The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers
Houghton Mifflin: 2001. 336 pp. $25, £17
The comedian Alan King tells the story of being invited by his wife to join her and some friends at a newly opened Italian restaurant. “A new restaurant?” he replied incredulously. “It took me 20 years to find five restaurants I can trust.” In any bookstore, on the psychology and self-help shelves, one can find dozens of books about the mind and the brain, including books on such popular topics as sleep, dreams, mood, thinking and creativity. Some are based on testimony or personal experience; others purport to be based on science. Is it possible to navigate through this material and find information that one can trust? There is Thomas Gilovich's How We Know What Isn't So (reprinted by Free Press, 1993), an entertaining and example-filled treatment of the kinds of cognitive errors that commonly attend evidence gathering and data interpretation. Similarly, in Inevitable Illusions (Wiley, 1994), Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini describes well-studied illusions of probability and judgement, ways in which human reason is prone to error in everyday life.
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