The Decisive Moment: How The Brain Makes Up Its Mind

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 mind's black box with the latest tools of neuroscience, they're discovering this is not how the mind works. Our best decisions are a finely tuned blend of both feeling and reason - and the precise mix depends on the situation. When buying a house, for example, it's best to let our unconscious mull over the many variables. But when we're picking stocks and shares, intuition often leads us astray. The trick is to determine when to lean on which part of the brain, and to do this, we need to think harder (and smarter) about how we think. In The Decisive Moment, Jonah Lehrer arms us with the tools we need, drawing on cutting-edge research by Daniel Kahneman, Colin Camerer and others, as well as the world's most interesting 'deciders' - from airline pilots, world famous sportsmen and hedge fund investors to serial killers, politicians and poker players. He shows how the fluctuations of a few dopamine neurons saved a battleship during the Persian Gulf War, and how the fevered activity of a single brain region led to the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Lehrer's 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?

About the Author :
Jonah Lehrer is editor-at-large for Seed Magazine and a contributing editor at NPR'S Radio Lab. He has written articles for Nature, New Scientist and the MIT Technology Review. He graduated from Columbia University in 2003 with a degree in neuroscience, and spent two years studying 20th Century Literature and Theology at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. His first book, PROUST WAS A NEUROSCIENTIST was published in the US by Houghton Mifflin in November 2007. Lehrer also writes a highly regarded science blog, The Frontal Cortex - http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/

Review :
That deep insights about human nature come first to poets and artists, to be systematically explored by scientists only decades or centuries later, is not a new idea - but I have never seen it more brilliantly illustrated than in this amazing first book by Jonah Lehrer, who himself bridges "the two cultures" with ease and grace. Lehrer is as much at home with Cezanne, Proust, George Eliot, Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf as he is with the latest neuroscientific work on perception, language, consciousness, and memory. His clear and vivid writing - incisive and thoughtful, yet sensitive and modest - is a special pleasure. Precocious and engaging His book marks the arrival of an important new thinker who finds in the science and the arts wonder and beauty, and with equal confidence says wise and fresh things about both.