Your Deceptive Mind by Steven Novella
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.
- Published
- 2011
- Nationality
- American
- Length
- Unknown
- Pages
- Unknown
- Original Language
- English
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- Alternate Titles
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