Yummy

So I picked this book up because it had ice cream cones on the cover and I had two hours to kill. Oh, and, also, because, yum:
That is Jonah Lehrer and he is younger and hotter and smarter than you. Also, married. BOO.
Ok, but the point is, that reading this book was a random decision I made that turned out to be exactly the right one. It's based on the premise that, despite what scientists used to think, rationality doesn't always trump emotion when it comes to making the right choices. In truth, the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain that we reason with, and that we use to understand rule-based behavior), when left to its own devices pretty much always makes the WRONG choice, picks the more expensive wine even if the cheaper one tastes better, overthinks at the grocery store and buys the wrong strawberry jam, and so on. It's when we don't think that we often make the right choice, because our brain knows intuitively what's best for us. Our subconscious looks out for our well-being far better than our conscious mind could ever hope to. Most of the studies Lehrer cites are food-based which is probably the number 2 reason I loved this book (for number 1, please see above.)

I tried to explain what How We Decide was about to my boyfriend and he assumed it was a ripoff of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and I was all "Perish the thought." Because that is not what it is. That is not what it is at all. Rather, it's a sort of guide book on how to most productively use emotion to guide thought. Lehrer explains how we can use our brain to control the way we feel and how those feelings play out in our day-to-day engagement with the world. The most important chapter, for me, was the one in which Lehrer explains how failure = learning. As in, our brain only figures out how to do things right by failing over and over again. We've been programmed to think of failure as a bad thing, something that is singularly detrimental to societal progress. I am pretty good at failing, so it was kind of nice to find out that actually I am paving the way for our advancement as a society.

You're welcome.