Thursday, January 21, 2021

Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills, by Steven Novella (author, narrator)

The Great Courses, July 2013

This is a good, fairly interesting look at the ways our minds play tricks on us, both in the limitations of our physical anatomy (our eyes have a blind spot in the center, and our brains fill that in with what's around it, which can sometimes be wrong) and the biases built into our brains due to the fact that we evolved in situations where snap decisions on limited information could save lives.

Novella talks about conspiracy theories, the dangers of believing your own theories on too little evidence, confirmation bias, and other ways our brains lead us astray. At times he gets overly dogmatic and repetitive, but it's mostly interesting and useful look at the ways we need to be aware of our own brains' ability to deceive us.

I bought this audiobook.

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