Later, Lehrer looks at the converse, where emotion misleads one’s decision-making process. Emotion might sometimes cloud our judgement, but it can also play a vital role in impelling us. Instead, people with damaged or removed OFCs are indecisive: without emotional cues, they are left to analyze even the smallest decision with relentless attention to the pros and the cons. If the myth of our rationality were true, this would result in the ultimate decision maker, completely unswayed by appeals to emotion. This little area of the prefrontal cortex (itself important to the process of decision-making) has a huge impact on how we decide: it is “responsible for integrating visceral emotions into the decision-making process”, and lacking it means one essentially decides based on rational criteria alone. His counterexample is the stunning account of people who have experienced damage to their orbitofrontal cortex (OFC).

Lehrer challenges the myth that humans are “rational animals”, that our rationality sets us apart and allows us to tame unreliable emotion. The focus of How We Decide, especially in the early chapters, is on the distinction between rational decision-making and emotional decision-making. However, I approached it as someone interested in learning about neuroscience, and in this respect the book did not let me down. How We Decide is definitely a work of popular science, and it seems to be trying to appeal to the broadest audience possible.

Football confuses me at the best of times, but fortunately Lehrer includes plenty of other case studies: airplane disasters, debt counselling, basketball performance, etc. Some of it was about football, because Lehrer opens the first chapter with an analysis of Tom Brady’s performance in the 2002 Super Bowl. Even as Jonah Lehrer explores the decision-making process from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, How We Decide also reaffirms my admiration for and awe of the brain.

It is the undiscovered country of biology: how does consciousness work? What makes us us? The brain is an amazing organ, simultaneously incredibly flexible and resistant yet also so fragile. When I talk biology, I tend to gravitate toward the more abstract areas: genetics, evolutionary biology, and of course, neuroscience-once you get down to the microscopic or molecular levels, the squick factor is considerably reduced. It’s full of squishy stuff, and it was my least favourite of the Holy Trinity of high school science classes (physics, biology, chemistry) for that reason.

I’ll be honest: although biology is really, really cool, I also find it kind of gross. In my recent review of The Grand Design I went on about my love of science, particularly of physics. This review is therefore preserved for posterity, but I no longer recommend this book. September 2013: So apparently this book is a pile of plagiarism.

How we decide by jonah lehrer