In “The Brain Is an Argument” Lehrer gets into the crux of the challenge facing marketers and advertisers trying to persuade consumers to buy their product: the decision-making process in our brain is hardly clear-cut and logical, but rather a bubbling competition between alternative choices. (See Paralysis of Analysis: Overthinking and Bad Decisions.) In a chapter titled “Choking on Thought,” Lehrer describes how too much thinking can actually lead to bad decisions: our emotional brain circuitry has already arrived at an optimal answer, but in attempting to analyze the problem logically our higher cognitive functions muddle things and may arrive at a worse conclusiong. (See my earlier post, Managing by Mistakes.)

A football quarterback, for example, has only a second or two after the ball is snapped to analyze the entire field, ascertain what strategy the defense is employing, determine where one of his own receivers is likely to be most open, and then throw the football to the spot where that player will be by the time the ball gets there.ĭecisions like this are being made by the emotional brain, Lehrer says, and research suggests that a big part of the learning process is driven by dopamine neurons aided by reviewing what was less than perfect in each past attempt. Lehrer begins with a look at expert decision-making, and how individuals with the right training and experience can make high quality decisions seemingly with little or no conscious thought. Jonah Lehrer has been translating neuroscience into prose comprehensible by the lay reader for years, and How We Decide helps readers understand and even apply current research in the process of human decision-making. Lehrer shows how people are taking advantage of the new science to make better television shows, win more football games, and improve military intelligence.Book Review: How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer 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 real-world experiences of a wide range of 'deciders'-from airplane pilots and hedge fund investors to serial killers and poker players. 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. But when we're picking a stock, intuition often leads us astray. When buying a house, for example, it's best to let our unconscious mull over the many variables.

Our best decisions are a finely tuned blend of both feeling and reason-and the precise mix depends on the situation.

But as scientists break open the mind's black box with the latest tools of neuroscience, they're discovering that this is not how the mind works. 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.

How we decide by jonah lehrer