Archives de catégorie : Popular Science

FOOLED de Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simmons

From Wall Street Ponzi schemes to Nigerian email scams, from chess cheaters with hidden computers to Bridge cheaters with covert signals, from psychic mediums preying on credulous audiences to scientific fraudsters making up results their colleagues want to hear, from art forgers to deceptive marketers, our world is filled with people who want to fool us..

FOOLED:
How Cheating Works and What You Can Do About It
by Christopher F. Chabris and Daniel J. Simmons
‎ Basic Books, June 2023
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

FOOLED is a book about why we fall for the schemes of liars, deceivers, marketers, con artists, and anyone else who tries to trick us into believing or doing something in their interest rather than our own. It identifies ten specific reasons why we are easily deceived, drawing upon classic and current research in cognitive psychology and the social sciences to explain exactly how deception works, why all of us are fooled at least some of the time, and how we can avoid being scammed—or even scam the scammers in return. FOOLED is not a book about why people cheat, but about how they manage to get away with it.
Chris and Dan’s first book, The Invisible Gorilla, was about how the brain’s limited capacities for attention, memory, and understanding make us miss so much in everyday life. It was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and bestseller published in over twenty languages.

Daniel Simons is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the University of Illinois. Previously he was an Assistant and then Associate Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He received his B.A. from Carleton College and a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Cornell University. He is one of the leading researchers in the world studying visual cognition and visual awareness, and he has made pioneering discoveries about the limitations of human perception, memory, and awareness.
Christopher Chabris is a Professor at Geisinger, an integrated healthcare system in Pennsylvania, where he is also co-director of the Behavioral and Decision Sciences Program and faculty co-director of the Behavioral Insights Team. Chris received his A.B. in computer science and his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University, where he was also a Lecturer and Research Associate for many years. His research, published in leading journals, focuses on several areas: attention, intelligence, behavior genetics, and decision-making.

COLLECTIVE ILLUSIONS de Todd Rose

Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience, behavioral economic, and social psychology research, acclaimed author, former Harvard professor, and think tank founder Todd Rose reveals how so much of our thinking about each other is informed by false assumptions that drive bad decisions that make us dangerously mistrustful as a society and hopelessly unhappy as individuals.

COLLECTIVE ILLUSIONS:
Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions
by Todd Rose
Hachette Go, February 2022
(via Javelin)

The desire to fit in is one of the most powerful, least understood forces in a society. Todd Rose believes that as human beings we continually act against our own best interests out of our brains’ misunderstanding of what we think others believe.  A complicated set of illusions driven by conformity bias distorts how we see the world around us. From toilet paper shortages to kidneys that get thrown away rather than used for desperately needed organ transplants, from racial segregation to the perceived “electability” of women for political office, from bottled water to “cancel culture,” we routinely copy others, lie about what we believe, cling to tribes, and silence others. We are so profoundly social that when we are incongruent with the group that we do lasting damage to our self-worth, diminish our well-being and never realize our full potential. It’s why we all too often chase the familiar trappings of money, fame, and success that leave us feeling empty even when we do achieve them. It’s why we’ll blindly espouse a viewpoint we don’t necessarily believe in so that we blend in with the group. We trap ourselves in prisons of our own making that prevent us from living the happy, fulfilled lives we envision. The question is, Why do we keep believing the lies and hurting ourselves? Todd Rose reveals the answer is deeply hard-wired in our DNA, with brains that are more socially dependent than we realize or dare to accept. Most of us would rather be fully in sync with the social norms of our respective groups than true to who we are.
Using originally researched data, COLLECTIVE ILLUSIONS shows us where we get things wrong and just as important, how we can be authentic in forming our opinions while valuing truth. Rose offers a counterintuitive, empowering, and hopeful explanation for how we can bridge the inference gap, make decisions with a newfound clarity, and achieve fulfillment. Only then can we transform ourselves, and ultimately, society.

Social scientist Dr. Todd Rose is the co-founder of Populace, a think tank dedicated to building a world where all people have the chance to live fulfilling lives in a thriving society. He is also a faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he founded the Laboratory for the Science of Individuality and previously directed the Mind, Brain, and Education program. He is the author of Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment and The End of Average: Unlocking Our Potential by Embracing What Makes Us Different.

THE WORLD BEHIND THE WORLD d’Erik Hoel

In a sweeping intellectual narrative, award-winning neuroscientist and author Erik Hoel argues there are two fundamental perspectives on reality: the intrinsic and the extrinsic. The intrinsic perspective is that of consciousness and experience, the feelings and sensations that make up your waking world. The extrinsic perspective is that of science, which views the universe as a set of mechanisms and relations.

THE WORLD BEHIND THE WORLD:
Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science
by Erik Hoel
Avid Reader, Fall 2023
(via Writers House)

The two perspectives have had an uneasy, sometimes troubled relationship. Throughout history some cultures have emphasized one perspective more than the other, which has radically changed how humans think about and conceptualize our own selves. Technologies and media often implicitly enforce one perspective: for instance, television and movies take the extrinsic perspective, exploring the world of relations and images, while literature and novels take the intrinsic perspective, exploring the world of consciousness.
Hoel offers a whirlwind tour of the two perspectives across the ages, like how the intrinsic perspective is absent from Homeric epics and earlier eras, its historical development and ultimate culmination in the invention of the novel, the separation of the two perspectives by Galileo Galilei when he recommended science remove the observer to focus solely on the extrinsic, and the reintroduction of the intrinsic perspective to science by Francis Crick, the discoverer of DNA, who proposed a search for the neural correlates of consciousness that continues to this day.
Hoel shows how our picture of reality is incomplete following Galileo’s separation and emphasis on the extrinsic. The ignored intrinsic perspective sheds light on fundamental scientific questions like causation, emergence, how the brain functions, the biological purpose of dreaming, artificial intelligence, and even why humans create art. He reveals how our own culture is becoming more based in the extrinsic perspective over time, neglecting the intrinsic and forgetting the importance of human consciousness, all to its cultural, scientific, and artistic detriment.
Ultimately, the two perspectives have stood apart for too long and must be reunited. To this end Hoel proposes a way to merge the intrinsic and the extrinsic in a radical new theory of consciousness.

Erik Hoel received his PhD in neuroscience from the University of Madison-Wisconsin. He is a research assistant professor at Tufts University and was previously a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University in the NeuroTechnology Lab, and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Hoel is a 2018 Forbes “30 under 30” for his neuroscientific research on consciousness. His first novel, The Revelations, was published in April 2021 by The Overlook Press. He lives in Massachusetts.

THE MYTH OF NORMAL de Gabor Maté & Daniel Maté

By the acclaimed author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness, a bracing critique of how our society breeds disease, and a pathway to health and healing.

THE MYTH OF NORMAL:
Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
by Dr. Gabor Maté & Daniel Maté
Knopf Canada (Canada) / Avery (US), May 2022
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

In this revolutionary book, renowned physician Gabor Maté eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, every fifth person has high blood pressure. In Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And everywhere, adolescent mental illness is on the rise. So what is really “normal” when it comes to health?
Over four decades of clinical experience, Maté has come to recognize the prevailing understanding of “normal” as false, neglecting the roles that trauma and stress, and the pressures of modern-day living, exert on our bodies and our minds at the expense of good health. For all our expertise and technological sophistication, Western medicine often fails to treat the whole person, ignoring how today’s culture stresses the body, burdens the immune system, and undermines emotional balance. Now Maté brings his perspective to the great untangling of common myths about what makes us sick, connects the dots between the maladies of individuals and the declining soundness of society—and offers a compassionate guide for health and healing. Cowritten with his son Daniel, THE MYTH OF NORMAL is Maté’s most ambitious and urgent book yet.

A renowned speaker and bestselling author, Dr. Gabor Maté is highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics including addiction, stress, and childhood development. Dr. Maté has written several bestselling books, including the award-winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection, and Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It, and has coauthored Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers. His works have been published internationally in nearly thirty languages.
Daniel Maté is a musical theater lyricist and composer whose work has been honored with the Edward Kleban Prize, a Jonathan Larson Foundation Grant, and the Cole Porter Award for Music and Lyrics. He is the producer and host of the YouTube program Lyrics to Go. With his father, Gabor, Daniel regularly co-leads the popular workshop Hello Again: A Fresh Start for Parents and Their Adult Children. He also runs a “mental chiropractic” service called Take a Walk with Daniel (walkwithdaniel.com).

IMAGINABLE de Jane McGonigal

A dynamic, optimistic, science-driven work by a New York Times bestselling writer and designer of alternate reality games that trains us to see the future as a futurist does―and prepares us to thrive in that future when it arrives (sooner than we think).

IMAGINABLE:
How to Pick Ourselves Up, Heal from the Pandemic, and Prepare for a Decade of Unthinkable Change
by Jane McGonigal
Spiegel & Grau, March 2022
(via The Gernert Company)

After living through the massive global shock and trauma of Covid-19, one of the most disruptive events in human history, we need to find a way to face the future with optimism. But how can we plan for a better future when it feels impossible to predict what the world will be like next week, let alone next year or in the next decade? What we need are new tools to help us recover our confidence, creativity, and hope in the face of an uncertain future. In Imaginable, world-renowned future forecaster and game designer Jane McGonigal draws on the latest scientific research in psychology and neuroscience to show us how to train our brains to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable. Using gaming strategies and fun, thought-provoking challenges that she designed specifically for this book, she helps us build our collective imagination to dive into the future before we live it and envision, in surprising detail, what our lives will look like ten years out.
In IMAGINABLE, McGonigal teaches us to identify the challenges that lie ahead in the next decade―big and small, personal and global; shape a better future that solves for those challenges; and access “urgent optimism,” an unstoppable motivational force that inspires us to be fearless, resilient, and bold in realizing a world we can only imagine.

Jane McGonigal, PhD, is a senior researcher at the Institute for the Future and the author of The New York Times bestseller Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Her work has been featured in The Economist, Wired, and The New York Times and on MTV, CNN, and NPR. Her TED talks on games have been viewed more than ten million times.