HOW WE DECIDE, Jonah Lehrer. Houghton Mifflin 2009. Think it’s the rational mind that makes the best decisions? The less emotional involvement the better? Think again says Jonah Lehrer in this fascinating new book about where decisions take place in the brain and the important interaction of experience-based emotion and pure “fact-based” analysis. Lehrer makes a topic that could be a yawn pertinent and gripping as he tells stories of real-life, critical decisions made by pilots, sports figures, and poker players, and he makes you think hard about how you form your own opinions and choose among options. If you want to make better decisions and utilize the strengths of various parts of your brain, this is a good place to begin.
This young writer is no slouch at making his own decisions and has put his brilliance to work as a contributing editor at Wired and as author of How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist. A Columbia U grad who studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, Lehrer has written for the New Yorker, Nature, Seed, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. He’s also a contributing editor at Scientific American Mind and National Public Radio's Radio Lab. To learn more, check out his blog at http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/ or his website at http://www.jonahlehrer.com/
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