What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite: Updated and Revised

by David Disalvo

Overview

This book reveals a remarkable paradox: what your brain wants is frequently not what your brain needs. In fact, much of what makes our brains "happy" leads to errors, biases, and distortions, which cloud our judgment and muddle our decision making.Science writer David DiSalvo presents evidence from evolutionary and social psychology, cognitive science, neurology, and even marketing and economics. And he interviews many of the top thinkers in psychology and neuroscience today. From this research-based platform, DiSalvo draws out insights that we can use to identify our brains' foibles and turn our awareness into edifying action. Ultimately, he argues, the research does not serve up ready-made answers, but provides us with actionable clues for overcoming the plight of our advanced brains and, consequently, living more fulfilled lives.Newly revised to include the latest research on the workings of the brain,What Makes Your Brain Happyis an essential tool for understanding yourself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781633883505
Publisher:	Prometheus Books
Publication date:	02/13/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	335
File size:	468 KB

About the Author

David DiSalvo is a science, technology, and culture writer and the author of Brain Changer and The Brain in Your Kitchen (eBook). His work appears in Scientific American Mind, Psychology Today, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, Salon, Esquire, Mental Floss, and other publications. He is also the writer behind the well-regarded science blogs  Neuronarrative and Neuropsyched.

Read an Excerpt

Preface to the New Edition

When this book was first published in 2011, we had recently entered a new era of understanding the brain-behavior connection. The question, “Why do we think as we think and do as we do?” was taking on new meaning, particularly because neuroscience was increasingly offering ways of examining the question that weren’t available even a decade prior.

In the few years since, it’s difficult to quantify just how much new research has hit the scene that in one way or another touches on these questions, which are always gaining more attention in both scholarly and popular press. As someone who writes science and health articles for popular magazines, I’m shoulder-deep in new research much of the time, and, as a result, I have a decent perspective on the latest understandings emerging from labs around the world. Allowing for variability in research quality, certain trends are clear in the best of these results.

Viewing these trends over time leads to a few conclusions, and one is that the original thesis of this book is more strongly supported now than even when it was first published. The brain is a prediction and pattern-detection machine with a penchant for storytelling that craves certainty, stability, and predictability. Begin with that understanding, and a great deal starts making sense when we ask, “Why do we think as we think and do as we do?” Begin with that understanding, and you’ll also begin making sense of yourself.

That was, and continues to be, the main driver for why I started writing about these topics to begin with: making sense of, specifically, why I think as I think and do as I do. As I’ve mentioned in many interviews since the first edition was published, that was my starting point when I started writing about the subjects in these pages, and it’s with this same flavor of introspection that I’m happy to see this book going back into the world with a few new content adjustments and research findings. The thesis that the content orbits around feels more relevant and well-supported now than ever before.

And that’s heartening to know, not only because it makes the book in your hand worth reading, but because it shows that we’re getting somewhere—in the really big sense of that statement. The human brain, and by association human thought and behavior, is a tremendously complex thing to understand, but we’re getting closer to true understandings that yield clearer answers.

Having said that, what’s also true is that we’re always uncovering questions that aren’t close to being answered, no matter how much we’d like to claim otherwise. One of the perils of popular-media science treatments is jumping to answers that really don’t exist. We’d like them to exist. We’d like answers to guide us. We’d love to create how-to systems around these answers for others to follow. But when you break it down, this is little more than either well-intentioned wish fulfillment or, sometimes, manipulation of peoples’ need for answers and ways to change their lives. As a journalist, part of the challenge is to know which way is which, and to check myself continuously when approaching questions that are likely to remain open for a good long while, if not indefinitely.

With that, I leave you to read this edition, which I hope has judiciously followed a path that celebrates what we know while acknowledging what we don’t, always preserving the space between.

Table of Contents

Foreword 9

Preface to the New Edition 15

Introduction: Hacking the Cognitive Compass 17

Part 1 Certainty and the Seduction of Chance

Chapter 1 Adventures in Certainty 29

Chapter 2 Seductive Patterns and Smoking Monkeys 57

Part 2 Drifting, Discounting, and Escaping

Chapter 3 Why a Happy Brain Discounts the Future 71

Chapter 4 The Magnetism of Autopilot 79

Chapter 5 Immersion and the Great Escape 89

Part 3 Motivation, Restraint, and Regret

Chapter 6 Revving Your Engine in Idle 105

Chapter 7 Writing Promises on an Etch-a-Sketch 119

Chapter 8 Want, Get, Regret, Repeat 133

Part 4 Social Ebbs and Influential Flows

Chapter 9 Socializing with Monkeys Like Us 145

Chapter 10 The Great Truth Rub-Off 157

Chapter 11 How Your Brain Catches Psychosocial Colds 171

Chapter 12 The Hidden Power of Stuff 183

Part 5 Memory and Modeling

Chapter 13 Your Mind in Rewrites 103

Chapter 14 Born to Copy, Learn to Practice 209

Part 6 Nothing So Pure as Action

Chapter 15 Mind the Gap 221

Chapter 16 Shake Your Meaning Maker 249

Special Section 1 Suggested Resources 253

Special Section 2 Of Technology and Rewards 273

Afterword to the New Edition: On the Anxiety of Reduction 285

Acknowledgments 289

Notes 291

Index 303

Editorial Reviews

""DiSalvo offers 'science-help' (as opposed to self-help) by detailing the mental shortcuts our minds like to take but that don't always serve us well, with the assumption that understanding brain function helps us fight its stubborn behavior." -Psychology Today

"David DiSalvo takes us on a whistle-stop tour of our mind's delusions. No aspect of daily life is left untouched: whether he is exploring job interviews, first dates or the perils of eBay, DiSalvo will change the way you think about thinking... an enjoyable manual to your psyche that may change your life." -New Scientist

"This book is the Swiss Army knife of psychology and neuroscience research--handy, practical, and very, very useful. It boils down the latest findings into simple, easy-to-understand lessons you can apply to your daily life." -Joseph T. Hallinan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Why We Make Mistakes

"A five-star intellectual smorgasbord of the latest speculations on what makes us tick." -Robert Burton, MD, author of On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not

"This book will make your brain happy--in a good way. With engaging prose and compelling stories, DiSalvo provides a fast-paced overview of mental shortcuts and foibles that make us happy in the short term, often to our long-term detriment." -Daniel Simons, author of The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us

"DiSalvo takes us on mind trips to the frontiers of brain and behavior research--and, being a superb guide, shows us how each development is useful, exciting, and inspired by wonder." -Jena Pincott, author of Do Gentlemen Really Prefer Blondes? Bodies, Brains, and Behavior: The Science behind Love, Sex, and Attraction

"A well-researched and effectively argued guide to uncovering the reasons why we so often think and act in ways that undermine our best interests, and it's also full of knowledge about why humans manipulate each other. If you want to know more about why you do what you do, and how to avoid becoming the victim of someone else's manipulation tactics, I encourage you to read this book." -Philip Zimbardo, PhD, author of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil and past president of the American Psychological Association

From the Publisher