted or under pressure you are more likely to believe statements you would normally find dubious.
Susceptible to innuendo: “Is Bob Talbert Associated with Fraudulent Charity?� is just as damaging as “Bob Talbert Associated with Fraudulent Charity.� Negative campaigning works.
Publicity is very bad for defendants. Media reports of crime encourage pro-prosecution stance in jurors.
With hindsight, what has happened seems inevitable and foreseeable, so you convince yourself you saw it coming.
We don't consider counterevidence because we are convinced we are already doing so.
The unconscious automatically makes you go the extra mile when schema are primed.
Schemas make up the filing system of the mind. Example: schema for dogs, schema for Asian, schema for mother, etc. Think about dogs having four legs, other aspects of dogs filed in the schema are primed, like dogs bark. Priming a schema means shaking the whole bed.
It's not that we're necessarily unaware of the stimulus itself. However, we are oblivious to the effect that it is having on us.
Lacking enlightenment, we have to perform the cumbersome task of placing ourselves on the psychiatrist’s couch whenever we want to know why we did what we've done. And, as we would with anyone else whose inner tickings we wished to probe, we infer motives from anything around us.
School children experiment - Bring pens, tell some children if they busied themselves drawing they'd be rewarded w a gold star & ribbon. Other children were given the selection of pens to play with but no incentive. Few days later: this time pens lying around for them to play with as they pleased. The unrewarded children play w the pens more.
Reasoning (self-perception theory): “How do I like drawing with the pens?� Unrewarded children: “I spent all that time drawing the pens last week, so I must enjoy it.� Rewarded group: “Not pens again, I played with them last week just to get the star and ribbon.�
When we reflect on major issues in our lives - why we prefer this car or that house, why we are in this particular career, or with that particular person - the answers that we come up with are just best guesses. They may have little to do with the truth.
Benjamin Libet experiment - Half a second before someone's finger moves there's a little flurry of brain activity called the readiness potential. Didn't have anything to do with implementing the actual finger movement: wasn't the instructions to get the finger up - this comes later, right before movement, in the motor control area of the brain.
This was the readiness potential - the command “Move finger� itself. Volunteers didn't consciously experience the will to move finger until more than a third of a sec after the readiness potential.
The brain can prepare for intentions you haven't had yet.
Are our lives nothing more than the “dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago.�? (William James)
Never forget that your unconscious is smarter than you, faster than you, and more powerful than you. It may even control you. You will never know all of its secrets.
Making decisions, getting things going, developing plans, fixing your attention on the task at hand - in short, anything that requires concentrated thought - all deplete the same pool of mental resources.
We can exert self-control when we are feeling bad, we just usually choose not to because it's more important for us to feel good than to be good.
Being told you are unlikeable makes you not want to direct attention inward, fear of deficiencies and flaws. But ignoring the inner self leaves you unable to make usual comparisons between What I am doing & What I SHOULD be doing, which is essential for keeping self in line.
Psychology hack: MIRROR. Mirrors can reverse the effect of social exclusion. They literally make people self-reflect.
Stress & distraction both have very untoward effects on the conscious mind's ability to stay focused and in control of itself. It is strange but true that, the harder we try to relax and forget our anxieties, the more determined we are to cheer up and forget our troubles, or the more urgently we try to wind down & sleep, the more persistently thoughts of stress, sadness, or sleeplessness can drum at consciousness.
When your unconscious searches mental baggage for unwanted thoughts it primes the very thoughts.
Use moral muscles sparingly, ensuring precious brainpower isn't wasted on less important matters.
Resolution: Give up smoking, Exercise regime, Soup for breakfast, lunch, dinner
You’ll fail. Not enough willpower. Pick the most important thing and focus.
We do this naturally when reminded of our mortality
How to diet: put a skull in the fridge
If you are disciplined about resisting a particular temptation when it appears your unconscious will eventually take over.
Sad and unloved: Remember the problem isn't that we can't control ourselves but that we are less inclined to: Low-spirited people are just as likely to resist temptation if told it won't improve their mood.
Don't avoid potentially bruising self-reflection. Whip out a mirror.
Keeping life simple, calm, and sensibly paced may be a necessity rather than an indulgence if we are to keep thoughts under control.
When our lives are far from tranquility, it's better to give up & allow thoughts to flow free. Better a trickle than torrent.
Insomniacs ordered to stop themselves from falling asleep get to sleep quicker. The sleep-starved person calls off the inevitably unsuccessful attempts to keep wakeful thoughts suppressed.
Habits: plan out exactly how and when. People who strengthen resolve w simple but determined plan are far more likely to develop self-control.
Also makes you more likely to use restraint in other areas.
July 17, 2011
Very "pop" psychology. This book was assigned in my psychology graduate class, Cognitive and Affective Behavior. As a grad school bog, it's honestly a little boring, as we know most of what Ms. Fine is talking about (how many times can you read about the same experiment?). But I doubt it was ever supposed to be used in this kind of setting. For someone interested in psychology, I'm sure this book is very informative. Ms. Fine's writing style is very refreshing from the usual psychology jargon we have to muddle though. She uses real life experiences as examples of our brain functions.
May 27, 2019
(The English review is placed beneath Russian one)
Книга чем-то напоминает стиль Чалдини, который особенно заметен в его бестселлере «Психология влияния», т.е. берётся несколько тем, которые разбиваются на главы, в самих же главах сначала идёт теория, а потом несколько историй или экспериментов, которые призваны объяснить теорию. Вот то же самое и тут. Правда, я так и не понял, на каком поле играет автор, т.е. что за главная тема у этой книги. С одной сторо��ы, автор много пишет о мозге, его строении, функциях и так далее. А с другой, мы встречаем классические эксперименты из социальной психологии. Более того, автор довольно много места в книге отводит на знаменитый эксперимент Милграма. Так социальная психология или нейропсихология? Честно сказать, такое чувство, что обе.
Я не могу сказать, что я с автором в чём-то не согласен или что в книге присутствуют какие-то явные для меня минусы, но просто книга лично мне показалась сухой и скучной. Кому-то покажется наоборот интересной (я так думаю). Поэтому ничего не могу сказать по поводу «читать или не читать». Однако, судя по многочисленным примерам из социальной психология, я бы рекомендовал всё же прочитать одну большую, но знаменитую и очень интересную книгу по социальной психологии Дэвида Майерса под названием «Социальная психология».
Как я уже сказал, в книге очень много повторений, а в купе со скучным слогом, книга навевает дремоту. Однако от самой низкой оценки её спасли несколько интересных примеров, о которых я ещё не знал (к сожалению, автор не стала их более подробно рассматривать). Первый касается нашего настроения, которое прямо влияет на то, как мы смотрим на те или иные события, на тех или иных людей и так далее. А второй, это интересный эксперимент, где людей разделили на три группы. Одна занималась фитнесом, а после смотрела эротический фильм. Другая же смотрела только эротический фильм. Про третью я уже не помню. Так вот, группа, которая активно занималась физическими упражнениями, нашла эротический фильм более интересным. Т.е. физические упражнения или лучше сказать физическая нагрузка запускает процессы в мозгу, которые начинают на нас так влиять, что мы становимся более позитивно настоянными в отношении возбуждающего нас объекта (надеюсь, я тут ничего не спутал).
В общем, по моим ощущением, эта не та книга, альтернативу которой невозможно подобрать, а как раз наоборот. Поэтому надеюсь найти более нескучную книгу или, как я уже сказал, прочитать университетский учебник по социальной психологии. Один раз, но уже покрыть все темы и рассмотреть все значимые эксперименты. Уверен, что того же Дэвида Майерса многие надут намного более интересным и не скучным, нежели этого автора и эту книгу.
The book is somewhat reminiscent of Chaldini's style, which is particularly noticeable in his bestseller "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion", i.e., he takes several topics that are divided into chapters, and the chapters themselves first have a theory, and then a few stories or experiments that are designed to explain the theory. Here's the same thing, too. However, I never understood what field the author is playing on, i.e. what is the main theme of this book. On the one hand, the author writes a lot about the brain, its structure, functions and so on. And on the other hand, we read about classical experiments from social psychology. Moreover, the author gives quite a lot of space in the book for Milgram's famous experiment. So is it social psychology or neuropsychology? To be honest, it feels like both.
I can't say that I don't agree with the author in anything or that there are some obvious shortcomings in the book, but the book just seemed to me to be dry and boring. Someone will find it interesting (I think so). So I can't say anything about "read or not read". However, judging by the numerous examples from social psychology contained in this book, I would recommend that you read one big but famous and very interesting book on social psychology called "Social Psychology" by the author David Myers.
As I said, the book has a lot of repetitions, and in combination with a boring syllable, the book makes you drowsy. However, from the lowest estimation the book was saved by some interesting examples about which I did not know yet (unfortunately, the author did not consider them in detail). The first example tells us that our mood directly affects the way we look at certain events, at certain people and so on. And the second one is devoted to an interesting experiment where people are divided into three groups. One of them was engaged in fitness, and then watched an erotic film. The other one watched only an erotic film. I don't remember the third one anymore. So, the group that was actively engaged in physical exercises, found the erotic film more interesting. I.e. physical exercises, or better to say physical activity, starts the processes in the brain, which start to affect us so much that we begin to treat the object that excites us more positively (I hope I didn't confuse anything here).
In general, I feel that this is not a book whose alternative is impossible to find, but just the opposite. Therefore, it is better to find a more interesting book or, as I have already said, to read a university textbook on social psychology. I am sure that many people will find the same David Myers much more interesting and not boring than this author and this book.
Книга чем-то напоминает стиль Чалдини, который особенно заметен в его бестселлере «Психология влияния», т.е. берётся несколько тем, которые разбиваются на главы, в самих же главах сначала идёт теория, а потом несколько историй или экспериментов, которые призваны объяснить теорию. Вот то же самое и тут. Правда, я так и не понял, на каком поле играет автор, т.е. что за главная тема у этой книги. С одной сторо��ы, автор много пишет о мозге, его строении, функциях и так далее. А с другой, мы встречаем классические эксперименты из социальной психологии. Более того, автор довольно много места в книге отводит на знаменитый эксперимент Милграма. Так социальная психология или нейропсихология? Честно сказать, такое чувство, что обе.
Я не могу сказать, что я с автором в чём-то не согласен или что в книге присутствуют какие-то явные для меня минусы, но просто книга лично мне показалась сухой и скучной. Кому-то покажется наоборот интересной (я так думаю). Поэтому ничего не могу сказать по поводу «читать или не читать». Однако, судя по многочисленным примерам из социальной психология, я бы рекомендовал всё же прочитать одну большую, но знаменитую и очень интересную книгу по социальной психологии Дэвида Майерса под названием «Социальная психология».
Как я уже сказал, в книге очень много повторений, а в купе со скучным слогом, книга навевает дремоту. Однако от самой низкой оценки её спасли несколько интересных примеров, о которых я ещё не знал (к сожалению, автор не стала их более подробно рассматривать). Первый касается нашего настроения, которое прямо влияет на то, как мы смотрим на те или иные события, на тех или иных людей и так далее. А второй, это интересный эксперимент, где людей разделили на три группы. Одна занималась фитнесом, а после смотрела эротический фильм. Другая же смотрела только эротический фильм. Про третью я уже не помню. Так вот, группа, которая активно занималась физическими упражнениями, нашла эротический фильм более интересным. Т.е. физические упражнения или лучше сказать физическая нагрузка запускает процессы в мозгу, которые начинают на нас так влиять, что мы становимся более позитивно настоянными в отношении возбуждающего нас объекта (надеюсь, я тут ничего не спутал).
В общем, по моим ощущением, эта не та книга, альтернативу которой невозможно подобрать, а как раз наоборот. Поэтому надеюсь найти более нескучную книгу или, как я уже сказал, прочитать университетский учебник по социальной психологии. Один раз, но уже покрыть все темы и рассмотреть все значимые эксперименты. Уверен, что того же Дэвида Майерса многие надут намного более интересным и не скучным, нежели этого автора и эту книгу.
The book is somewhat reminiscent of Chaldini's style, which is particularly noticeable in his bestseller "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion", i.e., he takes several topics that are divided into chapters, and the chapters themselves first have a theory, and then a few stories or experiments that are designed to explain the theory. Here's the same thing, too. However, I never understood what field the author is playing on, i.e. what is the main theme of this book. On the one hand, the author writes a lot about the brain, its structure, functions and so on. And on the other hand, we read about classical experiments from social psychology. Moreover, the author gives quite a lot of space in the book for Milgram's famous experiment. So is it social psychology or neuropsychology? To be honest, it feels like both.
I can't say that I don't agree with the author in anything or that there are some obvious shortcomings in the book, but the book just seemed to me to be dry and boring. Someone will find it interesting (I think so). So I can't say anything about "read or not read". However, judging by the numerous examples from social psychology contained in this book, I would recommend that you read one big but famous and very interesting book on social psychology called "Social Psychology" by the author David Myers.
As I said, the book has a lot of repetitions, and in combination with a boring syllable, the book makes you drowsy. However, from the lowest estimation the book was saved by some interesting examples about which I did not know yet (unfortunately, the author did not consider them in detail). The first example tells us that our mood directly affects the way we look at certain events, at certain people and so on. And the second one is devoted to an interesting experiment where people are divided into three groups. One of them was engaged in fitness, and then watched an erotic film. The other one watched only an erotic film. I don't remember the third one anymore. So, the group that was actively engaged in physical exercises, found the erotic film more interesting. I.e. physical exercises, or better to say physical activity, starts the processes in the brain, which start to affect us so much that we begin to treat the object that excites us more positively (I hope I didn't confuse anything here).
In general, I feel that this is not a book whose alternative is impossible to find, but just the opposite. Therefore, it is better to find a more interesting book or, as I have already said, to read a university textbook on social psychology. I am sure that many people will find the same David Myers much more interesting and not boring than this author and this book.
November 14, 2019
I did not like this book. I’ve read plenty of psychology books in my time, and this one is my least favorite thus far. The concepts, content, and ideas in the book are interesting. However, the writing style of the author leaves much to be desired. I found myself not wanting to pick up the book and read, and when I did, it felt like a chore. I’m glad I finally finished it. I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone. That’s just my opinion.
June 17, 2017
A very good book!
November 16, 2020
Adorei! Muito bem escrito.
Vale a pena a leitura.
Vale a pena a leitura.
Read
August 8, 2023Pop psychology at its worst...
February 19, 2020
This is a terrific little book about some of the numerous ways the brain takes the wheel and relieves our conscious minds of the work of making decisions, passing judgement, and evaluating ourselves. Fine is a meticulous researcher and there are plenty of references, but the writing is fun and breezy.
However, I wouldn't say this book is an easy read. It's written in a particularly English style that I find hard to characterize, but that relies on a large vocabulary and convoluted linguistic circumlocutions. It a lot of fun to read for those of us who are adept at English, but I imagine it's exhausting for the rest of the world.
Here's an example: "For scratch the surface of the moral judgments of mature adulthood, and the visceral inequities worthy of the passionate toddler can be plainly seen. Carelessly unattuned to the cicumstances of others, we can be as quick to conclude 'naughty Greta' as any stripling magistrate." Basically it sounds like it's written by Moira from Schitt's Creek.
However, I wouldn't say this book is an easy read. It's written in a particularly English style that I find hard to characterize, but that relies on a large vocabulary and convoluted linguistic circumlocutions. It a lot of fun to read for those of us who are adept at English, but I imagine it's exhausting for the rest of the world.
Here's an example: "For scratch the surface of the moral judgments of mature adulthood, and the visceral inequities worthy of the passionate toddler can be plainly seen. Carelessly unattuned to the cicumstances of others, we can be as quick to conclude 'naughty Greta' as any stripling magistrate." Basically it sounds like it's written by Moira from Schitt's Creek.
November 26, 2019
بیشتر از هرچیز این کتاب برای خودم شبیه چند جلسه تراپی خیلی خوب بود. عجیب نیست چون شیوه� کارکرد مغز و روان رو میگ� بیشتر. اگه علاقمندید به این موضوعات شدیدا توصیه میکن�. امیدوارم ترجمه� خوبی ازش بشه ولی اگه انگلیسی متوسطی هم بدونید میتونی� خودتون بخونید.
در عین حال خیلی هم کتاب بامزهای� و من بلندبلند باهاش خندیدم. اشک هم ریختم. واقعا نویسنده� طنازی داره.
یاد میگیری� چطوری ذهن ما رو فریب مید� و حتی محافظتمو� میکنه� کارمون رو آسون یا سخت میکن�. نویسنده آخر کتاب میگ� خوبیش اینه که شما به سادگی فقط با خوندن این کتاب در برابر حملههای� که به یکپارچگ� و قطعیتِ اعتقادات و رفتارهاتون میش� انگار یه زره سبک تن کردید. چرا بقیه رو هم با خریدن یه نسخه از این کتاب محافظت نمیکنید�
البته بیشتر به نظرم تنها خوبی این کتاب اینه که میتونی� یاد بگیریم اینقد� یککلام� متعصب و خودبرتربین نباشیم یا کمتر باشیم. در نتیجه این کتاب شما رو در برابر چیزهای دیگها� محافظت میکن� نه حمله به طرز فکر و خط مشیتو�.
در عین حال خیلی هم کتاب بامزهای� و من بلندبلند باهاش خندیدم. اشک هم ریختم. واقعا نویسنده� طنازی داره.
یاد میگیری� چطوری ذهن ما رو فریب مید� و حتی محافظتمو� میکنه� کارمون رو آسون یا سخت میکن�. نویسنده آخر کتاب میگ� خوبیش اینه که شما به سادگی فقط با خوندن این کتاب در برابر حملههای� که به یکپارچگ� و قطعیتِ اعتقادات و رفتارهاتون میش� انگار یه زره سبک تن کردید. چرا بقیه رو هم با خریدن یه نسخه از این کتاب محافظت نمیکنید�
البته بیشتر به نظرم تنها خوبی این کتاب اینه که میتونی� یاد بگیریم اینقد� یککلام� متعصب و خودبرتربین نباشیم یا کمتر باشیم. در نتیجه این کتاب شما رو در برابر چیزهای دیگها� محافظت میکن� نه حمله به طرز فکر و خط مشیتو�.
May 20, 2011
Bluntly, this one was a mixed bag. The stories and examples were amusing, though they did start to get to be a bit too much by the end of the book. I suppose what bothered me most was that there's seemingly no place for any actual thing such as objectivity according to her beliefs. We can do things to rein in the worst excesses of our "butler" (the unconscious), but as best I can tell per Fine we can never fully break free from it. I suppose I could have lived with that, if she had stopped there, perhaps concluding that all cognition should be treated as having "proceed with caution" signs, and all unconscious behaviors as at least occassionally subjected to a rigorous examination.
Unfortunately, she does not confine herself in such a way. In fact, she seems to out and out disregard the above when it is inconvenient, or perhaps wishes to push a certain agenda. As in, she'll make claims like such and such was a "well-designed psychology experiment," of course when it conformed what I took to be her beliefs. Could an experiment be "well-designed" if it did NOT confirm a closely held belief? And, anyway, how can she be so glibly confident in her ability to separate wheat from chaff in the first place? We're never told, or actually, what we're told is that this is exactly what we should NOT be doing.
So, what can I say? By turns this one was amusing, though-provoking, irritating, hypocritical, preachy and at times downright arrogant. I don't regret reading it, and in fact learned more than I thought I would. Some of her examples were silly, but they also put things in terms a layman could understand. But... I still can't imagine I'll pick anything up by her again. My teeth can only take so much grinding in the face of hypocrisy.
Unfortunately, she does not confine herself in such a way. In fact, she seems to out and out disregard the above when it is inconvenient, or perhaps wishes to push a certain agenda. As in, she'll make claims like such and such was a "well-designed psychology experiment," of course when it conformed what I took to be her beliefs. Could an experiment be "well-designed" if it did NOT confirm a closely held belief? And, anyway, how can she be so glibly confident in her ability to separate wheat from chaff in the first place? We're never told, or actually, what we're told is that this is exactly what we should NOT be doing.
So, what can I say? By turns this one was amusing, though-provoking, irritating, hypocritical, preachy and at times downright arrogant. I don't regret reading it, and in fact learned more than I thought I would. Some of her examples were silly, but they also put things in terms a layman could understand. But... I still can't imagine I'll pick anything up by her again. My teeth can only take so much grinding in the face of hypocrisy.
July 29, 2015
Fascinating reading for a layman--a short, easy read. I highly recommend this book to everyone with a brain (except scientists already familiar with how the brain distorts and deceives). Although the author explains the hows and whys of some fascinating cases of people with strange disorders, most of the book covers how the normal brain works, and you'll be amazed at how much your brain twists perception, memory, conscious thought. Cordelia Fine explains so much, yet you'll be left reeling with the implications. She is quite funny too. [2015 Reading Challenge: A Nonfiction Book]
September 15, 2014
Interesting, although a little wordy at times. By "wordy" I mean explained the same thing several times. Made me realize that I can sometimes do that too, and I need to change that because it is distracting :)
Explains how our minds work in ways that distort reality and project its prejudices and beliefs on others. The book offers a very strong reason why we should be skeptical of our own hasty insights, generalizations, and rationalizations.
Explains how our minds work in ways that distort reality and project its prejudices and beliefs on others. The book offers a very strong reason why we should be skeptical of our own hasty insights, generalizations, and rationalizations.
November 7, 2011
Even if it's ridden with language I did find challenging Cordelia presents the quirks of our brain in a really compelling way and clearly lays out the way our minds work beyond our cognition. Simply a must read if you want to understand how our minds work.
June 16, 2014
I liked this book as it had lots of great little research projects quoted throughout. I though the first half of the book was much stronger than the second half but it was informative all the same. Crazy what our brains can do!
May 31, 2014
Was this book even edited? I've never been subjected to such repetitive writing. Cordelia Fine has a knack for conveying the same information in 3 different ways, one after the other, with a variety of infuriatingly childish similes.
Maybe this was written for middle school kids, I don't know.
Maybe this was written for middle school kids, I don't know.
May 18, 2015
The book points out the habit of brain, biased thinking form of brain, and the disadvantage of the brain.
I reference their properties but the contents of the book are thin.
the book is not rewarding very much.
I reference their properties but the contents of the book are thin.
the book is not rewarding very much.
September 14, 2015
It's definitely worth a read. An extensive review of current state of social and cognitive psychology. It's perhaps not a milestone as Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" but eventually gives you quite a solid understanding how and why you should be aware of your own mind.
No doubt recommend it.
No doubt recommend it.
May 16, 2017
You probably think you are smarter, funnier, more clever, better looking, more talented and more moral than the average person. That could be because it’s true, but more likely it’s because your brain is a tricksy organ of deceit. It lies to you so as to protect your delicate ego every minute of the day. It’s doing it right now � admit it, at this very moment you’re thinking to yourself “It just so happens I am one of those people who is smarter, funnier, more clever, better looking, more talented and more moral than the average person�. That’s your brain. It’s a lying liar and it’s telling you what you want to hear.
Or maybe it tells you what you need to hear. If you woke up every morning to the realization that you are, in fact, a mediocre schlub with middling intelligence, an unexceptional personality and pedestrian job performance you’d probably stick your head in the oven (no doubt realizing too late, with your middling intelligence, that it was electric, not gas). A deceptive brain probably serves to protect us from despair, makes life more endurable and gets us to try new things.
Of course, on the downside, it allows horribly repugnant human beings to have great self-esteem and makes those with the most despicable, demonstrably wrongheaded ideas lodged in their skulls absolutely confident as to their correctness (a quick glance at the on-line comments to any political news article will relieve you of any doubts on this point). This is why science, critical thinking and an ability to impartially weigh evidence are so important. These techniques provide the means by which we can avoid the pitfalls of having deceitful brains (as well as to avoid the lying brains of others).
In A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives Cordelia Fine, psychologist and Associate Professor at Melbourne Business School describes some of the ways our brains fool us into believing things that just aren’t so. The topics Fine discusses in the book include:
Your brain makes you feel good about yourself by elevating your successes and making excuses for your failures.
Your mood effects your behavior and judgement (as anyone who has ever hit ‘send� on an e-mail written in a pique of anger well knows). No surprise here. On the positive side, evidence shows that emotions also play a key role in decision making.
Our emotions play a role in our moral perceptions. We judge people and things we like less harshly than those we don’t.
Your brain re-writes history to fit expectations.
Your brain seeks out evidence that supports pre-existing beliefs and discounts evidence that contradicts those beliefs (confirmation bias).
It’s willpower is depleted by difficult tasks.
Fine does a decent job summarizing some of the scientific results that has come from studying human behavior, albeit at a very high level. Overall the book was interesting, but lacking in depth or details.
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