As my second Audible book, I choose to listen to How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer.
While I chose it based on the synopsis and the recommendation of some podcasts that I listen to, I didn’t think it would really address so many of the same basic themes as my last book, Outliers.
It’s a hard book to get through, even when listening to it. The style is dense and more technical in nature. The result is that the book is harder to internalize or to relate to. Why? Because the book is so oddly balanced.
About 80% of the book is concentrating on the biological nature of how decisions are made. This large chunk of the book is so hard to get through, and feels so overwhelmingly single minded. Dopamine here… Amygdala there… Prefrontal cortex everywhere… Take this quote:
We all need to know about the innate frailties of the prefrontal cortex so that we don’t undermine our decisions.
This is typical of the book in such a way that annoys me. It’s more than fair to say that statements like this are overly broad in their implications.
The other 20% of the book oddly take on the value of creative thinking and the value of experience. I have a hard time really giving this portion of the book much credit because it feels like such an afterthought. The vast majority of the specific, situational, cases brought up are only discussed in terms of the bran biology and chemistry that lead to their decisions. The few cases discussed in terms of creative thought or experience are just so weak in comparison to the earlier cases. A case of a poker player (poorly written at that) is a joke when compared talking about commercial pilots facing extreme cases of adversity (which would mean the deaths of many).
The very end of the book really made me scratch my head when the early cases are revisited. All of a sudden, all the previous examples are referenced in a manner that references the necessary component of experience. Huh? It was only about biology before, but now it requires experience? Make up your mind!
So in the end, I’m not too happy for wasting so much time with this book. It’s poorly written, obviously slanted, overly detailed where it shouldn’t be, and severely lacking in other places. I do not recommend this book in any capacity.