Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Price: $25.00
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JONAH LEHRER
examines How We Decide
Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome back bestselling author, Seed editor-at-large, and Frontal Cortex blogger JONAH LEHRER for a discussion of his new book, How We Decide. Lehrer, acclaimed author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, takes a fascinating look at the new science of decision-making—and how it can help us make better choices—in his newest book. Since Plato, philosophers have described the decisionmaking process as either rational or emotional: we carefully deliberate or we "blink" and go with our gut. 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.Our best decisions are a finely tuned blend of both feeling and reason—and the precise mix depends on the situation.When buying a house, for example, it's best to let our unconscious mull over the many variables. But when we're picking a stock, intuition often leads us astray.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.
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Jonah Lehrer is editor at large for Seed magazine. A graduate of Columbia University and a Rhodes scholar, Lehrer has worked in the lab of Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel and in the kitchens of Le Cirque 2000 and Le Bernardin. He has written for the Boston Globe, Nature, NPR, and NOVA ScienceNow, and writes a highly regarded blog, The Frontal Cortex.
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