Joseph T. Hallinan, a former writer for the Wall Street Journal, is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He lives with his wife and children in Chicago.
"What an eye-opener! If you're someone who has trouble remembering
the names of people (or common objects), if you seem to forget
things almost immediately after you learn them, if your memory of
past events frequently turns out to be drastically at odds with the
facts, relax: you're not alone. It's a truism that we all make
mistakes, but Hallinan is more interested in why we make them, in
what quirks of our mental makeup allow—and even frequently
encourage—us to misremember important events, forget passwords,
mistake strangers for friends, buy more groceries than we actually
need, fall for optical illusions, and so on. Turns out these aren't
sign of illness. Just the opposite: our minds behave this way
because our brains are wired this way. Hallinan cites numerous
studies and experts (there is a lengthy bibliography), but he keeps
the book from becoming a stodgy recitations of facts and statistics
through the frequent use of illustrative examples and snappy prose.
He also throws in a few big surprises, such as the revelation that
multitasking is a myth (we don't do several things at once—we
switch between various tasks without really focusing on any of
them). A vastly informative, and for some readers vastly
reassuring, exploration of the way our minds work."
—Booklist
“Entertains while it informs. Hallinan brings the science of human
behavior to life, showing how it applies to us every day.”
—Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things
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