You Are Not So Smart: Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, Why You Have Too Many Friends On Facebook And 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself

A superbly informative and entertaining book that can genuinely help change the way you think about how you and others think. The author has an engaging, enthusiastic style that completely bears out his point that we respond to a narrative style. What also impresses is that he has clearly done a huge amount of research in order to back up his points with evidence.The book is divided into chapters covering specific subjects in enough detail and without padding. This makes it very readable and the concepts stay with you.What particularly chimed with me was that my wife and I once nearly caught a pickpocket. In my memory, I was the hero of the hour. In her memory, she was the one that dived in to save the day. And we are both convinced we are right. Having read the book I now understand why I can't be sure anymore! Now I just have to convince her why she can't be sure!

First, I should point out that I am a third year psychology student so do have background knowledge of the material.I found this book interesting and read it quite quickly, however it is the type of book that can be read a chapter or so every so often. The book was explained well for the most part, and sometimes humorously. I came across a lot of information that I haven't come across during my degree. However, I only gave the book 4 stars as there were lot of chapters in which I did have background knowledge and found that important studies where not included that could have added to explanations. Also, some concepts were backed up with selective evidence as whilst reading I was aware of emperically sound evidence that contradicts the authors stance on matters.All in all this is an interesting book that I would recommend to anyone, with or without background knowledge of psychology, who is interested in how the mind works and how we fool ourselves.

This is a fantastic book packed full of so much information that a single read won't do it justice. While many books similar to this have a handful of principles (Marketing to Influence and Predictably Irrational come to mind) this one has a huge amount more substance.It draws you in in the first few pages by proving you are not so smart and then explains why and what we can do about it for the rest of the book.What makes this interesting is that we think we are clever for reading this book and the rest of the world wouldn't be interested in it. They are too bust watching reality shows or reading glossy magazines. However, this has been a very popular book which means that we are the masses and, in fact, "are not so smart"!

The author writes a series of short chapters telling you why what you think you know about yourself may be wrong. A lot of this has been revealed elsewhere in more depth but it is interesting reading. By the end of the book you won't be at all sure what you know or why you know it !The problem with the book is in its unique selling point. By having lots of short chapters each of which deal with one aspect of the mind and memory none of them can be very long. This means that the author hasn't got room for much in the way of shading and delivers quite blunt statements backed up with some scientific studies. This makes it an interesting read and one to dip into but if you are engaged by one of the things he discusses you will probably need to do some more solid reading about it elsewhere.The author also doesn't have the opportunity to tell you about how you might deal with the issues he raises or how you might overcome them in your daily life. This means that if you read this book in large chunks you will become a bit bemused about yourself and your perceptions.Worth a read as long as you realise the limitations of the style - I also don't appreciate being told I am not smart (it might be true but that doesn't make it more palatable from someone I have never met).

I came to this book after reading another writer's recommendations for overcoming "modern character neurosis", one of which was to get familiar with the content of your unconscious, that author was a psychoanalyst and thinking primarily of analysis but also other methods for promoting awareness.This book is all about awareness, or rather telling people straight just how unaware of things they really are whatever they may imagine to the contrary, it deals with the sorts of logical fallacies which govern peoples thinking when they are on auto-pilot, letting heuristics/mental shortcuts, ease the cognitive load in decision making. Simple examples of these processes are described in the introduction, such as when you drive the car or take a journey you can think about many things, jumping from one thing to another while still piloting the vehicle competently enough, and then each chapter there after deals with each of the major logical fallacies like confirmation bias or confabulation.The chapters are of differing length, some of the content was familiar to me from philosophy, thought experiments and theorising about reasoning but there are case studies, the findings of psychological research experiments or studies and examples from everyday life too. The style and pace of writing are very good and its possible to read a couple of chapters at a time, although if you are anything like me you'll choose to digest what you have read before reading further, some of the ideas, like confirmation bias, were familiar to me from other sources or I had heard it talked about in the media but there was lots in this book which was totally new to me. Its fun to read this sort of thing and recall when you've behaved/thought exactly like that or, as is more often the case, noticed others behaving/thinking like that (it can sometimes be harder to admit it about ourselves).I enjoyed reading this book so much that I have bought another similar book by the same author and sought out some online material on the topics featured in the book too. Recommended.

Right now I am highly interested, in mental models and human behaviours. This book covers a little bit of both by explaining all the bias that makes us not so smart. Interesting read.

Thus book is a must read for those who want to understand the intricacies of how our thinking is influenced on the basis of our interactions with the world around us. It forces us to believe that we humans are conditioned to think in biases which are inherent in our brains from the time of evaluation. It also helps to increase the level of awareness that can come handy to analyze similar situations in the future

¡Librazo! Una forma súper potente de aprender sobre cómo funcionamos como personas a nivel social e individual. Un libro que cambia la perspectiva sobre cómo nos vemos, cómo nos valoramos y cómo nos movemos diariamente.Cada capítulo es breve pero conciso al explicar distintas "distorsiones" cognitivas con las que lidiamos día a día y en efecto la manera más sencilla (Que yo he encontrado) para entender que no soy tan listo como pensaba.

Great reading. The author keeps it simple and straight. He uses examples that makes easy to understand how our minds play tricks on daily basis.

When you didn't get enough of "You're Not as Dumb..." there is this! Another great study of how our mind arrive at the "decisions" that they do... the author is very informative, and writes with much humour. I highly recommend this book!