Reviews:《Jia thinks》,《My memoir of youth》,《How we decide》
(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-03-24 09:50
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How We Decide
By Jonah Lehrer, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
There is something powerfully human in the act of deliberately choosing a path; other animals also have drives, emotions and problem-solving skills but none rivals our capacity for self-consciously weighing up all the options, imagining potential outcomes and arriving at a choice. As George W. Bush might have put it, we are a species of deciders.
Lehrer's engaging book puts our decision-making skills under the microscope. At 27, Lehrer is something of a popular science prodigy, having already published, in 2007, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, which argued that great artists anticipated the insights of modern brain science.
How We Decide tilts more decisively in the thinking person's self-help direction, promising not only to explain how we decide but also to help us do it better.
Explaining decision-making on the scale of neurons makes for a challenging task but Lehrer handles it with confidence and grace.
He has a wonderful section on creativity and the working memory, which ends with the lovely epigram: "From the perspective of the brain, new ideas are merely several old thoughts that occur at the exactly the same time."
China Daily-The New York Times Syndicate
