The Decisive Moment

Since Plato, philosophers have described the decision-making process as either rational or emotional: we carefully deliberate or we 'blink' and go with our gut. But as scientists break open the mind's black box with the latest tools of neuroscience, they're discovering this is not how the mind works. Our best decisions are a finely tuned blend of both feeling and reason - and the precise mix depends on the situation. When buying a house, for example, it's best to let our unconscious mull over the many variables. But when we're picking stocks and shares, intuition often leads us astray. The trick is to determine when to lean on which part of the brain, and to do this, we need to think harder (and smarter) about how we think. In "The Decisive Moment", Jonah Lehrer arms us with the tools we need, drawing on cutting-edge research by Daniel Kahneman, Colin Camerer and others, as well as the world's most interesting 'deciders' - from airline pilots, world famous sportsmen and hedge fund investors to serial killers, politicians and poker players. He shows how the fluctuations of a few dopamine neurons saved a battleship during the Persian Gulf War, and how the fevered activity of a single brain region led to the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

ISBN 1847673139   DEWEY edition DC22 ISBN13 9781847673138 (What's this?)   Pages 304 Publisher Canongate Books Ltd   Published in Edinburgh Imprint Canongate Books Ltd   Height (mm) 234 Format Hardback   Width (mm) 153 Publication date 19 Feb 2009   Academic level General DEWEY 153.83

		Introduction		1
1		The Quarterback in the Pocket		9
2		The Predictions of Dopamine		34
3		Fooled by a Feeling		60
4		The Uses of Reason		94
5		Choking on Thought		131
6		The Moral Mind		162
7		The Brain Is an Argument		189
8		The Poker Hand		210
9		Coda		240
		Acknowledgments		249
		Bibliography		251
		Notes		269
		Index		279

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