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Book Review: A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives
The subtitle of this book really does my job of summarizing for me. This is a smoothly-written collection and sorting-out of the psychological research of decades to create a picture of what we know about how our brains work. It turns out that a lot of things that we think we know about ourselves, we really don't have good reason for believing.
I can't really do justice to the book in this short review except to say that the work that Fine writes about here is absolutely fascinating. Anyone who wants to acheive better self-knowledge, better knowledge of what others are doing, or better knowledge about the world more generally should read this book. Our brains often lead us astray, and to some extent this is unavoidable, but these are also effects that can be at least partially mitigated by better self-knowledge. And whether it can or can't be, it's still fascinating to know how things work and our best guesses at why.