You Are Not So Smart

justbeingatpresent
Jun 25, 2021
3 min read

Why you have too many friends on Facebook, Why your memory is mostly fiction, and 48 other ways you are deluding yourself.

General

Tile of book: You Are Not So Smart

Author: David McRaney

Genre: Self-discovery, Psychology

Publisher: Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Number of pages: 235

Summary

You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney is a compendium of information about self-delusion and the wonderful ways we all succumb to it. You think you know how the world works, but you really don’t. But the truth is, you have no clue why you act the way you do, choose the things you choose, or think the thoughts you think. Instead, you create narratives, little stories to explain away why… We, every brain within everybody is infested with preconceived notions and patterns of thought that lead it astray without the brain knowing it… You are naturally hindered into thinking in certain ways and not others, and the world around you is the product of dealing with these biases, not overcoming them.

Author

David McRaney is a writer about psychology now. You Are Not So Smart is the first psychology book which is a bestseller now available in fourteen languages, the second one is You are now less dumb which was released in 2013, and he is working on a third book right now. However, he did a lot of other things before writing: an editor, photographer, voiceover artist, television host, public speaker, and tornado survivor, etc.

Analysis

This book helps you will soon realize you are not so smart, by showing the differences between your misconception and your truth about your thoughts and your acts and your choices, showing the reasons why your memory is mostly fiction, and 48 other ways you are deluding yourself, through The three main subjects in this book are cognitive biases, heuristics, and logical fallacies.

“You think you know how the world works, but you really don’t.”

Cognitive biases are predictable patterns of thought and behavior that lead you to draw incorrect conclusions. You and everyone else come into the world preloaded with these pesky and completely wrong ways of seeing things, and you rarely notice them. Cognitive biases lead to poor choices, bad judgments, and wacky insights that are often totally incorrect.

Heuristics are mental shortcuts you use to solve common problems. They speed up processing in the brain, but sometimes make you think so fast you miss what is important. Instead of taking a long way around and deeply contemplating the best course of action or the most logical train of thought, you use heuristics to arrive at a conclusion in record time.

Logical fallacies are like math problems involving language, in which you skip a step or get turned around without realizing it. They are arguments in your mind where you reach a conclusion without all the facts because you don’t care to hear them or have no idea how limited your information is. Logical fallacies can also be the result of wishful thinking. Sometimes you apply good logic to false premises; at other times you apply bad logic to the truth.

My Recommendation

You Are Not So Smart helps you understand how the ways your brain works, how the way your brain lies to you, how the ways we all succumb to it, and how unaware we are. The truth is always extremely cruel to accept. But just take a few seconds for thinking about them yourself. You choose the way you live: ignore them and continuously live unaware, or deal with them once you understand how the way they work on, to help you see the deepest and clearest within you. You are a story you tell yourself.

"The emotional brain, the unconscious mind, is old, powerful, and no less a part of who you are than the rational brain is, but its function can’t be directly observed or communicated to consciousness. Instead, the output is mostly intuition and feeling.”

We think we understand and know our thoughts, actions, emotions, and motivations, but sadly we do not. This book helps you look inward to remove from the old limited thoughts you have. We feel that we just have a single brain, but we really have three: rational brain, emotional brain, and mirror brain. The rational brain handles simple problems involving unfamiliar variables. The emotional brain is older and thus more evolved than the rational brain, it is better suited for complex decisions and automatic processing of very complex operations like somersaults and break dancing, singing on key and shuffling cards. The mirror brain (mirror neurons) is observing yourself as an outsider. To use full of these three brains to serve your life the best. Anyway, you have your higher cognition, to discover and improve and devolve it to achieve the abundant life which you desire.

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