Gain Access On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Minds Hard-Wired Habits Penned By Wray Herbert Compiled As Softcover

liked the concept of the book and it was honestly interesting, But the whole point, the howto bit was missing, Each chapter was a new heuristic and I think the author explained it well enough for a lay person such as myself, Though, I think there were too many references to experiments and the author did go off on a few tangents, But that was all good except for the missing bit in how to combat these heuristics, I think that was very unclear and Im still left scratching my head now,

Overall, interesting and wellexplained concepts, Just missing how we can practically apply this new knowledge, Your brain is destroying your life, You. Yes you, brain! You are an incompetent idiot! You were designed for a simple life on the savanna, and your primitive behaviour is trashing my life, and the lives of everyone on this planet.


True story, I was reading this book and having internet dates at the same time, For the first time in years, I had a terrific date, We were compatible on every level, The only downer was that she was then unavailable for ten days due to family and work commitments, Stupidly, I responded to an email from someone who wasn't wholly suitable, And that was that I got into the wrong relationship, Don't get me wrong: womanis a lovely person, and we're still in touch, She read the copy of this book that I lent her and even commented that she was the 'decoy' choice from chapter, The relationship lasted just a couple of months, To this day, I still wonder about my extraordinary stupidity, For a long time, I thought of sending her a copy of the book with the relevant page tagged and explaining the nonsensical choice I'd made.
But who wants to date an idiot even an honest one

The above story and the opening paragraph are true, I mean, you always suspected your brain's decisions were devoid of reason, didn't you This book proves it, But, given that you are your brain, what are you going to do about it The only answer is to buy this book and try to modify your idiotic and irrational behaviour.
However, it didn't work in my case when it came to my dating decision, Apparently I'm beyond help: I literally will not take good advice when it is spelled out to me, Heuristics are short cuts we use to make decision making faster, Sometimes that's a good thing, other times not so much, Marketers know about heuristics and use them to sell you products, you should know them too, This book can help understand why our brain takes short cuts, Listened to this one on Audible and found it a very interesting overview of the shortcuts that our brains are hardwired to take in different areas.
Shortcuts that made sense throughout our evolution to keep us alive may not always be either valid or helpful in the modern world, and this book outlines a different category in each chapter and gives explanation and examples of each.
It's meant as an introduction for the layman and is very approachable, probably not detailed enough for someone actually working in the field of study already, but for those of us who are not it's definitely fascinating and enlightening.
Finished it. Learned a lot. Bleh :/ Page
We “see” the world through the lens of our emotions, and our vision in turn shapes our fears, motivation, and selfesteem, Call it the visionary heuristic,

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The Greek system embodies much that is sad and unflattering about human nature, especially the cruelty of exclusion and the often desperate need to belong.
Psychologists are very interested in these dynamics, because they apply beyond the frat house, Why is inclusion in groups and clubs so important to us, and what cognitive and emotional resources do we use to avoid rejections, Or, more important, to deal with the inevitability of rejections

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There is a general sense, that, beyond basic arithmetic, math is only useful for future math teachers, to torment another generation of high school students.
Unhappily, such disdain for numbers has left a lot of Americans mathematically illiterate or “innumerate,” in the coinage of experts, New evidence suggests that inept everyday mathematicians make unwise judgments and regrettable decisions in everything from personal health to real estate, Whats more, those of us who are bad with numbers appear more likely

to make bad choices because we are under the sway of our own unchecked emotions.


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They did a set of experiments comparing mathematically savvy people with the mathematically challenged, Lets call them the nerds and the dimwits, just to save space,

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Human knowledge may be trivial but its infinite,

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These laboratory scenarios can be entertaining, but the inability to take anothers perspective can be the source of a lot of misunderstanding and sorrow in real life.
Think of couples trying to negotiate a shared life, or business partners agreeing on strategy, Our initial, fact, and automatic judgment is that someone elses view or desire or perspective is exactly the same as our, just because thats what is most prominent in our minds.
But communications depends on how swell we can adjust our egotistical anchoring view away from that automatic perspective, If we cant learn to see a range of possible views, we are likely to misunderstand and be misunderstood, Perspective taking is the foundation of fairness, which is also wrapped up in the calorie heuristics, the topic of the next chapter, The calorie heuristic is about exchange and currency but currency broadly defined to encompass hunger money, deprivation, and our basic human sense of human decency.


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So fairness is fundamentally jarring to the brain, and fairness is fundamentally rewarding,

It appears that we can temporarily damp down the brains contempt center, in effect allowing the rational, utilitarian brain to rule, as least momentarily.
So it seems contempt does not go away when the economic pie is sliced unfairly it just goes underground,

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This ancient and automatic entwining of food and money can skew our diets in other ways as well, Consider this bit of trivia: Americans typically eat yogurt out of eightounce containers, By contrast, the typical yogurt in a French market is less than five ounces, This seemingly pointless fact may hide a fundamental psychological truth about how humans regulate their consumption and, in fact, how we make all sorts of choices in life.


The French dont double up on their tiny yogurts to get the same volume of food or caloric intake as Americans, Instead, they simply stop eating after one serving, and therefore eat less overall, and therefore are more slender and healthier than overweight Americans,

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I am writing this just a few days after the election of Barack Obama as the fortyfourth president of the United States, a historic event not matter what your political stripe.
But you are reading this much later, As I write I am filled with hope and expectation, like much of American, yet even as I write, I wonder how I will feel a year or two from now how the country will feel.
Can we carry that excitement and goodwill into the future Are our expectations too high

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Heres one more example fro Gilberts Harvard lab.
Why is it that psychologist asks, that most of us would drive clear across town to saveon aradio, but wouldnt consider the same inconvenience to saveon a,car The answer is that we think in relative terms, not absolutes.
Getting a good radio at half price is a bargain, Getting that fancy care for,doesnt feel like a bargain at all the savings are trivial, Such reasoning and behavior drive economists crazy, because to an economistisis, But paradoxically, it takes an act of supreme imagination to et to this obvious truth,

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Its a bit irrational, but apparently the brain is not wired to imagine the gradual dissipation of emotion over time slightly less excitement tomorrow, even less the next day, and so forth.
The fact is most peoples emotions good and bad, gradually head back toward a present emotional baseline, but its very difficult to see that when youre in a peak experience.


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The problem with stereotypes they contain enough truth to be both humorous an cruel

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Many of the contagion beliefs that linger in the modern mind are a form of magical thinking.
Think of cooties. Cooties are fictional germs that spread on contact they are disgusting and they are everywhere, and nowhere are they more prevalent than in the vivid imagination of just about every American child.
They are often carried by unpopular kids, and almost always by kids of the opposite sex, and they clearly have a moral dimension, Indeed, one is much more likely to ”catch” a classmates unpopularity from cooties than to come down with a fever.


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Psychologist Peter Kahn talked to African American children in innercity Houston about air pollution, most seem to grasp the idea of pollution and to know it was not a good thing.
But when he probed them further, the kids showed no concern about their air, That is, they did not think that Houston was a polluted city, even though it was at the time and remains one of the most polluted cities in the country.


These kids ranged in age from seven to eleven years old, They knew about environmental degradation in the abstract the idea was in their analytic brain, from lectures or books or whatever but they werent experiencing it.
They had no idea that the air they breathed was a far cry from the cleaner air their grandparents breathed,

Kahn finds this worrisome, He believes that with every generation, kids are losing some of their experiential knowledge of the natural world and their expectations for what is a normal interaction with nature, creating a kind of generational amnesia.
If nature is indeed a source of mental and emotional replenishment, this could emerge as one of the most compelling psychological issues of the notsofaraway future.


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Human are the only species that systematically murders its own for ideological reasons, More thanmillion people were victims of mass murder in the twentieth century, making it the deadliest century on records, That included the Ottoman Turks murder of,Armenians, the Nazis extermination ofmillion Jews, Maos murder ofmillion Chinese, and the Khmer Rouges destruction of,million Cambodians.

Why would this be Philosophy is not threatening in any literal sense it cant maim or make you die, even when its very different from your view.
Scientists are intrigued by this paradox, Why is philosophy or worldview, or ideology so threatening Or to flip the questions around, what are the cognitive and emotional underpinnings of mass murder and genocide
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