Steven Novella

American clinical neurologist and assistant professor at Yale School of Medicine, science communicator and skeptic, host of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast and author of the Neurologica blog.

This list of books are ONLY the books that have been ranked on the lists that are aggregated on this site. This is not a comprehensive list of all books by this author.

  1. 1. Your Deceptive Mind

    A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills

    The book explains how the human brain builds a coherent but often inaccurate model of reality, exploring how perception, memory, and reasoning are prone to illusions, errors, and self-deception. It surveys cognitive and neurological mechanisms—from pattern-seeking and predictive processes to confabulation, false memories, and motivated reasoning—that lead people to believe things that aren’t true. Using clinical examples, experiments, and everyday cases, the author shows the consequences of these mental flaws for eyewitness testimony, belief formation, and susceptibility to pseudoscience, and argues that awareness of our cognitive limitations plus scientific thinking can help mitigate their effects.