Shankar VedantamReseñas

Similar to the stories done for NPR. I enjoyed the stories and research, but I wasn't as happy on the general focus with the unconscious as something working against our own morally conscious decision making. A broader focus on the many facets of how our minds make decisions for and against our true wishes would have been better. There are other works that have done so. Being able to recognize our own decision making process, and when it can be trusted or questioned would be more advantageous.

Maybe not super deep or anything, but lovely humanistic writing on an important topic - why our brains allow us to be deluded, and why that’s frequently for our own good. Liked this quote in the final chapter:

“Many intelligent people have come to believe—with near religious fervor—that reason and rationality constitute the highest good, and that these alone can produce the outcomes we want. As a card-carrying rationalist, I would love for this to be true. But as a card-carrying rationalist, I also need to follow the evidence where it leads. And the evidence (ah, the irony!) tells me that in many situations, we need to work with the self-deceiving brain even if—especially if—we want to achieve the goals of the rational brain.”

Fascinating

Well, I learned a lot from this book. It was fascinating when I heard the author talk about his book on NPR and I realized that I had to have it. That hasn't happened in awhile. The whole idea that our unconscious minds may play a larger part of our actions than we'd care to admit is intriguing. Vedantam supports these ideas with true-life stories that are sad, surprising and shocking at times. His biases show at times and I think the editing could have been better but I really enjoyed the read. I hope he takes it further and we can not only be aware of our own unconscious thoughts and how we act on them but how to access them and have some honest discussions. This would be a great book to discuss in so many different settings.

An amazingly interesting book about how the hidden brain (subconscious) controls us, why it does and how it is set up to protect us, but fails us at times.

4,5 stars

I kept thinking of the Emperor without any clothes. A "tailor" sells the emperor clothes made of magical thread that could only be seen by intelligent people. Otherwise, the clothes would be invisible and the wearer naked. The emperor wants to look intelligent so he pretends to see the beautiful clothes. He doubles down on the idea and has a parade displaying his "clothes". Everyone in his kingdom hears about the magical properties of his clothes celebrate with him and each other. Well, everyone except for one boy who shouts, "Why is the emperor naked?"

As a child, this story taught me not to be tricked and the boy is a hero. But maybe not. Because everyone else in the kingdom is celebrating under a useful delusion. They were happy. The boy is a stick in the mud.

Sometimes our delusions keep us happy and surviving. Like one truthful viewpoint, we are just walking decaying and defecating meat sacks. But focusing on that truth can be debilitating and depressing. Another inconvenient truth being how insignificant our actions are in context of the age of the Earth or Universe. I kinda like the useful delusion that I matter and what I do matters.

I know a fair amount about social psychology, but the way the author and the scientists he cites apply their knowledge to major societal problems is mind blowing. I absolutely loved this book, and recommend it to anyone interested in racism, terrorism, and other problems of modern life. It's brilliant.

Kind of interesting but doesn't present any ground-breaking concepts. All of this material will likely be familiar to those who read about neuroscience regularly.

The author makes a simple point – – that we often lie or delude ourselves and others not necessarily out of malice or ignorance but often to promote happiness, comfort and reassurance. He cites the example of the story of the Church of Love. These were men duped into thinking that they were corresponding personally with women and developing personal relationships. The Church of Love was a scam and when mail authorities filed charges, some of these men, instead of being upset about the scam, were upset with the postal authorities in filing charges. These men were content with the delusion and fantasy – – many sent thousands of dollars by mail to help the women when they cited financial burdens.

Religion has been cited as possibly man's greatest illusion. The author suggests a "terror management theory” where religion provides comfort and security against the fear of death and impermanence.

This book is an easy read, about 200 pages. I was able to finish it in less than two days. Not sure how much information in this book will be new to the reader or revelatory but I found it interesting. It has made me review my own “delusions.”

Some of my notes from the book listed below:

Could self deception ever lead to good outcomes?

We say "have a nice day" when we couldn't care less.

It should not be surprising, therefore, that we lie most regularly to those who are closest to us, to people whom we care about deeply.

There are circumstances where we must temper our desire to tell the truth with the imperative to protect and comfort.

Benjamin Franklin once offered the advice, "keep your eyes wide open before marriage and half shut afterward.”

Scandinavians have lots of trust in their governments, excellent social services and high functioning states. They also have some of the lowest levels of religious belief in the world.

The author reveals how the brain makes decisions without our conscious knowledge.½

Thanks to W. W. Norton for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Many of us are delusional: to be precise, all of us. We have to be, in order to maintain the will to survive. This is the theme of Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler's book "Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain." Not only are we delusional, we actually evolved that way via natural selection because cheerful blindness about some things helps us survive better.

Whether we are talking about religion, relationships, medicine, or commerce, the ways in which our brains trick us (or lead us to be easily tricked by others) can certainly be harmful or even deadly. We harshly judge others for being so easily tricked. Why can't they just open their eyes? It's so obvious that they are being had!

We do not often consider that first, scientific data tends to demonstrate that we are just as deluded as others in some ways (sports anyone?) and that moreover, being deluded may sometimes be very good for both us and those poor suckers we are so harshly judging. If you don't think you have your own sacred cows and sacred causes, odds are, careful self-examination would reveal otherwise.

Crippling existential dread is not conducive to human flourishing, even if it constitutes the last word in "getting real" or "being truthful." Many of our useful delusions can promote our health and our well-being in numerous ways, so why not be humble and cut our fellow delusional saps a little slack?

"Useful Delusions" can be repetitious, and as hard as I tried, I could not muster much sympathy for many of the authors' examples of deluded people, no matter how many times I was asked to pity or understand their views and behavior. However, I enjoy a good and frequently witty thought exercise, and "Useful Delusions" was a fun shake-you-up self-help guide. The book goes pleasantly against the grain of modern hidebound certainty with everyone's cocksure social media platform on blast at full volume. Repeat after me: "I might be wrong."

Just did not like the book. Covered a lot of ground--most of the things a person would learn in a social psychology class--but the presentation of different biases were lost to verbose anecdotes. The stories to explain the biases would get so long and cumbersome that I would forget his original point--and all of his points I already knew or heard before elsewhere. Every story was literally 50 words too long.

I was expecting a more neuroscience driven explanation for unconscious behavior/biases, but this was briefly mentioned if at all.

To his credit, racial biases and the "terrorist mind" were excellently executed.

Would recommend this only if you have never been exposed to any social psychology material (and like long anecdotes to prove points). Reading this in conjunction with [b:Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion|28815|Influence The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials)|Robert B. Cialdini|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167956934s/28815.jpg|29303] will round out the social psychological picture.

The author, Shankar Vedantam, is the host of the popular NPR program by the same name. He started looking into what he termed the hidden brain when he became curious about many decisions that people made that just didn't make rational sense. He, like everyone else, assumed that we make our best decisions by relying upon our rational mind. He sensed that this was not accurate description of the procedure by which we make all of our decisions and he sought to investigate the process by which we make our decisions. He dug into the psychological literature to get at all the existing research on biases and reasons why we usually don’t call upon our conscious or rational brain. The resulting book is a treasure trove of studies and anecdotes that goes to prove his points.

Interestingly, this book came out in 2010, before Daniel Kahneman published his tome: Thinking: Fast and Slow and well before David Epstein published Range in 2019. They all investigated the same phenomenon albeit with different means. Vedantam is a journalist, as is Epstein, and Kahneman is a Nobel Prize winning economist. Both Vedantam and Epstein called upon the research of others to draw their conclusions whereas Kahneman had been conducting his own research with Amos Tversky for decades.

Vedantam talks about the conscious brain versus the hidden brain when digs in deeper into the research on the subconscious biases and irrational conclusions that we draw when making quick decisions. Kahneman and Epstein uses Kahneman and Tversky terms of System 1 and System 2 thinking. Indeed, conscious brain can is the System 2 and the Hidden brain is the System 1.

Vedantam establishes his argument in the first two chapters of the book and then he delves into the studies that he had gathered in the succeeding chapters. He pairs the findings with great stories which integrates nicely with his arguments and each chapter is an enjoyable read which serves a greater purpose: to show the perniciousness of the biases which dominates our hidden brain. He ultimately draws some interesting conclusions in Chapter 10, where he tries to bring everything together.

I probably should have known about this book earlier, as I would have read it before I was exposed to the works of the others. Remarkably, The Hidden Brain has withstood the test of rapidly changing knowledge and research into the unconscious mind and still tells a great set of stories which shows us that our decision making prowess is indeed affected by our hidden biases, more importantly, other people, people in positions of authority or in a position to affect lives are also affected by the hidden brain. What is worse, they are not aware about how their hidden brain affects their decisions, or they just don’t care.

How our unconscious minds elect

I had a small dose of déjà vu when reading this because I was very familiar with the contents of the chapter on transgender experiences of gender bias...but it must have been an excerpt. Vedantam is a science journalist who in writing this book considered it "reporting" (he states so explicitly in chapter 8) and this book is more anecdotal than academic, though he backs up the claims with references. Still. it is an easier read than Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, which I've not finished after starting it twice.

The revelations of racial bias being hardwired were enlightening, despite my reading quite a bit in the past two years on brain structure, and the group reinforcement of undesired behaviors corroborated some other things I've read. One quote I added to the toolbox:

Since your hidden brain values speed over accuracy, it regularly applies heuristics to situations where they do not work.

A good read when read as a primer.

An amazing, insightful book. A book everyone should read, just to be aware of our hidden biases. The only way to overcome you unconscious thoughts is to be aware that you have unconscious thoughts.

I worried when I saw that some people rejected this book, but I got a lot out of it -- and I believe the conclusions that we are directed by assumptions and other factors that are invisible to us.½

Just like I enjoy a book on cognitive psychology--full of relatable examples and neat anecdotes.

After-the-colon bit is slightly misleading, since there’s a chapter on electing presidents and less of the other stuff, but it’s still a good overview to the research on unconscious biases of various types, including racial, gender, and number (the suffering of one person or even one dog gets us to act, but make it two or more and we become less likely to respond). Vedantam uses behavior in the World Trade Center to show how people flock: if you see others leaving the building, you’re very likely to do so as well, and if others stay in place you probably will also. This means that survival, rather than being aided in this circumstance by the unconscious mind, actually depends on two things evolution hasn’t really helped with: (1) particular quirks of fate or circumstance that get a flock leader moving or not moving, and (2) whether flight is a good idea or not at that particular time—hint, in an evacuation, you might want to leave by an exit different than the one you entered at, because the main entrances are going to be more crowded. The chapter on presidential politics has the most on potential debiasing solutions, but I would have liked to read more.

This book will get you thinking. It is always uncomfortable when we start delving into how much power genes and how we're hard wired has control over. Would have given this 5 stars save for the last chapter on race and the Obama campaigns dealing with it. The writing there was a little shallow.

Marks the end of my staff lollygagging when the fire alarm rings. That's about all I got...