Customer Reviews

How We Decide

5 star:		(109)
4 star:		(43)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

Perhaps my expectations of one of my favorite authors/editors in Seed magazine and from his earlier book Proust Was a Neuroscientistwas too high...nevertheless, this book is a disappointment. Not that there is anything structurally or factually incorrect - it just doesn't add any value to a reader that is familiar with this field. The examples and studies mentioned in the book, for the most part, have been repeated many times in several books of this genre. Instead of providing additional insights or alternative interpretations, or any follow-ups to the experiments and studies, Lehrer, for the most part repeats the key points from these studies and attempts to make some points in the context of decision making. Despite best efforts, the book merely ends up reinforcing known and well-popularized concepts (even in popular literature) such as recency bias, cognitive dissonance, loss aversion, etc. If you have read books like Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness you will be hard pressed to find enough value in this book to invest in this. Other books such as Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts and Why Choose This Book?: How We Make Decisions also cover similar concepts in a more focussed manner.

Similarity to other books is no crime. But one will be hard pressed to determine any differentiating value when the book is serving as another book referencing almost an identical set of research papers without providing a compelling counter-argument or new inferences. For a reader who is aware of the work in behavioral psychology, this book provides incremental value at best. For a reader getting initiated to this field, this book is an OK introduction to the vast research, though my no means a unique interpretation. It is written in a very accessible manner and the narration sustains the interest of the reader throughout the book. The reader may have been better served if the author provided a synopsis of each chapter in the context of his title "how we decide".
Overall, an interesting read if you are new to this field, but an also-ran if you are familiar with the popular literature in this field.

This book describes the neuroscience behind decision making, and in particular the various parts of the brain that are involved in different parts of problem analysis. It is filled with interesting examples from real world situations such as airplane near-disasters, poker playing, and Parkinson's patients, and uses these examples to illustrate various parts of our brain machinery.

The book is an easy read, interesting, and informative. It is, however, a lightweight read. Do not expect great depth into any of the studies -- it is more like a survey course or cliff notes in many respects. This makes it approachable for an audience without any science background, but it also left me wanting a lot more depth. I also found the concluding chapter to be forced... it didn't really have much to offer.

I am glad to have read the book, but I didn't walk away feeling amazed.

Lehrer takes aim squarely at Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink, and, for my money, hits a home run. How We Decide is clearly and interestingly written, like Gladwell, but is more substantiated with recent neuroscience research. Lehrer's conclusion is also more nuanced, i.e., the best way to make a decision depends on different factors, and argues for the effectiveness and importance of monitoring our own thought process.

This is one talented young man. I read Lehrer's first book about Proust and neuroscience, and while I was super impressed with his intellect, it required serious effort to read and understand. How We Decide is a lighter read, but just as original and significant in its own way.

I read this book because I am teaching a course in consumer behavior this fall and was wondering if this book might be worth making required or optional reading. Neuroscience and neuromarketing are gaining a lot of attention in the marketing field and I thought this could be a good introduction. Unfortunately, I was disapointed by this book. I agree with previous reviews that a lot of the content seems similar to books like Blink and Buyology. I love colloquial examples but I couldn't help feeling like I had heard these exact same stories and examples before. Granted, this is less of an issue if you've never read a book on neuroscience, neuromarketing or decision making, but I would have expected the author to source more examples that are less common.

I think I would have had less of an issue with the similar content if the book was told in a way that was compelling and interesting. However, this was just not the case for me. I found that the storytelling paled in comparison to books like Buyology and Blink. It's completely subjective but there was just nothing pushing me along to keep me engaged in the book. I generally have a high tolerance for dry writing but I found myself consistently putting this down and having to encourage myself to pick it back up. Granted, reading examples I had heard before probably contributed to this, but the writing didn't help in my opinion either. I think the one strength of this book is that it is very well researched and it is clear that Lehrer really knows what he is talking about.

Overall I think this book was just too similar to others I had read on similar topics and not written as compellingly as those books either. If this is your first book on the topic of neuroscience, neuromarketing, or decision making you may enjoy it more than I did. However I don't see myself recommending this to someone who wants to read books about neuroscience. Instead I would be much more likely to recommend Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions or Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy because I find these books to provide much more new information and to be written in a way that is engaging.

I enjoyed reading this book, as it was well written and organized. The content was not all that surprising though as much of the information (as the author points out) is from other studies discussed in such books as Moral Minds, The Logic of Life, etc. As is the case with so many non-fiction books, the beginning starts out with novelty, but then as the book continues, although still well written, lost my interest as it had to rely on other works, and not the author's originality or new studies that deal with human thought, driven by our emotions.

"If you're going to take 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."

If you think about a book on human behaviours, unexpected findings, and researches, you could probably think of a lot of them. If you add neuroscience to the mix, you would probably think of a few. But if you think of that kind of book with a practical and solid guideline for you to change how you live your life, I doubt you could find that many. And "How We Decide" by Jonah Lehrer falls in that category.

The book is about `decisions' and how they are made by rationality and emotions from you brain (there are lots of parts within the frontal cortex but I'm not sure which). This is another typical book of this genre but let me tell you why should you `decide' to get this book.

Contents

The Quarterback in the Pocket
The first story starts with the 2002 Super Bowl and how Tom Brady made the decision that led the team to victory. Lehrer moved onto stories of Plato and the very interesting one is the man who had a brain damage and lost emotions and eventually, he just could not `decide'. This chapter focuses on `emotion' and how it is crucial to decision making.

The Predictions of Dopamine
The chapter begins with the story of Lieutenant Commander Michael Riley who commanded a British destroyer and decided to do something vital during the Persian Gulf War (I'm not going to spoil the story). The author also wrote about Bill Robertie, a chess master, a widely respected poker expert, and a backgammon champion. By the way, this is not my field but Dopamine is the brain region (or cell, or neurons, or whatever) that links our emotion to expectations.

Fooled by a Feeling
Emotions cannot do everything. The author wrote about Ann Klinestiver, a Parkinson teacher who became a slot machine addict (and lost literally almost everything in life) AFTER her Parkinson's disease `treatment'. The chapter moves onto basketball player's hot hands, stock investment, and a game show `Deal or No Deal'. The epic part of this chapter is about credit card (I am personally moved by this part and it sent shiver down my spine). The core of this chapter that wild feelings or emotions can bring us down.

The Uses of Reason
The story of a firefighter who survive the thick wall of raging fire starts the chapter perfectly because it is about how reasons are crucial at certain times. There is also another heartfelt story about a young girl, Mary, who were a brilliant and bright girl with bright future but one day she became different and ruined her life drinking, sleeping around and became angry a lot. She was eventually infected by HIV because of her brain tumor! Another great story in this chapter is how Captain Al Haynes of the United Airlines Flight 232 could maneuver the plane without basically everything working except the thrust levers.

Choking on Thought
The chapter begins with the opera singer Renee Fleming and how her career went downhill. Likewise, Van de Velde, a golf pro, could not recover from the career slump because of their `thoughts'. There are numerous researches in this chapter along with the MRI machine that failed to treat back pain. The point of the chapter is that we can think too much because our brain is not designed to calculate, take into account, and make a decision of 10 choices with 20 factors each.

The Moral Mind
This is also one of my favourite chapters starting with John Wayne Gacy, a psychopath who murdered thirty-three boys. The crucial aspect is how he thought and decided to commit those `evil' (put your baddest word here) crimes without a wink. There are many researches including the one on war. There is also a very eye-opening story about `autism'.

The Brain Is An Argument
Within a decision, there are numerous parts of your brain working at the same time and you are likely to decide based on which part is winning be it choosing a political party candidate, shopping, or pundits. There is a story about decision-making failure during the 1973 war in the Middle East.

The Poker Hand
This chapter is mainly about Michael Binger, one of the world's best poker players and how he applied different tactics in each different round. The chapter ends with the simple guidelines (with explanations, of course)
SIMPLE PROBLEMS REQUIRE REASON
NOVEL PROBLEMS ALSO REQUIRE REASON
EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY
YOU KNOW MORE THAN YOU KNOW
THINK ABOUT THINKING

Coda
It's the conclusion with another great story

...
I'll compare "How We Decide" to an ideal business book in my personal opinion a book that is easy to understand, distinct, practical, reliable, insightful, and provides great reading experience.

Ease of Understanding: 9/10: From the briefing above, you will see that there are so many stories and they make it easy to understand the content and the way Jonah Lehrer wrote is a breath of fresh air. Each chapter has its core concept and the explanations are clear. The only confusion comes from the neuroscience. If you are not familiar with the brain parts, you might struggle a bit but that's minor.

Distinction: 6/10: What can I say? I have read some researches in the book from other books and this book is not the breakthrough of a major finding on neuroscience. However, this book is different in the aspect that it tells you why you did what you did and it tells you how should you do, which brings us to the next part.

Practicality: 9/10: When I first picked up "How We Decide", I did not have much hope in practicality but this book exceeds every expectation of mine. I might be biased but since I read the chapter on credit card, I really stopped using my credit card (except for online purchases) because the book told me what I thought and it was like a lightning struck on your head. The stories and researches will make you think of yourself and the world around you differently.

Credibility: 8/10: There is no need to not believe the book because of the tons of highly advanced scientific researches regarding the activity in your brain. Every explanation and analysis is written in plain language but scientific proofs are always there.

Insightful: 7/10: When I think of this book, I can think of so many stories (this is probably the book which has stories that I can recall most). I spent hours telling my friends about the stories in this book. There are lots of stories and lots of researches. Yes, it's pretty insightful.

Reading Experience: 10/10: I love the book. The book changes the way I spend and that alone is much great than the $25 price tag of the book. I changed the way I think of an unfortunate autistic person I know personally because in the past, I think of feeling and emotion for granted but this book says `don't, you don't have a clue'. Moreover, the book has (I said it for the millionth time) great stories that you will remember.

Overall: 8.2/10: I love the book. Bias? Possibly. "If you're going to take 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." And trust me that if you start from that idea, you'll get countless of invaluable ideas, for life.

"The science of decision-making," says Jonah Lehrer "remains a young science. Researchers are just beginning to understand how the brain makes up its mind." (p. 243) Unlike some of the dimmer acolytes of contemporary (as opposed to old-fashioned Skinnerian) behavioral psychology, Lehrer stresses the importance of reason in the human capacity to make successful decisions. "Simple problems require reason," he notes, and "novel problems also require reason." (p. 244-245) However, he correctly notes that hard problems draw on human capacities, especially the emotions and forms of knowledge that lie below the level of the conscious, that account for the stunning capacity of humans to make good decisions under stressful conditions.

Lehrer is a first-rate writer who takes great care in presenting his evidence. This is a really exciting book to read because of his manner of developing examples of human decision-making under stress and uncertainty. Because this is meant to be a popular book, not a research treatise, Lehrer uses examples rather than statistics, and he takes many creative but sometimes questionable leaps in interpreting the evidence. In the remainder of my review, I will stress the mistakes Lehrer makes because they are instructive. I do not want to dissuade the reader from buying this book---it is a great and insightful read, and the mistakes do not distort the message.

Almost all of Lehrer's questionable assertions are based on the "people are irrational" school of contemporary behavioral psychology. Thus, he calls loss aversion and the framing effects associated with prospect theory (the idea that we are risk-loving over losses and risk-averse over gains) "irrational," and he argues that it is "irrational" not to maximize expected value for lotteries with small stakes. Similarly, he asserts the equity premium in the stock market is due to investor irrationality, as though there is something wrong with being highly risk-averse, and that economists agree that there is a stock market risk premium (they do not).

Like the "people are irrational" behavioral psychologists, Lehrer is happy to make assertions that clearly do not contradict rationality, yet claim that they do. For instance, he relates an experiment by Dan Ariely in which a motley group of goods (French wine, computer keyboards, etc.) are to be auctioned off to a group of MIT business school students, with the restriction that no subject could bid more in dollars than the last two digits of their social security number. The experimenters found that students with high last two digits bid three times as much as those with low, and proclaimed this "irrational." Of course, there is nothing whatever irrational about this. Suppose, for instance that all the goods are worth $100 and this were common knowledge. Then each subject would bid exactly the maximum he is allowed. Similarly, Lehrer relates an experiment of Paul Andreassen in which students were given various amounts of information and asked to choose a stock portfolio. Those that had more information made more profitable choices than those who had less! Lehrer interprets this as "irrational," because more information is always better than less. In fact, the "less information" consisted of price history of the stocks, and "more information" added opinions of stock experts from TV and newspapers. People did better by ignoring the extra information of the "experts." Now, I agree that we live in a strange world in which some (not all, by any means) people listen to "experts" who in fact haven't a clue about what will transpire and whose track records are shoddy at best, but is this "irrational"? Of course it is not. You have to be an expert to know to disregard the advice of such "experts," and in general the "experts" are very useful, although not so in the case of the stock market (the correct "experts" in financial affairs give investors good advice about portfolio diversification, cost of managing a portfolio, and how to choose types of financial instruments, but they do not tell people how to "pick winners").

In an engaging and eloquent chapter, Lehrer documents the fact that people tend to be overly certain of their opinions, and tend to ignore or devalue evidence that goes against their opinions (so-called cognitive dissonance). Now, this is true of some people, but hardly of all people, and it is indeed a mental failing, provided the issue is important and it is costly to make a mistake. But, how costly is it to have political opinions that are inconsistent with the evidence? One vote can't change an election, so what incentive to people have to change their ideas given the evidence? Of course, those who care about the truth for its own sake (Lehrer is one of these, and so am I), will pay close attention to the evidence. But those whose political positions give them pleasure for other reasons (religious, ideological, historical, etc.) have no interest in placing a lot of weight on the "evidence." Calling such people "irrational" is just wrong. Moreover, even most people in the cognitive dissonance camp eventually change their mind when there is enough evidence. If that were not true, democracy could not work. Lehrer should abandon the dim-witted behavioral psychologists who incorrectly denigrate the capacity of ordinary people to make important decisions.

One final point is worth thinking about. Virtually all of the convincing evidence in this book (and in the larger world of research findings) is based on experiments dealing with individual behavior rather than neuroscientific reports of brain dynamics. I can think of one or two cases where what happens in the brain can really help us understand human behavior. For instance, we have mirror neurons that allow us to empathize with the mental states of others, so empathy and the "theory of mind" are not purely rational phenomena (i.e., a highly intelligent organism without the equivalent of mirror neurons would likely be a sociopath). Similarly, brain scans show that altruistic punishment (for instance, rejection of positive offers in the ultimatum game) and contributions to charity make people happy, so cannot be justified on reputational or deontological grounds. But, there is too much of simple description of what lights up under various choice conditions. Who cares? Of course, something is going to light up in the brain, but this is of no more interest to me than what transistors go off in my computer's CPU when I order underwear from Calvin Klein.

With regard to neuroscience, I am the among non-scholars who have a keen interest in what the brain and mind are and how they function, and am especially interested in how decisions are made. In recent years, I have read a variety of books that have helped me to increase my knowledge in these specific areas. They include William Calvin's How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now, Gerald Edelman's Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On The Matter Of The Mind, Guy Claxton's Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less, Howard Gardner's Five Minds for the Future, Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, and most recently, Torkel Klingberg's The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory. I am grateful to these and other volumes for increasing my understanding of the decision-making process while realizing that is still so much more that I need to know. Hence my interest in Jonah Lehrer's book, How We Decide.

In the Introduction in which he shares an experience aboard a simulated flight landing at Tokyo Narita International Airport, Lehrer observes: "In the end, the difference between landing my plane in one piece and my dying in a fiery crash came down to a single decision made in the panicked moments after the engine fire...This book is about how we make decisions. It's about airline pilots, NFL quarterbacks, television directors, poker players, professional investors, and serial killers...[Ever since the ancient Greeks, assumptions about decision making have revolved around a single theme: humans are ration.] There's only one problem with this assumption of human rationality: It's not how the brain works...We can look inside the brain and see how humans think: the black box has been broken open. It turns out we weren't designed to be rational creatures...Whenever someone makes a decision, the brain is awash in feeling, driven by its inexplicable passions. Even when a person tries to be reasonable and restrained, these emotional impulses secretly influence judgment...Knowing how the mind [i.e. `a powerful biological machine'] works is useful knowledge, since it shows us how to get the most out of the machine. But the brain doesn't exist in a vacuum; all decisions are made in the context of the real world."

Then in the Coda, Lehrer re-visits the approach into the Tokyo airport that, we now realize, serves as the central metaphor in his book. "When the onboard computers and pilots properly interact, it's an ideal model for decision-making. The rational brain (the pilot) and the emotional brain (the cockpit computers) exist in perfect equilibrium, each system focusing on those areas in which it has a comparative advantage. The reason planes are so safe, areas in which it has a competitive advantage. The reason planes are so safe, even though both the pilot and the autopilot are fallible, is that both systems are constantly working to correct each other. Mistakes are fixed before they spiral out of control." The safe landing of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River on January 15th offers a more recent example of what Lehrer calls "perfect equilibrium" between Captain Chesley ("Sully") Sullenberger and the computers aboard the Airbus A320.

There are many valuable insights within Lehrer's narrative. Here are several that caught my eye, albeit quoted out of context.

"The process of thinking requires feeling, for feelings are what let us understand all the information that we can't directly comprehend. Reason without emotion is impotent." (Page 26)

"Unless you experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong, your brain will never revise its models. Before your neurons can succeed, they must repeatedly fail. There are no shortcuts for this painstaking process." (Page 54)

"The ability to supervise itself, to exercise authority over its own decision-making process, is one of the most mysterious talents of the human brain. Such a mental maneuver is known as executive control, since thoughts are directed from the tip down, like a CEO issuing orders." (Page 116)

"As it happens, some of our most important decisions are about how to treat other people. The human being is a social animal, endowed with a brain that shapes social behavior. By understanding how the brain makes these decisions, we can gain insight into one of the most unique aspects of human nature: morality." (Page 166) Lehrer devotes all of Chapter 6, The Mortal Mind, to this important "aspect." For
example:

"At its core, moral decision-making is about sympathy. We abhor violence because we know violence hurts. We treat others fairly because we know what it feels like to be treated unfairly. We reject suffering because we can imagine what it's like to suffer. Our minds naturally bind us together, so we can't help but follow the advice of Luke: `And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise." (Page 180)

Actually, I highlighted dozens of other passages but this review is already longer than I originally intended so I will quote no others. Because I think so highly of this book, I wanted to allow Lehrer sufficient opportunity to share at least a few of his thoughts with those who read this review. Credit him with a brilliant achievement: Enabling his readers to make better decisions by helping them to "see" themselves as they really are by carefully examining that is inside the "black box of the human brain." Only by doing so can we "honestly assess our flaws and talents, our strengths and shortcomings. For the first time [Lehrer claims], such a vision is possible. We finally have tools that can piece the mystery of the mind, revealing the intricate machinery that shapes our behavior. Now we need to put this knowledge."

I am unqualified to comment on Jonah Lehrer's claim that what he offers enables the aforementioned "vision" for the first time. However, he has certainly increased both my awareness and my understanding of what may be in my own "black box."

i always feel bad giving a bad review since i know how hard authors work on their books. And i can see how a lot of people will like this book - it's filled with interesting studies, simple explanations and strong, clear conclusions. The problem i had is that most of the studies described here have already been described in well written, easy to understand popular pop sci books, so there's not much new here unless this is the first book you've read in the area. It reads like a book report, which isn't a bad thing (especially if the original material is hard to read, which is true of most academic material), but in this case the book repeats information from Klein's Sources of Power, Damasio's Descarte's Error and other easy to read best sellers, so many people who read these types of books already know the material and, because the summaries here aren't that good, those who don't will still need to read them after reading this book.

A more serious problem are the parts that aren't copied. The author is overly melodramatic, writing like a circus barker. The general format of the book is "do you want to hear something amazing, people are incredibly amazing/stupid, study X showed fact Y, this proves sweeping generalizations A-F, amazing!". The author frequently makes assumptions based on the cited experiments that seem reasonable but aren't supported by the data and are often wrong (ex - people are more likely to buy expensive shoes if they have a credit card because their brain has a cell that can tell the difference between paper money and plastic money and doesn't like to spend paper because it makes "your wallet literally lighter"; no alternative explanations are considered, such as that they don't buy it if they have to use cash because they physically don't have that much cash).

These assumptions lead to much larger, sweeping assumptions and condemnation. It's probably always wrong for a neuroscientist to say "person X found that cell Y in the brain reacts to stimulus Z and that's why we have a mortgage crisis", but it's definitely wrong for a journalist with no graduate training in a field to try to blame a global economic meltdown on a study he read about biology and justify it in two or three pages. The book is filled with hyperbole and unneeded judgments. For example, the book frequently uses terms such as "rational" and "common sense" to describe using math (in a way that is in no way obviously rational) and "mental defect" to describe things such as the human tendency to not like losing.

Many of the assumptions are wrong because the author probably doesn't know the field or source material well enough (which isn't a crime; lord knows i did it often enough as a journalist and got burned by it many times as a graduate student). Others are wrong, i presume, because the author thought they made a better story. For example, contrary to what the book suggests, an adjustable rate mortgage is not the same thing as a subprime mortgage, adjustable rate mortgages do not "always" go up, the average credit card does not have a 25% interest rate (which the book implies but doesn't explicitly state) and a normal, responsible person does not typically pay hundreds of dollars in credit card late fees every month. Those are simple, verifiable facts. Others are more philosophical, but i have a hard time believing anyone knowledgeable believes "Wall Street [is] like a slot machine" and that "people enjoy investing in the market and gambling in a casino for the same reason that they see Snoopy in the clouds" (the list of reasons why it's better to invest in a 401k than play poker in Vegas are too long and obvious to list here).

A third problem is that the author doesn't integrate the material, which is a serious problem as the book frequently contradicts itself. For example, the book states that "the stock market... is a classic example of a random system. This means that the past movement of any particular stock cannot be used to predict its future movement" and vehemently criticizes people stupid enough to think they can ever make money investing in the stock market. The stock market is a purely random system, like a coin toss, so how could you? Then the book says that you should invest in index funds because they outperform all professional investors (but if the system is random, how can an index fund consistently beat every other fund?). Then the book chides humans for being so stupid that they sell stocks that have done well (to lock in gains), even though those stocks should have been kept because they'll continue to do, on average, 4% better than all the other stocks (how can that be true if past performance is meaningless and the system is random?). At a higher level, the book spends the first two chapters trying to make you feel like an idiot for believing in being rational (don't fear the Platonic horse of emotion!) and the next chapter making you believe that emotions are broken, awful things inferior to reason "which wants to max out the credit card, order dessert and smoke a cigarette" (it pulls Plato's driver against its will!; the author, like many freshman papers, loves to unnecessarily cite Greek philosophers).

All in all, the book reads a lot like an undergraduate book report

The brain has been the hot topic of a number of books lately from Buyology to Daniel Pink's work and others. These books, while helpful, do not engage or inform the reader the same way as Jonah Lehrer's book How We Decide. This book is a unique combination of brain science, popular culture and clear explanation that was a pleasure to read. Here is why:

How We Decide starts from the premise that the traditional separation of reason from emotion is incomplete and in fact we are decisive because we connect both sides of our brain. Lehrer illustrates this idea with stories of people who have had to make quick decisions, build strong decision making skills or face tough choices. Those stories are then backed up by a review of the neuroscience that covers the structure of the brain to the functioning of dopamine, etc. Presented together the reader gets an understanding of what has happened and what is happening in the brain.

Lehrer then builds on the emotions + reason = decision equation to talk about failure modes where emotions run amok and reason is the only way the person can think. These stories follow the same pattern as the opening discussion and provide greater insight into the way the brain works.

Overall this book is a rare combination of science that is interesting and entertaining. I would almost go so far as to say that it would be a great Book Club recommendation for those clubs who want to discuss more than fiction.

So a recommended read that opens the mind to how it thinks, while engaging your attention. The best book on the brain I have read in a long time -- at least I think so.