A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Decieves

by Cordelia Fine

A delightfully unsparing look into what your brain is doing behind your back.

In recent years, we've heard a lot about the extraordinary workings of our hundred-billion-celled brain: its amazing capacities to regulate all sensation, perception, thinking, and feeling; the power to shape all experience and define our identity. Indeed, the brain's power is being confirmed every day in new studies and research. But there is a brain we don't generally hear about, a brain we might not want to hear about the "prima donna within."

Exposing the mind's deceptions and exploring how the mind defends and glorifies the ego, Dr. Cordelia Fine illustrates the brain's tendency to self-delusion. Whether it be hindsight bias, wishful thinking, unrealistic optimism, or moral excuse-making, each of us has a slew of inborn mind-bugs and ordinary prejudices that prevent us from seeing the truth about the world and ourselves. With fascinating studies to support her arguments, Dr. Fine takes us on an insightful, rip-roaringly funny tour through the brain you never knew you had.

• ISBN10: 0393062139
• ISBN13: 9780393062137
• Publish Date: 18 August 2006 (first published 12 January 2006)
• Publish Status: Inactive
• Out of Print: 14 August 2012
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: WW Norton & Co
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 256
• Language: English

Reviews

[wyvernfriend]

I found it an interesting read, how we can't assume that what we're thinking on the surface permiates and how unthinking biases can cause long-term repercussions which have fueled sexism and racism and probably a lot of other isms too. A bit of a pop-culture quick look, but well cited and a springboard to further reading.