Cordelia Fine - A Mind of its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives

We are all vain bigots, thanks to the foibles of the human brain, so argues Fine in her witty survey of psychology experiments An ideal gift for anyone interested in psychology Focus

Clear, accessible writing makes her a science writer to watch. Metro

Filled with quotable stories and interactive ways of how our brain has a buoyant ego of its own and is not the objective tool we might like to believe Bookseller

A light and amusing introduction to the brain and how it works on our perceptions and actions Publishing News

Consistently well-written and meticulously researched Alain de Botton, Sunday Times

In breezy demotic, Fine offers an entertaining tour of current thinking [she] is especially fascinating on the blurring of the line between pathological delusions and the normal deluded brain Telegraph

Fine with a sharp sense of humour and an intelligent sense of reality, slaps an Asbo on the hundred billion grey cells that literally have shifty, ruthless, self-serving minds of their own. The Times

Fines style is chirpy [with] many affectionately amusing scenes Guardian

Engaging, intelligent Scotland on Sunday

Fines flair for the humorous and anecdotal makes this a delightful read. Irish Times

Fine sets out to demonstrate that the human brain is vainglorious and stubborn. She succeeds brilliantly. Mail on Sunday

This is one of the most interesting and amusing accounts of how we think we think I think. Alexander McCall Smith

A fascinating, funny, disconcerting and lucid book. By the end youll realise that your brain can (and does) run rings around you. Helen Dunmore

Witty and informative Philip Pullman

Excellent Fines very engaging and chatty style will delight many readers Fine has got it just right. Although she is an academic, she writes like a human being All in all this short and enjoyable book is a must for anyone who wants to get a better understanding of what their brain gets up to when they arent watching it. First class. Brian Clegg, www.popularscience.co.uk

A fun introduction to some of the factors that can distort our reasoning . Id recommend it to anyone who is just getting interested in the topic, or as a gift for anyone you know who still thinks that their personal point of view is unprejudiced and reliable. Psychologist

Fine is that rare academic whos also an excellent writer. Highly recommended for all public and undergraduate libraries. Library Journal

Remarkably entertaining Los Angeles Times

My sincere thanks go to Simon Flynn and his colleagues at Icon Books for their assistance, in so many ways, with this book. Their contribution is greatly appreciated. I am also most grateful to my agent Barbara Lowenstein and her colleagues, for their advice and support on so many matters. Thanks, too, go to my editors at W.W. Norton for all they did for the US version of the book. For my mother, who always said just the right thing when I needed encouragement, I have the deepest gratitude. And finally, without my husbands very practical support, I would still be working on Chapter 1. Thank you.

Dr Cordelia Fine studied Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, followed by an M.Phil in Criminology at Cambridge University and a Ph.D in Psychology at University College London. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne and the Australian National University.

Do you feel that you can trust your own brain? So maybe it falters for a moment, faced with the thirteen times table. It may occasionally send you into a room in search of something, only to abandon you entirely. And, if yours is anything like mine, it may stubbornly refuse to master the parallel park. Yet these are petty and ungrateful gripes when we consider all that our brains actually do for us. Never before have we been made so aware of the extraordinary complexity and sophistication of those one hundred billion brain cells that make up the engine of the mind. And barely a day goes by when these gathered neurons arent exalted in a newspaper article highlighting a newly discovered wonder of their teamwork.

From day to day, we take our brains somewhat for granted, but (particularly with this book in hand) its likely that youre feeling a little quiet pride on behalf of your own. And, reading books on the subject of its own self aside, what else cant the thing do? After all, it tells you who you are, and what to think, and whats out there in the world around you. Its ruminations, sensations and conclusions are confided to you and you alone. For absolutely everything you know about anything, it is the part of yourself you have to thank. You might think that, if theres one thing in this world you can trust, its your own brain. You are, after all, as intimate as it is possible to be.

But the truth of the matter as revealed by the quite extraordinary and fascinating research described in this book is that your unscrupulous brain is entirely undeserving of your confidence . It has some shifty habits that leave the truth distorted and disguised. Your brain is vainglorious. Its emotional and immoral. It deludes you. It is pigheaded, secretive and weak-willed. Oh, and its also a bigot. This is more than a minor inconvenience. That fleshy walnut inside your skull is all you have in order to know yourself and to know the world. Yet, thanks to the masquerading of an untrustworthy brain with a mind of its own, much of what you think you know is not quite as it seems.

For a softer, kinder reality

A week after Icon commissioned this book, I discovered that I was pregnant with my second child. The manuscript was due three days before the baby. My husband, a project manager both by temperament and employ, drew up a project plan for me. To my eye, it entirely failed to reflect the complexity, subtlety, and unpredictability of the process of writing a book. It was little more than a chart showing the number of words I had to write per week, and when I was going to write them. It also had me scheduled to work every weekend until the baby was born.

This plan has me scheduled to work every weekend until the baby is born, I said.

Plus all the annual leave from your job, my husband added.

I felt that he had missed the point. But when do I