David Eagleman, Incognito
Featured Book
An audacious argument based on the science of split-second decision-making
What does the fact that strippers get better tips when they’re most fertile have in common with the unreliability of our peripheral vision? In David Eagleman’s telling, they’re both evidence that the unconscious parts of our brain are far more responsible for what we think and do than we realize. It’s the amazing science behind all of these decisions that we don’t realize we make that Eagleman lays out in the first half of Incognito, which is best thought of as two books in one. In the first book, Eagleman compellingly describes a dazzling array of experiments demonstrating just how many of our decisions are dictated by things we’re not consciously aware of. In the second book, Eagleman reaches for altogether different territory, distinguishing himself from the many other neuroscience popularizers. He takes his findings about decision-making and crafts from them an argument that we must revise our notions of blame and justice to reflect each individual’s pre-wired capacity for conscious decisions. Effectively, different justice for all, because each of us is genetically endowed with a different amount of free will. Readers will decide for themselves just how much they agree with his thesis (to say the least, such an idea would be a logistical nightmare to implement), but Incognito is nonetheless a remarkably interesting book. Eagleman is fearless in following this cutting-edge research to its farthest conclusions, making for a book equally rich with hard facts and dizzying possibilities.
