How We Decide: Book Review

I wanted to supplement yesterday’s post on Super Freakonomics with another interesting book I’m reading, How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. The book uses neuroscience discoveries to illuminate how the human mind makes decisions as well as how decisions can be improved.

Since Plato, philosophers have described the decision-making process as either rational or emotional . . . But as scientists break open the mind’s black box with the latest tools of neuroscience, they’re ...

discovering that this is not how the mind works. Our best decisions are a finely tuned blend of both feeling and reason.

The book uses examples of airline pilots, football quarterbacks, military intelligence, gamblers, fire fighters, television executives, serial killers, and others to show how recent scientific research points to decisions being made through a complex argument that occurs at a chemical level within our brains, sometimes within our control and sometimes not. The book is extremely readable avoiding excessive medical and technical terms. Lehrer takes us through how people actually make decisions in a variety of situations.

The book discusses what is a relatively new field, one where we do not have a complete unified theory of all the processes that take place. Irrationality in decision making has always interested me. This book does a great job explaining where this irrationality comes from as well as presenting how decision making can be improved.

If you’re going to take only one idea away from this book, take this one: Whenever you make a decision, be aware of the kind of decision you are making and the kind of thought process it requires. . . . The best way to make sure that you are using your brain properly is to study your brain at work, to listen to the argument inside your head.

If there is any criticism of the book it is the lack of a comprehensive summary or integration of the many contradictory findings that are in the literature.

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