Book #82: How We Decide

Title: How We Decide
Author: Jonah Lehrer

Eddie and I listened to How We Decide on our drive to and from Minnesota last week. I dozed a little bit during some of the early chapters, but I think I heard enough of the book (at least 80%) to feel justified in reviewing it here. I read Jonah Lehrer's Proust was a Neuroscientist when it came out several years ago and found it a challenging, compelling read. I also really enjoy Lehrer's segments on the Radiolab podcast. I think Eddie liked How We Decide more than I did, maybe because I'm such a decisive person that reading a whole book about making decisions seems like overkill. Some of the material has been covered in other places (in Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman's Nurtureshock and on Radiolab) so some of it was a bit repetitive for me. And I also think I've started to tire of the small-format nonfiction books about quirky subjects with wide appeal (think all of Malcolm Gladwell and the Freakonomics books).

All of those things aside, the thing that bugged me most about my experience with How We Decide was the narrator. His voice was deep and boring and serious, and he changed it to become the characters in the stories in a highly annoying way. I recently heard one of the stories in the book on Radiolab's "Stochasticity" episode, narrated by Lehrer and including the voices of the people he interviewed. It was so much more interesting than the version narrated by David Colacci and made me wonder why Lehrer didn't narrate the book himself. In short, the book talks about how neuroscience helps us understand why we make the choices we do, and many of those choices that seem to be "gut" decisions, based on instinct, actually turn out to be the best choices we could have made if we went through a rational analysis of relevant data. In fact, too much analysis often brings about diminishing returns. So maybe my extreme decisiveness isn't such a detriment, after all.