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Jonah Lehrer

How We Decide Paperback – January 1, 2010

by Jonah Lehrer (Author)

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The first book to use the unexpected discoveries of neuroscience to help us make the best decisions

Since Plato, philosophers have described the decision-making process as either rational or emotional: we carefully deliberate, or we blink and go with our gut. But as scientists break open the minds black box with the latest tools of neuroscience, theyre discovering that this is not how the mind works. Our best decisions are a finely tuned blend of both feeling and reasonand the precise mix depends on the situation. When buying a house, for example, its best to let our unconscious mull over the many variables. But when were picking a stock, intuition often leads us astray. The trick is to determine when to use the different parts of the brain, and to do this, we need to think harder (and smarter) about how we think.

Jonah Lehrer arms us with the tools we need, drawing on cutting-edge research as well as the real-world experiences of a wide range of decidersfrom airplane pilots and hedge fund investors to serial killers and poker players.

Lehrer shows how people are taking advantage of the new science to make better television shows, win more football games, and improve military intelligence. His goal is to answer two questions that are of interest to just about anyone, from CEOs to firefighters: How does the human mind make decisions? And how can we make those decisions better?

Print length

302 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Mariner Books
Publication date

January 1, 2010
Dimensions

5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches
ISBN-10

0547247990
ISBN-13

978-0547247991
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Cash or credit? Punt or go for first down? Deal or no deal? Life is filled with puzzling choices. Reporting from the frontiers of neuroscience and armed with riveting case studies of how pilots, quarterbacks, and others act under fire, Jonah Lehrer presents a dazzlingly authoritative and accessible account of how we make decisions, what’s happening in our heads as we do so, and how we might all become better ‘deciders.’ Luckily, this one’s a no-brainer: Read this book.”—Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)

"Over the past two decades, research in neuroscience and behavioral economics has revolutionized our understanding of human decision making. Jonah Lehrer brings it all together in this insightful and enjoyable book, giving readers the information they need to make the smartest decisions.”—Antonio Damasio, author of Descartes’ Error and Looking for Spinoza

“Jonah Lehrer ingeniously weaves neuroscience, sports, war, psychology, and politics into a fascinating tale of human decision making. In the process, he makes us much wiser.”—Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational

“Should we go with instinct or analysis? The answer, Lehrer explains, in this smart and delightfully readable book, is that it depends on the situation. Knowing which method works best in which case is not just useful but fascinating. Lehrer proves once again that he’s a master storyteller and one of the best guides to the practical lessons from new neuroscience.”—Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail

“As Lehrer describes in fluid prose, the brain’s reasoning centers are easily fooled, often making judgments based on nonrational factors like presentation (a sales pitch or packaging)...Lehrer is a delight to read, and this is a fascinating book (some of which appeared recently, in a slightly different form, in the New Yorker) that will help everyone better understand themselves and their decision making.” —Publisher's Weekly, starred review

From the Back Cover

Praise for Jonah Lehrer and How We Decide ?Jonah Lehrer is a brilliant young writer. His clear and vivid writing?incisive and thoughtful, yet sensitive and modest?is a special pleasure.?Oliver Sacks ?Cash or credit? Punt or go for first down? Deal or no deal? Life is filled with puzzling choices. Reporting from the frontiers of neuroscience and armed with riveting case studies of how pilots, quarterbacks, and others act under fire, Jonah Lehrer presents a dazzlingly authoritative and accessible account of how we make decisions, whats happening in our heads as we do so, and how we might all become better ?deciders. Luckily, this ones a no-brainer: Read this book.?Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) ?Over the past two decades, research in neuroscience and behavioral economics has revolutionized our understanding of human decision making. Jonah Lehrer brings it all together in this insightful and enjoyable book, giving readers the information they need to make the smartest decisions.?Antonio Damasio, author of Descartes Error and Looking for Spinoza ?Jonah Lehrer ingeniously weaves neuroscience, sports, war, psychology, and politics into a fascinatingtale of human decision making. In the process, he makes us much wiser.?Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational ?Should we go with instinct or analysis? The answer, Lehrer explains, in this smart and delightfully readable book, is that it depends on the situation. Knowing which method works best in which case is not just useful but fascinating. Lehrer proves once again that hes a master storyteller and one of the best guides to the practical lessons from new neuroscience.?Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail ?An inviting, high-velocity ride through our most treasured mental act?deciding. This is truly one of the most accessible and richly informed books on human choice. Its a must-read for anyone interested in the human mind and how cutting-edge research changes the way we think about ourselves. A marvelous success.?Read Montague, Brown Foundation Professor of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine

About the Author

Jonah Lehrer is editor at large for Seed magazine and the author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist. A graduate of Columbia University and a Rhodes scholar, Lehrer has written forThe New Yorker, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. He edits the Mind Matters blog forScientific American and writes his own highly regarded blog, The Frontal Cortex.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The quick decisions made by a quarterback on a football field provide a window into the inner workings of the brain. In the space of a few frenetic seconds, before a linebacker crushes him into the ground, an NFL quarterback has to make a series of hard choices. The pocket is collapsing around him — the pocket begins to collapse before it exists — but he can’t flinch or wince. His eyes must stay focused downfield, looking for some meaningful sign amid the action, an open man on a crowded field. Throwing the ball is the easy part.
These passing decisions happen so fast they don’t even seem like decisions. We are used to seeing football on television, captured by the cameras far above the grassy stage. From this distant perspective, the players appear to be moving in some sort of violent ballet; the sport looks exquisitely choreographed. You can see the receivers spread the zone and watch the pocket slowly disintegrate. It’s easy to detect the weak spots of the defense and find the target with man-on-man coverage. You can tell which linebackers bought the play-action fake and see the cornerback racing in on the blitz. When you watch the game from this omniscient angle — coaches call it "the eye in the sky" — it appears as if the quarterback is simply following orders, as if he knows where he is going to throw the ball before the play begins.

But this view of the game is deeply misleading. After the ball is snapped, the ordered sequence of neat X’s and O’s that fill the spiral-bound playbook degenerates into a street brawl. There’s a symphony of grunts and groans and the meaty echoes of fat men hitting hard ground. Receivers get pushed off their routes, passing angles get cut off, and inside blitzes derail the best intentions. The offensive line is an unpredictable wrestling match. Before the quarterback can make an effective decision, he needs to assimilate all of this new information and be aware of the approximate location of every player on the field. The savage chaos of the game, the way every play is a mixture of careful planning and risky improvisation, is what makes the job of an NFL quarterback so difficult. Even while he’s immersed in the violence — the defensive line clawing at his body — the quarterback has to stand still and concentrate. He needs to look past the mayhem and make sense of all the moving bodies. Where is his receiver going? Will the safety break toward the ball? Is the linebacker going to drop back into coverage? Did his tight end pick up the blitz? Before a pass can be thrown — before the open man can be found — all of these questions need to be answered. Each pass is really a guess, a hypothesis launched into the air, but the best quarterbacks find ways to make better guesses. What separates Tom Brady and Joe Montana and Peyton Manning and John Elway and the other great quarterbacks of the modern NFL era from the rest is their ability to find the right receiver at the right time. (The Patriots like to pass out of a five-wide formation, which means that Brady often checks off five different receivers before he decides where to throw the ball.) No other team sport is so dependent on the judgment of a single player. NFL scouts take the decision-making skills of quarterbacks very seriously. The league requires that every player in the draft take the Wonderlic intelligence test, which is essentially a shorter version of the standard IQ test. The test is twelve minutes long and consists of fifty questions that get progressively harder as the test goes along. Here’s an example of an easy Wonderlic question:

"Paper sells for 21 cents per pad. What will four pads cost?"

And here’s a hard Wonderlic question:

"Three individuals form a partnership and agree to divide the profits equally. X invests $9,000, Y invests $7,000, Z invests $4,000. If the profits are $4,800, how much less does X receive than if the profits were divided in proportion to the amount invested?"

The underlying thesis of the Wonderlic test is that players who are better at math and logic problems will make better decisions in the pocket. At first glance, this seems like a reasonable assumption. No other position in sports requires such extreme cognitive talents. Successful quarterbacks need to memorize hundreds of offensive plays and dozens of different defensive formations. They need to spend hours studying game tape of their opponents and be able to put that knowledge to use on the field. In many instances, quarterbacks are even responsible for changing plays at the line of scrimmage. They are like coaches with shoulder pads. As a result, an NFL team starts to get nervous when a quarterback’s score on the Wonderlic test is too far below the average for the position. For quarterbacks, the average is 25. (In comparison, the average score for computer programmers is 28. Janitors, on average, score 15, as do running backs.) Vince Young, the star quarterback from the University of Texas, reportedly scored a 6 on the test, which led many teams to publicly question his ability to succeed in the NFL. But Young ended up excelling in the pros. And he isn’t the only quarterback who achieved success despite a poor Wonderlic score. Dan Marino scored 14. Brett Favre’s Wonderlic score was 22, and Randall Cunningham and Terry Bradshaw both scored 15. All of these quarterbacks have been or will be inducted into the Hall of Fame. (In recent years, Favre has surpassed many of the passing records once held by Marino, such as most passing yards and touchdowns in a career.) Furthermore, several quarterbacks with unusually high Wonderlic scores — players like Alex Smith and Matt Leinart, who both scored above 35 on the test and were top-ten picks in the 2005 NFL draft — have struggled in the NFL, largely because they make poor decisions on the field. The reason there is virtually no correlation between the results of the Wonderlic and the success of quarterbacks in the NFL is that finding the open man involves a very different set of decision-making skills than solving an algebra problem. While quarterbacks need to grapple with complexity — the typical offensive playbook is several inches thick — they don’t make sense of the football field the way they make sense of questions on a multiple-choice exam. The Wonderlic measures a specific kind of thought process, but the best quarterbacks don’t think in the pocket. There isn’t time. Take that pass to Troy Brown. Brady’s decision depended on a long list of variables. He needed to know that the linebacker wouldn’t fall back into coverage and that there were no cornerbacks in the area waiting for an interception. After that, he had to calculate the ideal place to hit Brown with the ball so that Brown would have plenty of room to run after the catch. Then he needed to figure out how to make a throw without hitting the defensive lineman blocking his passing lane. If Brady were forced to consciously analyze this decision — if he treated it like a question on the Wonderlic test — then every pass would require a lot of complicated trigonometry as he computed his passing angles on the plane of the football field. But how can you contemplate the math when five angry linemen are running straight at you? The answer is simple: you can’t. If a quarterback hesitates for even a split second, he is going to get sacked. So how does a quarterback do it? How does he make a decision? It’s like asking a baseball player why he decided to swing the bat at a particular pitch: the velocity of the game makes thought impossible. Brady can afford to give each receiver only a split second of attention before he has to move on to the next. As soon as he glances at a body in motion, he must immediately decide if that body will be open a few seconds in the future. As a result, a quarterback is forced to evaluate each of his passing alternatives without knowing how he’s evaluating them. Brady chooses a target without understanding why exactly he’s settled on that target. Did he pass to Troy Brown with twenty-nine seconds remaining in the Super Bowl because the middle linebacker had ceded too much space, or because the cornerbacks were following the other receivers downfield and leaving a small gap in the center of the field? Or did Brady settle on Brown because all the other passing options were tightly covered, and he knew that he needed a long completion? The quarterback can’t answer these questions. It’s as if his mind is making decisions without him. Even quarterbacks are mystified by their talents. "I don’t know how I know where to pass," Brady says. "There are no firm rules. You just feel like you’re going to the right place . . . And that’s where I throw it."

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books; Reprint edition (January 1, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 302 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0547247990
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0547247991
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #219,069 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #192 in Popular Applied Psychology
- #395 in Decision-Making & Problem Solving
- #450 in Cognitive Psychology (Books)

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Jonah Lehrer

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Jonah Lehrer is the author of A Book About Love, Imagine, How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist. He graduated from Columbia University and studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He's written for The New Yorker, Nature, The New York Times Magazine and many other publications.

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Larry R Frank Sr, MBA, CFP

How our brain works - in well told short stories fashion ...

Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2010

Verified Purchase

As a retired Air Force pilot (supersonic jets, multi-engine jets flying internationally, and helicopters) Lehrer's example in his introduction hit home; and how training and repetition help us make better decisions and hone instincts (instincts being the topic of an example in Chapter one too). Lehrer concludes with flight examples as well in the Coda. I bought the book primarily to understand how people make investment and economic decisions. I came away with much more.

A wealth of experiments that illustrate Lehrer's points, and short stories to bring your experience alive. I would point out, that his work is a primer to expose the reader to the broad aspects of how our minds work. All in all, a work that begins ones journey into how we decide. Lehrer has included excellent Notes and Bibliography sections for further reference and there is a well developed Index for cross referencing topics. All excellent resources to dive deeper into how we decide.

An NFL Football Quarterback governed primarily by emotions? Yes it is true according to research into an area of the brain (orbitofrontal cortex) that, when damaged, inhibits the feeling of emotions resulting in indecision. The first chapter describes how our "anatomical narrative" about our brain is false, and that emotions play a pivotal role in how we, as humans, make split second decisions. "Homos sapiens is the most emotional animal of all." It would seem that calculating many multi-variables, each in nanoseconds, would be more rational than emotional. Lehrer explains why rational and emotional are inter-related and necessary to each other and how rational evaluation would take too long.

Chapter 2 continues with the emotions theme through discussion of the single molecule dopamine. Lehrer discusses how various centers of the brain anticipate reward, learn from mistakes through pattern recognition and relearn through repetition and practice. Of interest is the discussion on the observation that praise for effort, although with mistakes, provides people with more incentive than praise for being correct or more perfect. Summary, we learn more from our mistakes.

Emotions are not perfect though, the topic of Chapter 3. The flaw? The mistakes we make when there is no pattern! Slot machines, prediction addiction trying to decipher patterns from true randomness or unpredictable rewards (3 or 4 times more exciting), and the game show Deal or No Deal are discussed. The discussion of how we approach the stock market is enlightening and how the flaw for dealing with randomness in our brains may lead to market bubbles and busts. Fictive-error learning, feeling of regret, loss aversion, negativity bias, all are examples and result of "slavishly following your primitive reward circuits." Credit cards and sub prime loans and buy-now are impulsive emotions wanting reward now overcoming reason. "The emotional brain is routinely duped."

As to overcoming the investment foibles in Chapter 3, there are investment books available that help you structure your approach to the random markets that go into more detail in what Lehrer suggests.
The Investor's Manifesto: Preparing for Prosperity, Armageddon, and Everything in Between by William J. Bernstein
The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio by William J. Bernstein
What Wall Street Doesn't Want You to Know: How You Can Build Real Wealth Investing in Index Funds by Larry E. Swedroe
The Successful Investor Today: 14 Simple Truths You Must Know When You Invest by Larry E. Swedroe

Chapters 4 and 5 switch gears from the emotional brain to the rational brain. Lehrer tells the story of the firefighter who invented the standard technique for firefighters to survive a fire that's about to overrun them. Rather than succumb to "perceptual narrowing," the brain expanded the list of possibilities. It is such that a new break through or discovery is made - rational thought. He goes on to tell of how the inability for rational thought leads to not being able to think ahead, plan, or repress impulses. Here framing a choice becomes important - is it framed positively, or negatively (recall loss aversion), to evoke a choice? "People who are more rational don't perceive emotion less, they just regulate it better." For those parents with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) children, his discussion on brain development may bring good news. Brain development of adolescents and their behavior are also covered. Working memory and how it works to form useful associations for new problems while the rational brain filters out unneeded thoughts is presented through example of the crash of Flight 232.

Chapter 5 looks at when our brain over analyzes. Sports, performers, students taking tests, sometimes "choke." Why? Thinking too much. Also, stereotype threats, and blind taste tests all cut you "off from the wisdom of your emotions." The "weighting mistake" people make between choosing a home in the suburbs and longer commute, over an urban choice with a shorter commute. The placebo effect is also explored in light of your expectations. Trying to remember too much and how that may lead to poor choices. Where bad moods may come from. Mental accounting. Anchoring effect. How too much information may lead to inability to ignore irrelevant data or poverty of attention ... and the effect this has on the medical profession. The prefrontal cortex is laden with flaws and foibles and is easy to hoodwink.

Chapter 6 explores the realm of how we treat other people, or the requirement to consider other people ... morality. What makes someone a psychopath? How our modern legal system is antiquated in the assumptions it is based on. How our view of morality has been backwards. How an egocentric decision making strategy backfires with moral decisions. Altruism and how it makes some feel good. In addition, when the brain is broken: Autism; Child abuse; Broken homes; and Solitary living while young. All are discussed along with interesting experiments that show the effect of normal versus broken brain development.

Chapter 7 discusses how we decide and arrive at our beliefs. How retailers manipulate our brains by priming one area of the brain with positive stimulus, while soothing another area of the brain in order for us to "go broke convinced that we are saving money." Credit cards, as plastic, inhibits the insula by dulling the averse feeling of having spent real money. Self-delusion. Lehrer discusses politics as well as to how our brain turns into an information filter to block out points we don't agree with. How certainty in our thinking can lead us astray. How censoring our minds leads us to ignore relevant information. "When making decisions, actively resist the urge to suppress the argument.

The final chapter uses the game of poker to demonstrate the simultaneous use of both the rational and emotional parts of the brain. This then goes to turn yet another widely held belief on its head, that the harder decisions are the ones that require the most feeling, not the easy decisions, as many would initially think. In situations with incomplete information, such as the financial markets, we need to think and feel. Lehrer concludes the chapter with some general guidelines: Simple problems require reason. Novel problems also require reason. Embrace uncertainty. You know more than you know. Think about thinking.

Other books worth the read relating to how the brain and mind works:

Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
Your Money and Your Brain: How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich By Jason Zweig which illustrates where many of these brain areas are.

A philosophy, that may help avoid many issues Lehrer raises in Chapter 3, is to adapt an overall wealth approach to your finances rather than shooting to make more money now. How? A resource may be: Wealth Odyssey: The Essential Road Map For Your Financial Journey Where Is It You Are Really Trying To Go With Money?

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Viriya Taecharungroj

One of the best in the field of neuroscience

Reviewed in the United States on September 7, 2009

Verified Purchase

"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.

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J

Un buen libro para iniciarse en cómo se toman decisiones

Reviewed in Spain on August 16, 2018

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La toma de decisiones implica una serie de procesos que, a menudo, tienden a ser explicados desde un punto de vista o demasiado técnico, o demasiado somero como para ser entendido con suficiente detalle para la mayoría de la gente que trabaja en producto (venta, marketing etc.). Este libro propone una explicación que mezcla la parte técnica, sin exceso de tecnicismos, con ejemplos de todo tipo para la mejor comprensión de cómo funcionan los circuitos neuronales implicados en la toma de decisiones.
El autor escribe de forma sencilla, clara y directa, y aunque está en inglés, es muy fácil de entender. No se requieren grandes conocimientos sobre el idioma para sacarle partido al contenido del libro.
Aunque se echa en falta la utilización de esquemas, gráficos o imágenes para asentar la explicación de algunos conceptos, "How we decide" es sin duda un libro de gran valor para iniciarse en la investigación y comprensión sobre los circuitos neuronales relacionados con la toma de decisiones.

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zeynep ozgunc

Timely and great. Thank you!

Reviewed in Canada on November 11, 2019

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It said a used book when I bought it but it looks like it wasn't used. My shipment came on time and I'm very happy with my purchase ! Thank you !

Sandhase 👌🏻

Entscheidend anders

Reviewed in Germany on April 2, 2013

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"How we decide" ist eine spannende Entdeckungsreise in unseren Denkapparat und seine Nebenstellen.
Sehr anschaulich und einnehmend in der Bildsprache, gelingt es dem Autor zu beschreiben, wie das menschliche Gehirn arbeitet.
Das es bei diesem Prozess zu Abweichungen in Form von Schnellschüssen und Gedankensprüngen kommt, bleibt nicht unbehandelt und rundet das Werk in jeder Hinsicht ab.

An manchen Stellen wäre eine Graphik wohltuend gewesen. Aber höchst wahrscheinlich wollte man bestimmte cerebrale Einheiten vor Bilderfluten schonen...

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Lorna Normand

book in good condition disappointed by the label stuck on the back

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 10, 2014

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the book arrived in good condition and on time. I was disappointed it had a big second hand label stuck on the back cover which i was not able to remove and which spoiled the appearance of the book

Vicki Drakopoulos

READING THIS BOOK IS AN EXCELLENT DECISION

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 6, 2012

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I've read and continue to read many books on neuroscience and selecting to read "How We Decide" has proven invaluable. There are many good comments and reviews here - I simply wanted to add that this particular book with Jonah Lehrer's approach, presentation and superb writing skills has provided a more complete and thorough understanding of neuroscience than all the books I have read on the subject. Very Well Done!!!!

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